Sarah's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:56:31 -0700 60 Sarah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The World Without Us 248787 A penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations, and how, as the world's cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists—who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths—Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.]]> 324 Alan Weisman Sarah 0 to-read 3.81 2007 The World Without Us
author: Alan Weisman
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Name 216775156 'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years' Olivia Laing, Observer

'You can't help but think of her work falling in the tradition of Annie Ernaux, just edgier. Her prose is gorgeously spare and practical' Irish Independent

In the twin worlds of the French bourgeoisie and aristocracy, names are everything. By contrast, our narrator insists on shedding her surname, indelibly associated with France's political and colonial past. In Name, she explores how this name is bound to the complex grief she feels for her father's recent passing and her mother's overdose many years earlier, as well as the murky practices of a political dynasty - a family life built around substance abuse, buried trauma and elitist pride.

Written in sharp prose that has been lauded by Rachel Kushner, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing and others, Debré's third novel is a fresh feat of restrained yet explosive writing.]]> 144 Constance Debré 1800819889 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.70 2022 Name
author: Constance Debré
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/18
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]> 63069126 0 Sigmund Freud Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.33 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
author: Sigmund Freud
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1905
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis]]> 205900042 Both a forceful polemic and a practical guide, Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent is a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, a monthly tribute that drives millions to debt, despair, and into the streets. In the context of a permanent housing crisis and governments in the pocket of real estate interests, Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants political actors who can, through organizing, direct action, and collective bargaining, bring about a housing system that meets their needs.Ěý

Abolish Rent is the first book-length engagement with the resurgent tenant movement. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis—cofounders of Los Angles’s many thousand member tenant union—offer a deeply-reported account centering poor and working class tenants who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. They take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line.Ěý

If rent abolition is our aim, tenant power must be the means—built through everyday resistance in our buildings and on our blocks. This is the revolutionary project we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.]]> 200 Tracy Rosenthal Sarah 0 4.50 Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis
author: Tracy Rosenthal
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/16
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]]> Play Boy 37791748 187 Constance Debré 2234084296 Sarah 0 fiction 3.23 2018 Play Boy
author: Constance Debré
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/15
date added: 2025/06/15
shelves: fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities (Mapping Social Reproduction Theory)]]> 209191698 Eros and AlienationĚýdelves into the underexplored relationship between alienated labour and sexuality. Our deeply human drive to shape the world around us and fulfil ourselves through labour is subverted by capitalist alienation, leaving us to find fulfilment elsewhere.

As a result, our erotic drives become the central focus for transformation and life-making, but are themselves restricted and fuelled by whatever energy is left after completing the monetised or social reproductive work required to survive. This alienation encounters ongoing resistance, as life-making activity can never be fully separated from the person who labours.

Alan Sears explores the ways this alienation frames the processes of gender and sexual formation, showing how the organisation of work contributes to the development of a dominant regime of gendered sexualities, defined by a binary gender mapping of desire as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.]]> 200 Alan Sears 0745349439 Sarah 0 end-of-heterosexuality 4.50 Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities (Mapping Social Reproduction Theory)
author: Alan Sears
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/14
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality
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]]> <![CDATA[Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)]]> 23437156 Alternate cover of ISBN 9781627792127

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.]]> 480 Leigh Bardugo 1627792120 Sarah 0 4.47 2015 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/09
date added: 2025/06/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Vagabonds)]]> 209191702 176 Valeria Graziano 0745349803 Sarah 0 end-of-heterosexuality 4.30 Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Vagabonds)
author: Valeria Graziano
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/07
date added: 2025/06/07
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality
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]]> <![CDATA[Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race]]> 121014641 A groundbreaking new analysis of the making of modernity, sexuality and race

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.]]> 225 Sita Balani 1839761040 Sarah 5 4.11 Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race
author: Sita Balani
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/06/07
date added: 2025/06/07
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loved this so much it was like fireworks in my brain
]]> <![CDATA[I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage]]> 3550810
For ten thousand years, marriage—and the idea of marriage—has been at the very foundation of human society. In this provocative and ambitious book, Susan Squire unravels the turbulent history and many implications of our most basic institution. Starting with the discovery, long before recorded time, that sex leads to paternity (and hence to couplehood), and leading up to the dawn of the modern “love marriage,� Squire delves into the many ways men and women have come together and what the state of their unions has meant for history, society, and politics � especially the politics of the home.

