dominique's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 22:10:00 -0700 60 dominique's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Texts & Documents)]]> 191712 novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images
through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted.
This is a reprint of the book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991.]]>
312 Carol Armstrong 0892367288 dominique 3 4.20 1991 Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Texts & Documents)
author: Carol Armstrong
name: dominique
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, art-history
review:

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<![CDATA[A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France]]> 201375296
While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artistsâ€� writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value.

Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.]]>
192 Oliver Wunsch 0271095288 dominique 4 4.50 A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France
author: Oliver Wunsch
name: dominique
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: academic-reads, 2025-reads, art-history, for-thesis
review:

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<![CDATA[Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923]]> 13633156 400 Gennifer Weisenfeld 0520271955 dominique 3 4.40 2012 Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923
author: Gennifer Weisenfeld
name: dominique
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, art-history, for-thesis
review:

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<![CDATA[Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France]]> 45186568
This diverse collection of essays draws attention to the eclectic objects and forms of visuality that emerged in France from the beginning of the French Revolution through to the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. It offers a new account of the story of French art's modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and printmakers, as they worked out what it meant to be “post-revolutionary.”]]>
280 Iris Moon 1501348396 dominique 3 3.00 Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France
author: Iris Moon
name: dominique
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, art-history, for-thesis
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The Romance of Madame Tussaud 9152341 472 John Theodore Tussaud 1142596540 dominique 1 2.25 2009 The Romance of Madame Tussaud
author: John Theodore Tussaud
name: dominique
average rating: 2.25
book published: 2009
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
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<![CDATA[The French Revolution: As seen by Madame Tussaud, witness extraordinary]]> 1462647 Book by Chapman, Pauline Pauline Chapman 1870948149 dominique 4 4.00 The French Revolution: As seen by Madame Tussaud, witness extraordinary
author: Pauline Chapman
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/30
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<![CDATA[Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History]]> 1571602 288 Peter Fritzsche 0674013395 dominique 3 3.63 2004 Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History
author: Peter Fritzsche
name: dominique
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, for-thesis, philosophy
review:

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<![CDATA[MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York]]> 2171135 380 Harriet Schoenholz Bee 0870704907 dominique 4 4.20 2004 MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York
author: Harriet Schoenholz Bee
name: dominique
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
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<![CDATA[Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition]]> 18223149
Impressionism cannot be given a capsule definition limited to its preoccupation with modern life, Japanese art, and plein-air painting. Before anything else, its emphasis on resonant color (vibration colorise) rendered through adjacent strokes of color interactivating one another is its most important characteristic. The common interest in resonant color is the source of real innovataion in the work of Monet, Renoir, and their circle, and in some instances, Manet too. Impressionism is the convergence of loose bonds between these individuals, each with his own obsessions but working together in a common venture without the loss of his own particular character; nevertheless, Impressionism was also a collective intellect (although as individuals they only thought of one thing at a time, life itself is a culmination—it is everything simultaneously). The Impressionists, because of their particular mode of plastic expressions, embodied the spirit of the period. [This book was originally published in 1974 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]]]>
220 Anne Dayez 0300200986 dominique 2 2.75 2013 Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition
author: Anne Dayez
name: dominique
average rating: 2.75
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, art-history
review:

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Degas Portraits 1042726 Original German, French]]> 372 Felix Baumann 1858940141 dominique 5 5.00 1995 Degas Portraits
author: Felix Baumann
name: dominique
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
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<![CDATA[Degas and the Business of Art: “A Cotton Office in New Orleansâ€� (College Art Association Monograph)]]> 1664020 Marilyn R. Brown 0271009446 dominique 4 4.00 1994 Degas and the Business of Art: “A Cotton Office in New Orleans” (College Art Association Monograph)
author: Marilyn R. Brown
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
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review:

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The Age of Innocence 60606911 Alternate covers can be found here and here.

The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society.

Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence.

Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and, almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer's life has no place for passion and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.]]>
368 Edith Wharton 014018970X dominique 0 to-read 4.06 1920 The Age of Innocence
author: Edith Wharton
name: dominique
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1920
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/29
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War and Peace 9141165 1350 Leo Tolstoy 0199232768 dominique 0 to-read 4.44 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: dominique
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1869
rating: 0
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The Ice Palace 2915975 48 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1419167006 dominique 3 2025-reads, academic-reads 3.56 1920 The Ice Palace
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: dominique
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1920
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads
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Heart of Darkness 4900
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]>
188 Joseph Conrad 1892295490 dominique 0 to-read 3.43 1899 Heart of Darkness
author: Joseph Conrad
name: dominique
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1899
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III: A Novel (Volume 3)]]> 210244500 296 Peter Weiss 1478026936 dominique 0 to-read 4.67 1981 The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III: A Novel (Volume 3)
author: Peter Weiss
name: dominique
average rating: 4.67
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
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Berta Isla 43518949 'The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature' Boston Globe

'No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this' Daily Telegraph

A thrilling new literary offering from the acclaimed author of The Infatuations and A Heart So White

'For a while, she wasn't sure that her husband was her husband. Sometimes she thought he was, and sometimes not...'

Berta Isla and TomĂĄs Nevinson meet in Madrid. Young and in love, they quickly decide to spend their lives together - never suspecting that they will grow to be total strangers, both living under the shadow of disappearances.

TomĂĄs, half-Spanish and half-English, has an extraordinary gift for languages and accents. Leaving Berta to study at Oxford, he catches the interest of a certain government agency, and its mysterious agent, Bertram Tupra. TomĂĄs is determined to evade the agent's attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life - and that of his beloved Berta. Finishing his time at Oxford, he returns to Madrid to marry her, already knowing that the life they planned has been lost forever.

Darkly gripping, Berta Isla examines a relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretence and conjecture, to resentment mingled with loyalty. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, MarĂ­as examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves.]]>
544 Javier MarĂ­as 024198355X dominique 3 2025-reads 4.00 2017 Berta Isla
author: Javier MarĂ­as
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/04/25
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Mr. Malcolm's List 48910455 It is a truth universally acknowledged that an arrogant bachelor insistent on a wife who meets the strictest of requirements--deserves his comeuppance.

The Honorable Jeremy Malcolm is searching for a wife, but not just any wife. He's determined to elude the fortune hunters and find a near-perfect woman, one who will meet the qualifications on his well-crafted list. But after years of searching, he's beginning to despair of finding this paragon. And then Selina Dalton arrives in town�

Selina, a vicar's daughter of limited means and a stranger to high society, is thrilled when her friend Julia invites her to London.  Until she learns it's part of a plot to exact revenge on Mr. Malcolm. Selina is reluctant to participate in Julia's scheme, especially after meeting the irresistible Mr. Malcolm, who seems very different from the arrogant scoundrel of Julia's description.

But when Mr. Malcolm begins judging Selina against his unattainable standards, Selina decides that she has qualifications of her own. And if he is to meet them he must reveal the real man behind...Mr. Malcolm's List.]]>
256 Suzanne Allain 0593197402 dominique 0 to-read 3.21 2009 Mr. Malcolm's List
author: Suzanne Allain
name: dominique
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
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Persuasion 31693 'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older'

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

In her introduction, Gillian Beer discusses Austen’s portrayal of the double-edged nature of persuasion and the clash between old and new worlds. This edition also includes a new chronology and full textual notes.]]>
250 Jane Austen 0141439688 dominique 0 to-read 4.08 1817 Persuasion
author: Jane Austen
name: dominique
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1817
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
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<![CDATA[How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy]]> 200868885 La thĂšse de ce livre est qu’avec la digitalisation du monde se produit une grande rĂ©gression. Retour des monopoles, dĂ©pendance des sujets aux plateformes, brouillage de la distinction entre l’économique et le politique : les mutations Ă  l’Ɠuvre transforment la qualitĂ© des processus sociaux et donnent une actualitĂ© nouvelle au fĂ©odalisme. L’ouvrage commence par proposer une gĂ©nĂ©alogie du consensus de la Silicon Valley et met en Ă©vidence les cinq paradoxes qui le minent.
La thĂšse centrale est ensuite dĂ©roulĂ©e, rythmĂ©e par des dĂ©veloppements sur les GAFA, les chaĂźnes globales de valeur ou encore le systĂšme de crĂ©dit social chinois. Les grandes ïŹrmes se disputent le cyberspace pour prendre le contrĂŽle sur des sources de donnĂ©es. Les sujets sont attachĂ©s Ă  la glĂšbe numĂ©rique. Dans l’ordre Ă©conomique qui Ă©merge, les capitaux dĂ©laissent la production pour se concentrer sur la prĂ©dation.

CĂ©dric Durand est Ă©conomiste Ă  l’universitĂ© Sorbonne Paris-Nord. Ses recherches portent sur la mondialisation, la financiarisation et les mutations du capitalisme contemporain. Il a publiĂ© de nombreux articles sur ces thĂšmes. Il est l’auteur de Le Capital ïŹctif (Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014).]]>
241 Cédric Durand 1804294411 dominique 0 to-read 4.00 2020 How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy
author: Cédric Durand
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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<![CDATA[Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting]]> 14891861
A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.]]>
428 Bridget Alsdorf 0691153671 dominique 0 to-read 4.00 2012 Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting
author: Bridget Alsdorf
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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Orbital 208580594
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]>
224 Samantha Harvey dominique 4 2025-reads 3.77 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: dominique
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/04/18
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<![CDATA[A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories]]> 43261038 288 Flannery O'Connor 0358139562 dominique 4 2025-reads, favorites 3.91 1955 A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: dominique
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: 2025-reads, favorites
review:

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<![CDATA[The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwester University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)]]> 203349 422 Galen A. Johnson 0810110741 dominique 5 4.45 1994 The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwester University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)
author: Galen A. Johnson
name: dominique
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, philosophy, art-history
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The Burnout 209786384
She can do anything . . . just not everything.

Sasha has had it. She cannot bring herself to respond to another inane, “urgentâ€� (but obviously not at all urgent) email or participate in the corporate employee joyfulness program. She hasn’t seen her friends in months. Sex? Seems like a lot of effort. Even cooking dinner takes far too much planning. Sasha has hit a wall.

Armed with good intentions to drink kale smoothies, try yoga, and find peace, she heads to the seaside resort she loved as a child. But it’s the off season, the hotel is in a dilapidated shambles, and she has to share the beach with the only other occupant: a grumpy guy named Finn, who seems as stressed as Sasha. How can she commune with nature when he’s sitting on her favorite rock, watching her? Nor can they agree on how best to alleviate their burnout (Sasha: manifesting, wild swimming; Finn: drinking whisky, getting pizza delivered to the beach).

When curious messages, seemingly addressed to Sasha and Finn, begin to appear on the beach, the two are forced to talk—about everything. How did they get so burned out? Can either of them remember something they used to love? (Answer: surfing!) And the question they try and fail to ignore: what does the energy between them—flaring even in the face of their bone-deep exhaustion—signify?]]>
416 Sophie Kinsella 0593730410 dominique 4 2025-reads
proper review coming soon! might be relating to this a bit too much as a tired grad student who is also re-entering the dating world. can say that it's been a while since i genuinely liked a romcom couple and i genuinely like sasha and finn.

also it's a romcom that's actually funny. like, thank god. i'd say my main gripe is that i don't think we needed the "mystery" subplot.]]>
3.75 2023 The Burnout
author: Sophie Kinsella
name: dominique
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
❀ for the romance book club's 4.17.25 meeting ❀

proper review coming soon! might be relating to this a bit too much as a tired grad student who is also re-entering the dating world. can say that it's been a while since i genuinely liked a romcom couple and i genuinely like sasha and finn.

also it's a romcom that's actually funny. like, thank god. i'd say my main gripe is that i don't think we needed the "mystery" subplot.
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The Academy 223541023 #1 bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand teams up with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, to deliver a dishy, page-turning novel following an intertwined cast of characters over the course of one drama-filled year at a New England boarding school.