This book is the product of thirteen years of intense research, but even more than the intellectual scope, what sets it apart is Squire’s voice and contrarian boldness. Learned, acerbic, opinionated, and funny, she draws on everything from Sumerian mythology to Renaissance theater to Victorian housewives� manuals (sometimes all at the same time) to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of the many things marriage has been and meant. The result is a book to provoke and fascinate readers of all ideological stripes: feminists, traditionalists, conservatives, and progressives alike.]]> 272 Susan Squire 1582341192 Sarah 0 storage-6 3.45 2008 I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage
author: Susan Squire
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/27
date added: 2025/05/27
shelves: storage-6
review:

]]> All the Crooked Saints 30025336 From bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater, a gripping tale of darkness, miracles, and family. Saints. Miracles. Family. Romance. Death. Redemption.

Here is a thing everyone wants: A miracle.

Here is a thing everyone fears: What it takes to get one.

Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars.

At the heart of this place you will find the Soria family, who all have the ability to perform unusual miracles. And at the heart of this family are three cousins longing to change its future: Beatriz, the girl without feelings, who wants only to be free to examine her thoughts; Daniel, the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone but himself; and Joaquin, who spends his nights running a renegade radio station under the name Diablo Diablo.

They are all looking for a miracle. But the miracles of Bicho Raro are never quite what you expect.]]> 313 Maggie Stiefvater 0545930804 Sarah 0 3.82 2017 All the Crooked Saints
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/26
date added: 2025/05/26
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]]> <![CDATA[All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess]]> 133286967 A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.

In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish� (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.

Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.

Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.]]> 292 Becca Rothfeld 1250849926 Sarah 0 3.27 2024 All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
author: Becca Rothfeld
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/23
date added: 2025/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity]]> 52375438 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter now turns her focus to the sexual lives of young men, once again offering “both an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it� (Washington Post).

Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & SexĚýbroke ground, shattered taboos, and launched conversations about young women’s right to pleasure and agency in sexual encounters. It also had an unexpected effect on its author: Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. Boys are subject to the same cultural forces as girls—steeped in the same distorted media images and binary stereotypes of female sexiness and toxic masculinity—which equally affect how they navigate sexual and emotional relationships. InĚýBoys & Sex,ĚýPeggy Orenstein dives back into the lives of young people to once again give voice to the unspoken, revealing how young men understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy.

Drawing on comprehensive interviews with young men, psychologists, academics, and experts in the field, Boys & Sex dissects so-called locker room talk; how the word “hilarious� robs boys of empathy; pornography as the new sex education; boys� understanding of hookup culture and consent; and their experience as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. By surfacing young men’s experience in all its complexity, Orenstein is able to unravel the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important realities of young male sexuality in today’s world. The result is a provocative and paradigm-shifting work that offers a much-needed vision of how boys can truly move forward as better men.

]]> 304 Peggy Orenstein Sarah 0 4.22 2020 Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
author: Peggy Orenstein
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/21
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke]]> 216526492

The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.


While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.


As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.]]> 232 Leigh Claire La Berge Sarah 0 3.36 Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke
author: Leigh Claire La Berge
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.36
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/18
date added: 2025/05/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Who Gets to Be Indian?: Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity]]> 223363571
Settler capitalism has been so effective that the very identities of Indigenous people have been usurped, misconstrued, and weaponized. In Who Gets to Be Indian?, scholar and writer Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) explores how ethnic fraud and the commodification of Indianness has resulted in mass confusion about what it means to be Indigenous in the United States.

As an entry point to the seemingly intractable problem of ethnic fraud, Gilio-Whitaker critically looks to the film industry, including a case study of Sacheen Littlefeather, who is most known as the Native American woman that rejected an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973—though later revealed, she was not who she said she was. Gilio-Whitaker argues that this pretendian phenomenon originated in Southern California when the United States was forcing assimilation of Indians into white America culturally, but also into its capitalist economic system. With Indianness becoming a marketized commodity in the Hollywood film business, the field became open to anyone who could convincingly adopt an Indian persona.

Deeply researched using socio-historical analysis, Gilio-Whitaker offers insights from her own experiences grappling with identity to provide clarity and help readers understand how the commodification of Indianness have ultimately left many people of legitimate American Indian heritage to be disconnected from their tribes. Personal and compelling, Gilio-Whitaker takes settler capitalism to task and helps us better understand how we got here in order to counteract the abuses of pretendianism and disenrollment.]]> 280 Dina Gilio-Whitaker 0807044962 Sarah 0 to-read 0.0 Who Gets to Be Indian?: Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity
author: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
name: Sarah
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Rule of Wolves (King of Scars, #2)]]> 36307674
The wolves are circling and a young king will face his greatest challenge in the explosive finale of the instant #1 New York Times-bestselling King of Scars Duology.

The Demon King. As Fjerda's massive army prepares to invade, Nikolai Lantsov will summon every bit of his ingenuity and charm—and even the monster within—to win this fight. But a dark threat looms that cannot be defeated by a young king's gift for the impossible.

The Stormwitch. Zoya Nazyalensky has lost too much to war. She saw her mentor die and her worst enemy resurrected, and she refuses to bury another friend. Now duty demands she embrace her powers to become the weapon her country needs. No matter the cost.

The Queen of Mourning. Deep undercover, Nina Zenik risks discovery and death as she wages war on Fjerda from inside its capital. But her desire for revenge may cost her country its chance at freedom and Nina the chance to heal her grieving heart.

King. General. Spy. Together they must find a way to forge a future in the darkness. Or watch a nation fall.]]> 592 Leigh Bardugo 1510109188 Sarah 0 4.34 2021 Rule of Wolves (King of Scars, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Spectre)]]> 25362959 200 Peter Linebaugh 1629631078 Sarah 5 3.98 2016 Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Spectre)
author: Peter Linebaugh
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/13
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]]> The House of Broken Bricks 127282259 Every marriage has its seasons...It’s autumn when we meet Tess, but her relationship with Richard is in a deep, cold winter. A winter so harsh, their union may never see the bright light of spring.

Tess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in the city to the English countryside, where predatory birds hover over fields, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider, and no one looks like her.

As Tess and Richard settle in, the dramatic arrival of their fraternal twins—one who presents as black and the other as white—recasts the family dynamic, stirring up complicated feelings and questions of belonging. Tess yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was, instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen where cooking Caribbean food becomes her sole comfort. And Richard obsesses over getting his crops planted rather than deal with the conversation he cannot bear to have.

In Fiona Williams� quartet of unforgettable, alternating perspectives, secrets and vines clamber over the house’s broken red bricks, and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, Sonny knows that something is stirring. . . . As the seasons change and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal.]]> 352 Fiona Williams 1250896762 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.72 2024 The House of Broken Bricks
author: Fiona Williams
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Permafrost 42200387
Repleto de imágenes poéticas, contundentes y muy físicas, este carácter tan palpable del texto no es gratuito en una novela que nos habla del cuerpo, del sexo, del yo; una obra aguda y directa que reivindica la libertad femenina en el placer y en la soledad.

Eva Baltasar inicia con "Permafrost" un trĂ­ptico de protagonistas femeninas que quiere explorar distintas etapas en la vida de las mujeres.]]> 144 Eva Baltasar 8439735146 Sarah 5 3.81 2018 Permafrost
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/12
date added: 2025/05/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want]]> 217432753 A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,� “they wish,� “LOL,� and “definitely not.� This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.� Hype looks and smells It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.]]> 288 Emily M. Bender 0063418568 Sarah 5 3.80 2025 The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want
author: Emily M. Bender
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/12
date added: 2025/05/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex]]> 52128695 An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that's obsessed with sexual attraction, and what we can all learn about desire and identity by using an ace lens to see the world

What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through the world not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about consent, about compromise, about the structures of society? This exceedingly accessible guide to asexuality shows that the issues that aces face—confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships—are conflicts that all of us need to address as we move through the world.

Through interviews, cultural criticism, and memoir, ACE invites all readers to consider big-picture issues through the lens of asexuality, because every place that sexuality touches our world, asexuality does too.

Journalist Angela Chen uses her own journey of self-discovery as an asexual person to unpretentiously educate and vulnerably connect with readers, effortlessly weaving analysis of sexuality and societally imposed norms with interviews of ace people. Among those included are the woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that "not wanting sex" was a sign of serious illness, and the man who grew up in an evangelical household and did everything "right," only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others. Also represented are disabled aces, aces of color, non-gender-conforming aces questioning whether their asexuality is a reaction against stereotypes, and aces who don't want romantic relationships asking how our society can make room for them.]]> 210 Angela Chen 080701379X Sarah 0 4.35 2020 Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
author: Angela Chen
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria]]> 1824226 360 Dolores Ibárruri Sarah 0 4.26 1962 They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
author: Dolores Ibárruri
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
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]]> <![CDATA[King of Scars (King of Scars, #1)]]> 36307634 Face your demons... or feed them.