It’s move-in day at Tiffin Academy and amidst the happy chaos of friends reuniting, selfies uploading, and cars unloading, shocking news America Today just ranked Tiffin the number two boarding school in the country. It’s a seventeen-spot jump â€� was there a typo? The dorms need to be renovated, their sports teams always come in last place, and let’s just say Tiffin students are known for being more social than academic. On the other hand, the campus is exquisite, class sizes are small, and the dining hall is run by an acclaimed New York chef. And they do have fun—lots of parties and school dances, and a piano man plays in the student lounge every Monday night.

But just as the rarefied air of Tiffin is suffused with self-congratulation, the wheels begin to turn â€� and then they fall off the bus. One by one, scandalous blind items begin to appear on phones across Tiffin’s campus, thanks to a new app called ZipZap, and nobody is safe. From Davi Banerjee, international influencer and resident queen bee, to Simone Bergeron, the new and surprisingly young history teacher, to Charley Hicks, a transfer student who seems determined not to fit in, to Cordelia Spooner, Admissions Director with a somewhat idiosyncratic methodology â€� everyone has something to hide.

As if high school wasn’t dramatic enough...As the year unfolds, bonds are forged and broken, secrets are shared and exposed, and the lives of Tiffin’s students and staff are changed forever. The Academy is Elin Hilderbrand’s fresh, buzzy take on boarding school life, and a thrilling new direction from one of America’s most satisfying and popular storytellers.]]>
432 Elin Hilderbrand 031656785X dominique 0 to-read 4.04 The Academy
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: dominique
average rating: 4.04
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Fox 219301718 A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by the legendary author 'who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers' (New York Times Magazine)

'Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today' Gillian Flynn

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.]]>
672 Joyce Carol Oates 0593978080 dominique 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Fox
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: dominique
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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Vera, or Faith 220239019 A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country that's rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends

"In its swirls of emotion, its humor and its pathos, the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that’s been let out of its bottle and set free. It begins to seem that there’s nothing Gary Shteyngart can’t do."—Michael Cunningham

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage give him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."]]>
256 Gary Shteyngart 0593595092 dominique 0 to-read 4.50 2025 Vera, or Faith
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: dominique
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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Lost Illusions 25932 656 Honoré de Balzac 1406506583 dominique 0 to-read 4.19 1843 Lost Illusions
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: dominique
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1843
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography]]> 497164 Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.]]> 119 Roland Barthes 0374521344 dominique 0 to-read 3.99 1980 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
author: Roland Barthes
name: dominique
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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Phenomenology of Perception 18279 544 Maurice Merleau-Ponty 0415278414 dominique 5 4.17 1945 Phenomenology of Perception
author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
name: dominique
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, philosophy, art-history
review:

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Philosophical Investigations 12073 Philosophical Investigations is the definitive en face German-English version of the most important work of 20th-century philosophy The extensively revised English translation incorporates many hundreds of changes to Anscombe's original translation Footnoted remarks in the earlier editions have now been relocated in the text What was previously referred to as 'Part 2' is now republished as Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment, and all the remarks in it are numbered for ease of reference New detailed editorial endnotes explain decisions of translators and identify references and allusions in Wittgenstein's original text Now features new essays on the history of the Philosophical Investigations, and the problems of translating Wittgenstein's text]]> 246 Ludwig Wittgenstein 0631231277 dominique 2 4.26 1953 Philosophical Investigations
author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
name: dominique
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1953
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: academic-reads, 2025-reads, philosophy
review:

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<![CDATA[Another Bullshit Night in Suck City]]> 544336 347 Nick Flynn 0393051390 dominique 0 to-read 3.75 2004 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
author: Nick Flynn
name: dominique
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Sundial (Penguin Classics)]]> 18079602
When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when the somewhat peculiar Aunt Fanny wanders off into the secret garden. But then she returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]>
222 Shirley Jackson 0143107062 dominique 0 to-read 3.92 1958 The Sundial (Penguin Classics)
author: Shirley Jackson
name: dominique
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era]]> 3004415
Clayson illuminates not only the imagery of prostitution—with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also issues and problems relevant to women and men in patriarchal society. She discuses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and mores. She describes the system that evolved of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness in their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it embodied key notions of it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.]]>
232 Hollis Clayson 0300047304 dominique 0 to-read 4.17 1991 Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era
author: Hollis Clayson
name: dominique
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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The Trial 17690 The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.]]> 255 Franz Kafka dominique 0 to-read 4.00 1925 The Trial
author: Franz Kafka
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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Shanghailanders 177772570 A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.

2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.

As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.

Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.]]>
288 Juli Min 1954118600 dominique 0 currently-reading 3.45 2024 Shanghailanders
author: Juli Min
name: dominique
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: currently-reading
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The Pages of the Sea 211801531
When her mother sails to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left behind on their Caribbean island with their aunts and cousins. Though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. She does her best to navigate uncertain rules about where and with whom she spends her time, but the tensions in the family home only seem to grow more opaque—and more threatening. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how long will it be, and why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?

A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and a heartbreaking evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.]]>
312 Anne Hawk 177196653X dominique 0 to-read 3.86 The Pages of the Sea
author: Anne Hawk
name: dominique
average rating: 3.86
book published:
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The Modern Fairies 199797762 Lauren Groff’s The Matrix meets Ophelia Field’s The Favourite in this the wry, sexy, and sharp historical novel—inspired by true events—featuring an elite group of Paris intellectuals who perform fairy tales that will change the course of literature—and put both the storytellers and their closely kept secrets in grave danger.

Why don’t they tell you it is the beautiful princess who becomes the evil queen; that they are just the same person at different points in their story?