The dashing young king, Nikolai Lantsov, has always had a gift for the impossible. No one knows what he endured in his country's bloody civil war--and he intends to keep it that way. Now, as enemies gather at his weakened borders, Nikolai must find a way to refill Ravka's coffers, forge new alliances, and stop a rising threat to the once-great Grisha Army.

Yet with every day a dark magic within him grows stronger, threatening to destroy all he has built. With the help of a young monk and a legendary Grisha general, Nikolai will journey to the places in Ravka where the deepest magic survives to vanquish the terrible legacy inside him. He will risk everything to save his country and himself. But some secrets aren't meant to stay buried--and some wounds aren't meant to heal.]]> 511 Leigh Bardugo 125014227X Sarah 0 4.16 2019 King of Scars (King of Scars, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance]]> 204267159 A thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policy

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance.

Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi.

Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth.

Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the Is another politics of extravagance possible?]]> 560 Melinda Cooper 1942130945 Sarah 0 0.0 Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance
author: Melinda Cooper
name: Sarah
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures with Britain's Wild Mammals]]> 122189217 Countryfile's best nature and wildlife books for 2023 Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize

'Elegiac, informative and funny; some truly magical encounters in the wild' - Peter Fiennes

Britain is teeming with wildlife, often in the most unexpected places. There are stone mines where bats hang out with pot-smoking teenagers and water voles thrive without water in Glaswegian parklands. Our coastlines are laden with seals. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a quarter of British mammals are at imminent risk of extinction. Tim Kendall and Fiona Mathews take us on a safari unlike any other. Armed with binoculars, a Thermos and, regrettably, an inexhaustible supply of puns, they travel from Scotland to the Isles of Scilly in search of their elusive subjects. You’ll find answers to questions you never thought to do pine marten droppings really smell like Parma Violets? Should we give squirrels access to family planning? And what do wild boar have in common with a certain royal? Black Ops and Beaver Bombing is a celebration of Britain’s marvellous mammals, and a rallying cry to save them.]]> 315 Fiona Mathews 0861545575 Sarah 0 4.37 2023 Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures with Britain's Wild Mammals
author: Fiona Mathews
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: miscellaneous-nonfiction, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation]]> 818517
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.

The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.]]> 352 Alexei Yurchak 0691121176 Sarah 0 to-read 4.13 2005 Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
author: Alexei Yurchak
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Years 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I� for the “we� (or “they�, or “one�) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Sarah 0 fiction, to-read 4.22 2008 The Years
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: fiction, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood]]> 178214193
When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo.

In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them, too.

Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.]]> 512 Helen Charman 0241512824 Sarah 0 4.52 2024 Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
author: Helen Charman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis]]> 223147730 From the co-author of Let This Radicalize You, a collection of letters to inspire activists to continue the fightĚý

Organizers are well seasoned in defeat. We study movement histories, strategize collectively, and gather strength in direct action, knowing that liberation does not arrive overnight, but that the fight is worth it. But what happens when political and personal crises overlap, and the despair becomes overwhelming? Where do we turn when the process of organizing no longer feels like a site of refuge, but isolating, or even tragic?Ěý

Read This When Things Fall Apart is a collection of letters written to organizers in crisis who are struggling with the conflicts, heartbreaks, and catastrophes that activists so often experience. From grief to exhaustion, fractured relationships, state violence and interpersonal violence, the struggle for justice can be tumultuous. Each letter invites the reader to the writer’s particular world in abortion defense, organizing within prison walls, recuperating from state repression after the 2020 uprisings, or as a new parent struggling to find their way in movement spaces, and offers an authentic account of moving through difficult times.Ěý

Personal, reflective, and hopeful, Read This When Things Fall Apart is a new type of book for radicals that harnesses the writers' individual moments of despair into living, breathing wisdom capable of chipping away at the supposed inevitability of fascist life. Restorative like a letter from a trusted friend and invigorating like a story from a mentor, the book is an indispensable companion for all of us navigating the challenging times ahead.Ěý]]> 172 Kelly Hayes 1849355843 Sarah 5 5.00 Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis
author: Kelly Hayes
name: Sarah
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
I blurbed it so not unbiased but I loved it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Pale Dreamer (The Bone Season, #0.5)]]> 213740279 The exhilarating prequel to the internationally bestselling Bone Season series.