At a safe distance from the intrigues of courtly life at Louis XIV’s Versailles, an intellectual crowd of mostly women have been gathering in a Parisian home to share what hostess Marie D’Aulnoy herself has christened comtes de fees: fairy tales. Recently ousted from court and still raw from the death of his beloved wife, Charles Perrault finds companionship and creative camaraderie at the salon, where he eagerly joins the storytellers. Their hostess is impressive, fiercely intelligent, but somehow unreadable. She is harboring secrets of her own: sold off as a child in marriage to a brutal baron, imprisonment, scandal. Despite the vicious Versailles gossip, Marie has mysteriously been allowed to return to polite society and establish her salon in the heart of Paris.

A devastating winter soon sweeps in, bringing with it all kinds of rumors and fears. A spate of poisonings at Versailles has led to several arrests, and no matter how high born the suspect, it seems no one is safe. Paranoia stokes the King’s insecurities, and there is a wolf among the salon’s members—someone more dangerous than any force they could conjure in their own tales, watching and waiting, reporting on the secret goings on, and threatening to destroy them one by one.

Brilliant and bawdy, witty and wise, Modern Fairies is a dazzling novel of stories within stories, familiar tales spun with fresh and provocative meaning, perfect for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy, and Angela Carter.]]>
252 Clare Pollard 1668049414 dominique 5 2025-reads 3.67 2024 The Modern Fairies
author: Clare Pollard
name: dominique
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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The Museum Detective 215808119 Archaeologist Dr. Gul Delani's investigation into a sensational discovery gets complicated—and personal—when it collides with her years-long search for a missing family member.

Inspired by a real-life antiquities scandal in Pakistan, this gripping, whip-smart, and heart-wrenching series opener is perfect for fans of Sue Grafton and Elsa Hart—and introduces an unforgettable new sleuth to the crime fiction canon.

When Dr. Gul Delani receives a call in the middle of the night from the Sindh police, she thinks they may have finally found her niece, Mahnaz—a precocious, politically conscious teenage girl who went missing three years prior. Gul has been racked with grief since Mahnaz’s disappearance, and distracts herself through she’s a talented curator at the Museum of Heritage and History in Karachi, one of the country’s leading experts in archaeology and ancient civilizations, a hard-won position for a woman.

But there is no news of Mahnaz. Instead, Gul is summoned to a narcotics investigation in a remote desert region in western Pakistan. In her wildest dreams, Gul couldn’t have imagined what she’d find amid a drug bust gone wrong, there is a mummy—life-size, seemingly authentic, its sarcophagus decorated with symbols from Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The discovery confounds everyone. It is both too good to be true, and for Gul, too precious to leave in careless or corrupt hands.

Aided by her team of unlikely misfits, Gul will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it, even as her quest for the truth puts her in the throes of a dangerous conspiracy and threatens to collide with her ongoing search for Mahnaz. A portrait of a city fueled by corruption and a woman relentlessly in pursuit of justice, this engrossing crime novel builds to an unforgettable, emotional conclusion readers won’t soon forget.The Museum Detective is an exciting, gritty new crime thriller that announces a whip-smart and brilliant sleuth and builds to a stunning, emotional conclusion that readers won’t soon forget.]]>
336 Maha Khan Phillips 1641296569 dominique 0 to-read 3.86 2025 The Museum Detective
author: Maha Khan Phillips
name: dominique
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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The Word for World Is Forest 276767 160 Ursula K. Le Guin dominique 5 2025-reads 4.06 1972 The Word for World Is Forest
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: dominique
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
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<![CDATA[The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia]]> 13651 387 Ursula K. Le Guin dominique 0 to-read 4.24 1974 The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: dominique
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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Poor Deer 127823311 A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.]]>
240 Claire Oshetsky 006332766X dominique 5 2025-reads 3.97 2024 Poor Deer
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: dominique
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2025-reads
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Greek and Roman Art 53131135

In Greek and Roman Art, classical art expert Susan Woodford illuminates the achievements of classical art and architecture in a concise, coherent breakdown of styles from Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire. Intelligent, clear, and compelling, this indispensable guide gives readers all the information they need to approach ancient art with confidence.]]>
176 Susan Woodford 0500295255 dominique 0 to-read 3.88 Greek and Roman Art
author: Susan Woodford
name: dominique
average rating: 3.88
book published:
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The High Dive 228575510
As the only scholarship kids of their elite group at Columbia University, their heated dynamic was scorched forever by one fateful, awful night just before graduation. And in the ten years since, Alex and Danial have been on radically different paths: she crafts social media campaigns for an ultra-progressive political party; he’s a rising star at a notoriously savage private equity firm. But when two of their college friends decide to tie the knot in the Mediterranean â€� and to host their old crew on a ten-day chartered yacht trip beforehand â€� Alex must finally face Danial, and the sobering reality that she’s now the only middle class outcast in this ultra wealthy club.

When her ideals start to clash with her most intimate desires, Alex must learn to swim in emotional waters that are as unfamiliar as they are undeniable.]]>
368 Chelsea Fagan 1662961189 dominique 0 to-read 4.13 The High Dive
author: Chelsea Fagan
name: dominique
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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<![CDATA[The Right Move (Windy City, #2)]]> 84943172
She’s a distraction, that’s what she is.

I’m the newest Captain of the Devils, Chicago’s NBA team, and the last thing I needed this year was for Indy Ivers, my sister’s best friend, to move into my apartment. She’s messy, emotional, and way too tempting.

But when the team’s General Manager vocalizes his blatant disapproval of my promotion to Captain, referring to me as an unapproachable lone wolf with no work-life balance, I can’t think of a better way to convince him otherwise than pretending to date my outgoing roommate.

The only problem? Faking it feels far too natural.

Having a fake girlfriend wasn’t supposed to be messy but having Indy under my roof and in my bed is complicated, especially when she wants all the romantic parts of life that I could never give her.


INDY

I never imagined I’d be living with my best friend’s brother, NBA superstar Ryan Shay. Even more unbelievable? He needs me to act as his loving girlfriend who’s suddenly changed him into a friendly and approachable guy.

Because, well
he’s not. He’s controlling of his space and untrusting of others.

Our arrangement isn’t one-sided, though. I’m in a wedding coming up, one where every one of my childhood friends, including my ex-boyfriend, will be in attendance, and there’s no better date than my ex’s celebrity hero.

Blurred lines make it almost impossible to separate real from fake. Falling for my roommate was never part of the deal, especially when Ryan is quick to remind me that he doesn’t believe in love.

I’m a romantic and can’t help fantasizing that he’ll change, but soon enough, I find myself questioning if sharing a roof with my best friend’s brother was the right move after all]]>
499 Liz Tomforde dominique 1 2025-reads
how do straight people live like this]]>
4.39 2023 The Right Move (Windy City, #2)
author: Liz Tomforde
name: dominique
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
❀ for the romance book club's 3.20.25 meeting ❀

how do straight people live like this
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<![CDATA[Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression]]> 139248
"Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."� The Guardian

"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."� Choice

"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review

"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."� Library Journal]]>
128 Jacques Derrida 0226143678 dominique 0 3.80 1995 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
author: Jacques Derrida
name: dominique
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read, 2025-reads, academic-reads, philosophy, for-thesis
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The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]>
180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 dominique 0 to-read 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: dominique
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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Not Quite Dead Yet 220223963 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder—now a hit Netflix series—returns with her first novel for adults: a twisty thriller about a young woman trying to solve her own murder.

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.

Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.

Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.

She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.

Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.

She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:

Jet is going to solve her own murder.]]>
400 Holly Jackson 059397705X dominique 0 to-read 4.37 2025 Not Quite Dead Yet
author: Holly Jackson
name: dominique
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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Tartuffe 52823

Condemned and banned for five years in ČюDZôŸ±Ăš°ù±đ’s day, Tartuffe is a satire on religious hypocrisy. Tartuffe worms his way into Orgon’s household, blinding the master of the house with his religious "devotion," and almost succeeds in his attempts to seduce his wife and disinherit his children before the final unmasking.

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180 ČюDZôŸ±Ăš°ù±đ 1854596373 dominique 5 2025-reads 3.68 1664 Tartuffe
author: ČюDZôŸ±Ăš°ù±đ
name: dominique
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1664
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025-reads
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Zong! 3009984
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert―the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slavesâ€� Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Check for the online reader's companion at]]>
224 Marlene NourbeSe Philip 0819568767 dominique 0 to-read 4.15 2008 Zong!
author: Marlene NourbeSe Philip
name: dominique
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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<![CDATA[They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms]]> 196775540 288 Mike Hixenbaugh 0063307243 dominique 5 2025-reads 4.45 2024 They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms
author: Mike Hixenbaugh
name: dominique
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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<![CDATA[Honoré de Balzac - The Magic Skin]]> 96365724 325 Honoré de Balzac dominique 0 to-read 3.40 1831 Honoré de Balzac - The Magic Skin
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: dominique
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1831
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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<![CDATA[Camille: The Lady of the Camellias]]> 212977 254 Alexandre Dumas fils 0451529200 dominique 0 to-read 4.01 1848 Camille: The Lady of the Camellias
author: Alexandre Dumas fils
name: dominique
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1848
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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The Unworthy 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]>
192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 dominique 0 to-read 3.64 2023 The Unworthy
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: dominique
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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The Little Prince 157993
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince, presented here in a stunning new translation with carefully restored artwork. The definitive edition of a worldwide classic, it will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.]]>
96 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0152023984 dominique 0 to-read 4.32 1943 The Little Prince
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: dominique
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
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<![CDATA[The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage]]> 162192 The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God

In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them - in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story - a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them - the School of the Holy Ghost - and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change - to save - our lives.]]>
555 Paul Elie 0374529213 dominique 0 to-read 4.29 2003 The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
author: Paul Elie
name: dominique
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/13
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<![CDATA[The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s]]> 217387881 The origins of our postsecular present, revealed in a vivid, groundbreaking account of the moment when popular culture became the site of religious conflict.

The 1980s are usually seen as a slick, shrill decade. The Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers urged "Death to America"; Ronald Reagan was in the White House, backed by the Moral Majority; John Paul II was asserting Catholic traditionalism and denouncing homosexuality, as were the televangelists on cable TV. And yet "crypto-religious" artists pushed back against the spirit of the age, venturing into vexed areas where politicians and clergy were loath to go—and anticipating the postsecular age we are living in today.

That is the story Paul Elie tells in this enthralling group portrait. Here's Leonard Cohen writing "Hallelujah" in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo's The Last Supper in response to the AIDS crisis; Prince making the cross and altar into "signs of the times." Through Toni Morrison the spirits of the enslaved speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; U2, Morrissey, and SinĂ©ad O'Connor give voice to the anguish of young people who were raised religious; Wim Wenders offers an angel's-eye view of Berlin. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist opposition to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie's struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.]]>
496 Paul Elie 0374272921 dominique 0 to-read 4.00 The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
author: Paul Elie
name: dominique
average rating: 4.00
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<![CDATA[Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination]]> 15815545
Contributors . Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, GastĂłn Gordillo, Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Ann Laura Stoler]]>
384 Ann Laura Stoler 0822353482 dominique 0 4.14 2013 Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination
author: Ann Laura Stoler
name: dominique
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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Monstrous Imagination 1873613
Down through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, philosophers and men of science rendered their learned opinions on the power of the female imagination to dominate, and thus distort, the act of procreation. Drawing on biological and physiological texts from classical times through the nineteenth century, Marie-HĂ©lĂšne Huet presents this argument as it evolved and as it reflected doubts about the force of paternity. She shows how, in the late eighteenth century, the discussion shifted from the scientific sphere to the aesthetic, and how the idea of imagination as monstrous progenitor eventually became a Romantic conceit. In reinterpreting art as teratology, however, Romanticism reclaimed the subversive power of imagination as a masculine attribute; it was now the artist as monstrous father who would generate new forms. From Ambroise Pare to Diderot, from Shelley to Hawthorne, Balzac and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as Huet demonstrates, the monster and the work of art challenged preconceived ideas of the natural order of things―and disclosed, for all to see, the silent desire of their to procreate without the other.