In the perilous heart of Scion London, a dangerous and valuable poltergeist is on the loose � and it must be caught before chaos erupts on the streets of the capital. Here, the clairvoyant underworld plays by its own rules, and rival gangs will stop at nothing to win such a magnificent prize.

Sixteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working for Jaxon Hall, the most notorious mime-lord in the city. He thinks she is hiding a powerful gift, but it refuses to surface. Maybe this is the opportunity she needs to secure her position in his gang, the Seven Seals…]]> Samantha Shannon 1408884178 Sarah 0 3.70 2016 The Pale Dreamer (The Bone Season, #0.5)
author: Samantha Shannon
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Shiny Broken Pieces (Tiny Pretty Things, #2)]]> 27617333
June is starting to finally see herself as a prima ballerina. However, getting what she wants might cost her everything—including the only boy she’s ever loved. Legacy dancer Bette is determined to clear her name after she was suspended and accused of hurting her rival, Gigi. Even if she returns, though, will she ever regain the spotlight she craves? And Gigi is not going to let Bette—or the other dancers who bullied her—go unpunished. But as revenge consumes her, Gigi may be the one who pays the price.

After years of grueling auditions, torn ribbons, and broken hearts, it all comes down to this last dance. Who will make the cut? And who will lose her dream forever?]]> 384 Sona Charaipotra 0062342444 Sarah 0 3.94 2016 Shiny Broken Pieces (Tiny Pretty Things, #2)
author: Sona Charaipotra
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)]]> 40333989 Get ready for Samantha Shannon's new novel, A Day of Fallen Night, coming in February 2023!The New York Times bestselling "epic feminist fantasy perfect for fans of Game of Thrones" (Bustle).NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR AMAZON (Top 100 Editors Picks and Science Fiction and Fantasy) * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY * BOOKPAGE * AUTOSTRADDLEA world divided.A queendom without an heir.An ancient enemy awakens.The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction--but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.]]> 849 Samantha Shannon 163557028X Sarah 0 4.22 2019 The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)
author: Samantha Shannon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
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]]> Goddess Complex 214537784 From the author of Gold Diggers, a biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her similarly well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.

There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face—literally—with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is both a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and so much more.]]> 304 Sanjena Sathian 0593489772 Sarah 0 to-read, fiction 3.46 2025 Goddess Complex
author: Sanjena Sathian
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tiny Pretty Things (Tiny Pretty Things, #1)]]> 59354601
Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars in this soapy, drama-packed novel featuring diverse characters who will do anything to be the prima at their elite ballet school.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Belles, Dhonielle Clayton, and the author of the highly anticipated Symptoms of a Heartbreak, Sona Charaipotra.

Gigi, Bette, and June, three top students at an exclusive Manhattan ballet school, have seen their fair share of drama. Free-spirited new girl Gigi just wants to dance—but the very act might kill her. Privileged New Yorker Bette's desire to escape the shadow of her ballet-star sister brings out a dangerous edge in her. And perfectionist June needs to land a lead role this year or her controlling mother will put an end to her dancing dreams forever.

When every dancer is both friend and foe, the girls will sacrifice, manipulate, and backstab to be the best of the best.

Don’t miss the gossip, lies, and scandal that continues in Tiny Pretty Things� gripping sequel, Shiny Broken Pieces!]]> 453 Sona Charaipotra Sarah 0 3.71 2015 Tiny Pretty Things (Tiny Pretty Things, #1)
author: Sona Charaipotra
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right]]> 222886935 â€An essential read to understand the times in which we live' - Lea Ypi


A revelatory exploration of how today’s rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it

After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated � and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.

In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of â€competitionâ€� ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.

Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.
]]> 273 Quinn Slobodian 1837310122 Sarah 0 to-read 4.12 Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right
author: Quinn Slobodian
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together]]> 212924187 From celebrated trans activist and author of Mutual Aid Dean Spade comes a practical manifesto for how to live out your radical political values in your intimate relationships

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiraling succession of crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. Many of us feel mobilized to organize and collectively combat these issues on both a personal and political level, often dedicating our lives to the forwarding of progressive ideas and the daunting goal of trying to bend the world toward justice.
Ěý
But too often we think of our political values as outward-facing positions again dominant systems of power. Rarely, if ever, do we pursue the same kind of justice close to home, in our relationships to ourselves and to those closest to us. No matter how ardently we want to see the world change, our lives and connections will continue to stagnate unless we liberate ourselves from the cultural scripts that too often dictate our behavior toward others.
Ěý
How do we become intentional about our levels of connection? How do we separate our expectations of love from the baggage left to us by our parents? How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? This book offers a roadmap for how to bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection.
Ěý
Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Love in a F*cked-Up WorldĚýis a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, preparing us for the work of changing the world.
Ěý]]> 352 Dean Spade 164375646X Sarah 0 Review forthcoming! 4.33 Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together
author: Dean Spade
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
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Review forthcoming!
]]> Humans: A Monstrous History 217077998 Why do humans make monsters, and what do monsters tell us about humanity?
Ěý
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and ET, A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about it defines who gets to count as normal.
Ěý
In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making to chart a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.]]> 336 Surekha Davies 0520388097 Sarah 0 to-read 3.69 2025 Humans: A Monstrous History
author: Surekha Davies
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Feminism Against Cisness 188536485
Contributors. Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Jules Gill-Peterson, Emma Heaney, Margaux L. Kristjansson, Greta LaFleur, Grace Lavery, Durba Mitra, Beans Velocci, Joanna Wuest]]> 280 Emma Heaney 1478030453 Sarah 0 4.24 Feminism Against Cisness
author: Emma Heaney
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
review:

]]> Love in Exile 60683642 â€We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be humanâ€�

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.]]> 208 Shon Faye 0241605989 Sarah 0 4.30 Love in Exile
author: Shon Faye
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
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Writing a proper review for the American Prospect
]]> Roland Rogers Isn't Dead Yet 208511410 It’s the gig of a lifetime for this ghostwriter, except there’s a the client, a closeted A-list actor finally ready to come out in his memoir, is an actual ghost.

Adam Gallagher has knocked on thousands of doors. An ex-Mormon and almost-famous memoirist, he is used to sharing his life story with strangers. But this day, this house, is different. For it belongs to none other than Roland Hollywood Hunk, and soon to be author. Roland has a story to tell, a decades-old secret to spill, and he’s decided that Adam is just the guy to help him do it. Except there’s a problem. Roland Rogers is dead. Not in the metaphysical realm—if he focuses, he can summon enough energy to communicate via the kitchen speaker—but certainly in the physical, and he needs Adam to pen his story before his body is found frozen beneath the avalanche of snow that squashed it. That means one month, a hundred thousand words, no breaks. Ghostwriting is hard enough, let alone when you’re dealing with a real ghost, and so it isn’t long before Roland’s idea of what his book should be clashes with Adam’s vision for what it could be. But the clock is ticking, the ice melting. And as more truths are told, both men soon discover that this experience is less of a coming out, and more of a coming home . . . The sophomore novel from the beloved author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle, Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet is a witty and electric new rom-com for fans of Ashley Poston and Casey McQuiston.]]> Samantha Allen 1638931542 Sarah 0 3.90 Roland Rogers Isn't Dead Yet
author: Samantha Allen
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> Patricia Wants to Cuddle 59093587 The contestants of a reality television dating show compete for love—and their lives—in this pulse-pounding and viciously funny fiction debut from the GLAAD Award-winning author of Real Queer America.

When the final four women in competition for an aloof, if somewhat sleazy, bachelor's heart arrive on a mysterious island in the Pacific Northwest, they mentally prepare themselves for another week of extreme sleep deprivation, invasive interviews, and of course, the salacious drama that viewers nationwide tune in to eagerly devour. Each woman came on 'The Catch' for her own reasons—brand sponsorships, followers, and yes, even love—and they've all got their eyes steadfastly trained on their respective prizes.

Enter Patricia, a temperamental, but woefully misunderstood local, living alone in the dark, verdant woods and desperate to forge a connection of her own. As the contestants perform for the cameras that surround them, Patricia watches from her place in the shadows, a queer specter haunting the bombastic display of heterosexuality before her. But when the cast and crew at last make her acquaintance atop the island's tallest and most desolate peak, they soon realize that if they're to have any hope of making it to the next Elimination Event, they'll first have to survive the night.