In this analysis of monstrous genesis Huet examines anew such questions as the authorship of Frankenstein , the birth of the Tussaud wax museum, and the ancient legend of the golem. Bringing together philosophy and science, aesthetics and popular culture, Monstrous Imagination is a marvel of intellectual history―a remarkable account of how the imagination has manifested itself, above all, in theory.]]>
344 Marie-HélÚne Huet 0674586492 dominique 0 4.16 1993 Monstrous Imagination
author: Marie-HélÚne Huet
name: dominique
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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Cosmicomics 59780
During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.

William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969

“Naturally, we were all there," old Qfwfq said, "where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?â€�

The distance of the moon --
At daybreak --
A sign in space --
All at one point --
Without colors --
Games without end --
The aquatic uncle --
How much shall we bet? --
The dinosaurs --
The form of space --
The light-years --
The spiral.]]>
153 Italo Calvino 0156226006 dominique 0 to-read 4.23 1965 Cosmicomics
author: Italo Calvino
name: dominique
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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Invisible Cities 9809 165 Italo Calvino 0156453800 dominique 0 to-read 4.16 1972 Invisible Cities
author: Italo Calvino
name: dominique
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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The Baron in the Trees 9804
Cosimo di Rondó, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an existence in the forest canopy—he hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the Age of Enlightenment pass by, and a new century dawn.

The Baron in the Trees exemplifies Calvino’s peerless ability to weave tales that sparkle with enchantment. This new English rendering by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein breathes new life into one of Calvino’s most beloved works.]]>
217 Italo Calvino dominique 0 to-read 4.12 1957 The Baron in the Trees
author: Italo Calvino
name: dominique
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)]]> 432 City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.

Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

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203 Paul Auster 0140097317 dominique 0 to-read 3.79 1985 City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)
author: Paul Auster
name: dominique
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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The Magic Mountain 88077
The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.]]>
706 Thomas Mann dominique 0 to-read 4.12 1924 The Magic Mountain
author: Thomas Mann
name: dominique
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1924
rating: 0
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The Virgin Suicides 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 dominique 0 to-read 3.81 1993 The Virgin Suicides
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: dominique
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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Then We Came to the End 97782
The characters in Then We Came To The End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."]]>
387 Joshua Ferris 0316016381 dominique 0 to-read 3.47 2007 Then We Came to the End
author: Joshua Ferris
name: dominique
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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Cloud Atlas 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

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

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

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]>
509 David Mitchell 0375507256 dominique 0 to-read 4.02 2004 Cloud Atlas
author: David Mitchell
name: dominique
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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The Never Ending Story 2893081 384 Michael Ende 014010867X dominique 0 to-read 4.16 1979 The Never Ending Story
author: Michael Ende
name: dominique
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)]]> 1232 487 Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn dominique 0 to-read 4.26 2001 The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)
author: Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn
name: dominique
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Critical Disaster Studies (Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster)]]> 56913887
As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power.

Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer.

With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.]]>
304 Jacob A.C. Remes 0812253248 dominique 0 4.75 Critical Disaster Studies (Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster)
author: Jacob A.C. Remes
name: dominique
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror]]> 1602692 384 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth 0300074212 dominique 0 4.20 1999 Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror
author: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
name: dominique
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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The Invention of Celebrity 32961115
Lilti retraces the profound social upheaval precipitated by the rise of celebrity and explores the ambivalence felt towards this new phenomenon. Jean Jacques Rousseau's career is an exemplary case. A celebrated and adulated writer, Rousseau ended up cursing the effects of his "disastrous celebrity" marred by the feeling that he had become a public figure whom people everywhere could fashion as they wished. Both sought after and denounced, celebrity evolved as the modern form of personal prestige, assuming the role that glory played in the aristocratic world in a new age of democracy and evolving forms of media. To this day, it is of course a type of glory whose value is still disputed.

Lilti's perceptive history uncovers the birth of celebrity in the 18th century, while at the same time shining valuable light on the continuing importance of celebrity in today’s world.]]>
320 Antoine Lilti 1509508767 dominique 0 3.93 2014 The Invention of Celebrity
author: Antoine Lilti
name: dominique
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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Big Swiss 138539153
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationshipâ€�

A fantastic, weird-as-hell, funny novel, Big Swiss is both a love story and a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, singular voice in contemporary fiction.]]>
352 Jen Beagin 1982153091 dominique 0 to-read 3.70 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: dominique
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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<![CDATA[The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare]]> 184419
As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.]]>
182 G.K. Chesterton 0375757910 dominique 0 to-read 3.85 1908 The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
author: G.K. Chesterton
name: dominique
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1908
rating: 0
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The Familiar 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio PĂ©rez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen—and PĂ©rez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of GuillĂ©n Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]>
387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X dominique 5 2024-reads 3.74 2024 The Familiar
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: dominique
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2025/03/06
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<![CDATA[If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler]]> 374233 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narrationâ€�"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.