A whirlwind romp careening toward a last-girl-standing conclusion and a scathing indictment of contemporary American media culture, Patricia Wants to Cuddle is also a love story: between star-crossed lesbians who rise above their intolerant town, a deeply ambivalent woman and her budding self-actualization, and a chosen family of misfit islanders forging community against all odds.]]> 256 Samantha Allen 163893004X Sarah 0 3.51 2022 Patricia Wants to Cuddle
author: Samantha Allen
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Whispering Night (The Luminaries, #3)]]> 204113970 The forest is more dangerous than ever as secrets are revealed in this highly-anticipated, pulse-pounding, and swoon-worthy conclusion to the bestselling Luminaries trilogy.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 369 Susan Dennard 1250339499 Sarah 0 4.02 2024 The Whispering Night (The Luminaries, #3)
author: Susan Dennard
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> She's Always Hungry 201033505 The first collection from a major voice in British fiction, the author of Boy Parts and Penance

A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.

A teenager longs for perfect skin.

A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.

A young man takes the night into his own hands.

Each of these characters has a desperate desire. Can any of them be sated?

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.]]> 225 Eliza Clark 0063393263 Sarah 5 fiction 3.78 2024 She's Always Hungry
author: Eliza Clark
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History]]> 134121281
Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means—now—to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night.
Ěý Ěý ĚýIn 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season , follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire’s role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.]]> 352 Manjula Martin 0593317157 Sarah 5 3.66 2024 The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
author: Manjula Martin
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Breakdown 63237765
She travels first by car and then train to Rosslare, from where she takes a ferry to Fishguard in Wales. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations, shopping centres, train stations, ferry terminals; recalling her youth, earlier fantasies of suicide and reminiscing about those people who have come in and out of her life.

Finally, 48 hours later, alone and isolated in a cottage in Wales, in a strange and eerie landscape, the woman reaches her nadir.

Breakdown is a novel about the rage and reckoning of a middle aged, educated woman who has lived her life in accordance with the expectations of society.]]> 218 Cathy Sweeney 1474618510 Sarah 0 to-read, fiction 3.67 2023 Breakdown
author: Cathy Sweeney
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle]]> 198139871
Michael Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an insatiable curiosity about masculinity--a concept in which many men are currently struggling to find their place. In our current moment, where "manfluencers" on TikTok tease their audiences with their latest videos, where right-wing men espouse the importance of being "alpha," as toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are being rightfully criticized, the nature of masculinity has become murkier than ever.

In excavating this complex topic, Brodeur uses the male body as his its role in cultures from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to Walt Whitman's essays on manly health, from the rise of Muscular Christianity in 19th-century America to the swollen superheroes and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of Brodeur's childhood. Interweaving history, cultural criticism, memoir, and reportage, laced with an irrepressible wit, Brodeur takes us into the unique culture centered around men's bodies, probing its limitations and the promise how men can love themselves while rejecting the aggression, objectification, and misogyny that have for so long accompanied the quest to become swole.]]> 256 Michael Andor Brodeur 0807059366 Sarah 0 3.83 Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle
author: Michael Andor Brodeur
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism]]> 339859
Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance―from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses―is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of material goods and happiness are available to all.

Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.]]> 332 Eva Illouz 0520205715 Sarah 0 4.33 1997 Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
author: Eva Illouz
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster]]> 7852
Earthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Drought. Tornadoes. Snakes in the sea, mountain lions, and a plague of bees. In this controversial tour de force of scholarship, unsparing vision, and inspired writing, Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, revisits Los Angeles as a Book of the Apocalypse theme park. By brilliantly juxtaposing L.A.'s fragile natural ecology with its disastrous environmental and social history, he compellingly shows a city deliberately put in harm's way by land developers, builders, and politicians, even as the incalculable toll of inevitable future catas-trophe continues to accumulate.

Counterpointing L.A.'s central role in America's fantasy life--the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909--with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility.ĚýĚýDrawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease at the millennial end of "the American century."ĚýĚýWith savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.

"Dizzying. . . . In Mr. Davis's account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now."--The New York Times]]> 496 Mike Davis 0375706070 Sarah 5 grief, grief-unread 4.07 1998 Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
author: Mike Davis
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: grief, grief-unread
review:

]]> The Radicality of Love 26515459
Although all important political and social changes of the 20th century included heated debates on the role of love, it seems that in the 21st century of new technologies of the self (Grindr, Tinder, online dating, etc.) we are faced with a hyperinflation of sex, not love. By going back to the sexual revolution of the October Revolution and its subsequent repression, to Che's dilemma between love and revolutionary commitment and to the period of ?68 (from communes to terrorism) and its commodification in late capitalism, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat gives a possible answer to the question of why it is that the most radical revolutionaries like Lenin or Che were scared of the radicality of love. What is so radical about a seemingly conservative notion of love and why is it anything but conservative?