The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches—stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."]]>
260 Italo Calvino dominique 4 2025-reads, favorites 4.05 1979 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
author: Italo Calvino
name: dominique
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/06
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Persian Letters 509686
C. J. Betts’s translation conveys the color of the original, and his introduction examines the inner meanings of Montesquieu’s satire. This edition also includes explanatory notes, appendices, and suggestions for further reading.]]>
352 Montesquieu 0140442812 dominique 0 to-read 3.76 1721 Persian Letters
author: Montesquieu
name: dominique
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1721
rating: 0
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Candide 19380 Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that � contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss � all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.]]> 129 Voltaire 0486266893 dominique 0 to-read 3.76 1759 Candide
author: Voltaire
name: dominique
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1759
rating: 0
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The Hearing Trumpet 46987 199 Leonora Carrington 1878972197 dominique 0 to-read 4.06 1974 The Hearing Trumpet
author: Leonora Carrington
name: dominique
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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Down Below 7100367 56 Leonora Carrington 0941194175 dominique 0 to-read 3.96 1945 Down Below
author: Leonora Carrington
name: dominique
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste]]> 80336
"A complex, rich, intelligent book. It will provide the historian of the future with priceless materials and it will bring an essential contribution to sociological theory."
� Fernand Braudel

"One of the more distinguished contributions to social theory and research in recent years . . . There is in this book an account of culture, and a methodology of its study, rich in implication for a diversity of fields of social research. The work in some ways redefines the whole scope of cultural studies."
� Anthony Giddens, Partisan Review

"A book of extraordinary intelligence."
� Irving Louis Horowitz, Commonweal

“Bourdieu’s analysis transcends the usual analysis of conspicuous consumption in two ways: by showing that specific judgments and choices matter less than an esthetic outlook in general and by showing, moreover, that the acquisition of an esthetic outlook not only advertises upper-class prestige but helps to keep the lower orders in line. In other words, the esthetic world view serves as an instrument of domination. It serves the interests not merely of status but of power. It does this, according to Bourdieu, by emphasizing individuality, rivalry, and ‘distinctionâ€� and by devaluing the well-being of society as a whole.â€�
� Christopher Lasch, Vogue]]>
613 Pierre Bourdieu 0674212770 dominique 0 to-read 4.15 1979 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
author: Pierre Bourdieu
name: dominique
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood]]> 45688525 Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America.

Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way, Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities.]]>
304 Cynthia A Kierner 146965251X dominique 0 3.20 2019 Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood
author: Cynthia A Kierner
name: dominique
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]]> 12075 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his life. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.' David Pears and Brian McGuinness received the highest praise for their meticulous translation. The work is prefaced by Bertrand Russell's original introduction to the first English edition.]]> 142 Ludwig Wittgenstein 0415254086 dominique 3 philosophical investigations next for seminar, and that will allegedly be an easier time.]]> 4.09 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
name: dominique
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1921
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, philosophy
review:
wittgenstein is absolutely insane for writing this. i was having war flashbacks to a logics class i had to take in undergrad to fulfill gen ed requirements. i could not understand propositions 5 and 6 without the help of a math phd in seminar. maybe i should take an english phd's words to heart and think of him as a "funny mathematician" if i ever do reread this. we're reading philosophical investigations next for seminar, and that will allegedly be an easier time.
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<![CDATA[Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, #2)]]> 32886 272 bell hooks 0060938293 dominique 0 to-read 4.36 2002 Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, #2)
author: bell hooks
name: dominique
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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All About Love: New Visions 17607 All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame.

For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.]]>
240 bell hooks 0688168442 dominique 0 to-read 4.06 1999 All About Love: New Visions
author: bell hooks
name: dominique
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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A Professional Lola 181513309 208 E.P. Tuazon 1636281184 dominique 4 2025-reads, favorites 4.05 A Professional Lola
author: E.P. Tuazon
name: dominique
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
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review:

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<![CDATA[Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting]]> 220707864 400 Peter Weller 1009548662 dominique 0 to-read 0.0 Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting
author: Peter Weller
name: dominique
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions]]> 195853492 A fascinating new history of America, told through the stories of a diverse cast of ten extraordinary—and often overlooked—adventurers, from Sacagawea to Sally Ride, who pushed the boundaries of discovery and determined our national destiny.

The archetype of the American explorer, a rugged white man, has dominated our popular culture since the late eighteenth century, when Daniel Boone’s autobiography captivated readers with tales of treacherous journeys. But our commonly held ideas about American exploration do not tell the whole story—far from it.

The Explorers  rediscovers a diverse group of Americans who went to the western frontier and beyond, traversing the farthest reaches of the globe and even penetrating outer space in their endeavor to find the unknown. Many escaped from lives circumscribed by racism, sexism, poverty, and discrimination as they took on great risk in unfamiliar territory. Born into slavery, James Beckwourth found freedom as a mountain man and became one of the great entrepreneurs of Gold Rush California. Matthew Henson, the son of African American sharecroppers, left rural Maryland behind to seek the North Pole. Women like Harriet Chalmers Adams ascended Peruvian mountains to gain geographic knowledge while Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride shattered glass ceilings by pushing the limits of flight.

±őČÔÌęThe Explorers,  readers will travel across the vast Great Plains and into the heights of the Sierra Nevada mountains; they will traverse the frozen Arctic Ocean and descend into the jungles of South America; they will journey by canoe and horseback, train and dogsled, airplane and space shuttle. Readers will experience the exhilarating history of American exploration alongside the men and women who shared a deep drive to discover the unknown.

Across two centuries and many thousands of miles of terrain, Amanda Bellows offers an ode to our country’s most intrepid adventurers—and reveals the history of America in the process.]]>
384 Amanda Bellows 0063227401 dominique 3 2025-reads 3.54 2024 The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions
author: Amanda Bellows
name: dominique
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
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The Pole 125484660 166 J.M. Coetzee 1324093862 dominique 5 2025-reads, favorites 3.69 2023 The Pole
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: dominique
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
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Selected Poems 1265072 96 Cyprian Kamil Norwid 0856463698 dominique 0 to-read 3.88 2004 Selected Poems
author: Cyprian Kamil Norwid
name: dominique
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
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<![CDATA[Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 2]]> 2020657 690 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 0198238177 dominique 3 3.50 1835 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 2
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: dominique
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1835
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: 2025-reads, academic-reads, art-history, architecture, philosophy
review:

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<![CDATA[Songs on the Death of Children: Selected Poems from Kindertotenlieder]]> 60868357
REVIEWS

â€� “Friedrich RĂŒckert, who had mastered thirty languages, found words for the inexpressible language of grief. More than 150 years later, his Songs on the Death of Children has new life, thanks to a vibrant new translation by David Bannon. This first English-language edition of a classic work adds commentary that illumines RĂŒckert’s work of deep passion while also bringing wisdom and solace to everyone acquainted with grief.”â€� Philip Yancey, author of Where the Light Fell and What’s So Amazing About Grace?

â€� “David Bannon opens our eyes to the timeless, borderless, and trans-cultural nature of grief, and of hope. He brings alive the centuries-old poetry of a bereaved father, Friedrich RĂŒckert, with powerful essays and commentary. I found myself caught up in the life of a dad from another place and time, who seems to feel everything I feel now when I think of losing my son, and was comforted and inspired to see the beauty of life as it still is, pain and all. David has done a remarkable thing with this book, and it will take up an important place in the modern canon of grief and loss. Outstanding.”â€� W. Lee Warren, MD, neurosurgeon, author of I’ve Seen the End of You, Winner of the Christian Book Award, and Host of The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast

â€� “The finest lament in world literature is finally available to the world in English, the international language, thanks to David Bannon’s sensible translation.”â€� Dr. Rudolf Kreutner, president of the RĂŒckert Society, historian and archivist of the RĂŒckert estate collection, and publisher of the definitive critical editions of the works of Friedrich RĂŒckert

â€� “In the wake of a profound loss, David Bannon discovered the German poet Friedrich RĂŒckert’s compelling verses, well-known in the poet’s own time but sadly almost forgotten in our own. As he turned in his grief to RĂŒckert’s ‘songs,â€� David not only found comfort, he also felt moved to draw on his considerable skills as a translator. The task of rendering the poetry of a bereaved father into English, David found, ‘was one of communion and solace.â€� Here he artfully frames RĂŒckert’s genius and helps his searing insights come alive. The result is an account both wonderfully well-researched and yet also moving and deeply personal.”â€� Timothy Jones, former Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina, and Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Halifax, Virginia

‱“You will cry, but the tears will comfort you.”â€� Johannes Wilkes, psychologist, president of the Erlangen RĂŒckert Circle, Germany

â€� “This beautiful English translation of German poetry by Friedrich RĂŒckert communicates a timeless message of grief, as well as comfort. David Bannon—a linguist and scholar who also shares with RĂŒckert the broken heart of a father—provides far more than a simple translation; his commentary on the poetry, the historical times, and the original language leads readers to a deeper understanding of this fascinating text with the power to heal.”â€� Steven S. Bammel, Ph.D., translator

â€� “Bannon’s translation of Songs on the Death of Children, masterfully embedded in their original context, is a worthy contribution to the long history of profoundly moving father’s laments, to the enrichment of the genre as a whole.”â€� Titus Leber, director of the film Kindertotenlieder (1976).

â€� “‘Friedrich RĂŒckert does not rely on emotional outburts; rather on sighs, quiet and restrained. . . . David Bannon also lost a daughter . . . he provides declarations of naked clarity in English free verse and combines theological, psychological and biographical insights with grief work.â€� —Reinhard Kalb, “Grief Work in the Poetry of Sighs: American author David Bannon sheds light on Friedrich RĂŒckert’s lamentsâ€� Erlangen News (April 1, 2023)]]>
199 Friedrich RĂŒckert 1476690421 dominique 0 to-read 5.00 Songs on the Death of Children: Selected Poems from Kindertotenlieder
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<![CDATA[The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II]]> 45732996 The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The crowning achievement of Peter Weiss—the internationally renowned writer best known for his play Marat/Sadeâ€�The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe.

Volume two, initially published in 1978, opens as the unnamed narrator finds himself in Paris after having retreated from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. From there, he moves on to Stockholm, where he works in a factory, becomes involved with the Communist Party, and meets Bertolt Brecht. Featuring the narrator's extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature, the novel teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. Throughout, the narrator explores the affinity between political resistance and art—the connection at the heart of Weiss's novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century history.]]>
336 Peter Weiss 1478006145 dominique 0 to-read 4.46 1978 The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II
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<![CDATA[The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1]]> 174518 376 Peter Weiss 0822335468 dominique 0 to-read 4.23 1975 The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1
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<![CDATA[Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics]]> 39027815
Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representationâ€� whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.

Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental The racialized remain “under representation,â€� on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.

Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.]]>
240 0823282376 dominique 0 to-read 4.55 Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
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<![CDATA[Consequences of Enlightenment (Literature, Culture, Theory, Series Number 30)]]> 1857075 278 Anthony J. Cascardi 052148149X dominique 0 to-read 0.0 1999 Consequences of Enlightenment (Literature, Culture, Theory, Series Number 30)
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<![CDATA[The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso]]> 6656 This Everyman’s Library edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli’s marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations.

Translated in this edition by Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.

Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.]]>
798 Dante Alighieri 0679433139 dominique 0 to-read 4.08 1320 The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso
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The Village of Stepanchikovo 17878 Dostoyevsky said he wrote the Village of Stepanchikovo (1859) for the sheer pleasure of prolonging the adventures of my new hero and enjoying a good laugh at him. This hero is not unlike myself...

Dostoyevsky's narrator has been summoned to his uncle Colonel Rostanev's remote country estate in the hope that he will act as decoy and rescue Rostanev's former ward, Nastenka Yezhevikin, from the tyranny of Opiskin, a despot and charlatan who has the whole household under his thumb. Forty-eight hours of explosive comic drama unfold, culminating in a violent confrontation between Opiskin and the ineffectual Rostanev.

Dostoyevsky conveys a delight in life's absurdities to rival that of Gogol, yet at the same time in Opiskin, a comic monster of Russian literature, he creates an unflattering portrait of his mentor. Here we recognize the genesis of the characters and the revelatory dramatic scenes of and The Karamazov Brothers.

The cover shows a detail from Spring by Konstantin Fedorovich Yuon reproduced by courtesy of the David King Collection.]]>
224 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0140446583 dominique 0 to-read 3.90 1859 The Village of Stepanchikovo
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The Sorrows of Young Werther 16640 149 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0812969901 dominique 0 to-read 3.71 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther
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