This short book is a modest contribution to the current upheavals around the world - from Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong, from Athens to Sarajevo - in which the question of love is curiously, surprisingly, absent.]]> 120 Srećko Horvat 0745691188 Sarah 0 3.51 2015 The Radicality of Love
author: Srećko Horvat
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
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]]> A Man 82895
The book is a pseudo-biography about Alexandros Panagoulis written in the form of a novel. Fallaci had an intense romantic relationship with Panagoulis. She uses the novel to put forth her view that Panagoulis was assassinated by a vast conspiracy, a view widely shared by many Greeks.]]> 463 Oriana Fallaci 0671252410 Sarah 0 4.40 1979 A Man
author: Oriana Fallaci
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Get on the Job and Organize: The Making of a New Labor Movement]]> 203166779 The leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements shares stories from the front lines to help workers organize their own workplace.Only in their early twenties, Jaz Brisack is one of the exciting new faces of the American Labor Movement. Already instrumental in successful union efforts at Nissan, Panera, Starbucks and now tech giant, Tesla, Brisack, a self-professed "labor history nerd" from a very young age, is deeply committed to the path she has chosen.ĚýGet on the Job and Organize is a compelling, character-driven narrative of the Starbucks and Tesla unionization efforts, telling the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in an era of political and social unrest. Brisack argues that while workers often organize when their place of work is toxic, it's equally important to organize when you love your job. Here, Brisack puts everything into the context of America's long tradition of labor organizing and shows readers how they too can organize their workplace, from how to educate yourself and your colleagues, to what backlash can be expected and how to fight it, to what victory looks like even if the union doesn’t necessarily “win.”ĚýĚýĚýRichly detailed with never-before reported scenes with high-profile characters like Howard Schultz, Elon Musk, and the terrifying union-busting lawyers they hired, Get on the Job and Organize will share the long American tradition of labor and organizing and how it continues today.]]> 304 Jaz Brisack 1662602286 Sarah 0 5.00 Get on the Job and Organize: The Making of a New Labor Movement
author: Jaz Brisack
name: Sarah
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
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]]> The Carrying: Poems 43357301 Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.â€� And still LimĂłn shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,â€� she writes. “I’ll take it all.â€� InĚý Bright Dead Things , LimĂłn showed us a heart “giant with power, heavy with blood”—“the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.â€� In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even asĚý The Carrying Ěýcontinues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.]]> 120 Ada Limon 1571315136 Sarah 0 4.47 2018 The Carrying: Poems
author: Ada Limon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist]]> 51652 518 Alexander Berkman 094032234X Sarah 0 4.01 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
author: Alexander Berkman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1912
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves:
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]]> My Men 61032475
My Men is a harrowing read about an enigmatic historical figure: Brynhilde Belle Gunness, a Norwegian servant girl turned serial killer after emigrating to America in the wake of a hopeless love affair at home. She thought she was following her sister to a better life, but what she found in America was a society ruled by the same rigid moral codes that oppressed her at home. Consumed by desire, and thirsty for the love and recognition she never received during her impoverished formative years, Belle seeks revenge on the world that broke her. As Belle racks up a body count of at least 14 men, she grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and—perversely—compelling.

Kielland writes urgently and thoughtfully about a broken person, one who yearns for liberation from the trappings of her class, gender, and traumatic past. My Men is a powerful and intense read, where the turn to violence is barely noticeable, but when it happens, there is no coming back.]]> 200 Victoria Kielland 166260193X Sarah 0 to-read, fiction 2.96 2021 My Men
author: Victoria Kielland
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir]]> 214175247 An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse townsâ€�; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journeyĚýto become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans.ĚýInĚýThe Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,ĚýCaseĚýbrings her trademarkĚýcandor andĚýprecisionĚýto a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisibleĚýgirl “raised by two dogs and a space heaterâ€� in rural Washington state toĚýher improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, CaseĚýshows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel theĚýmonotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love YouĚýis a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.


Ěý]]> 271 Neko Case 1538710501 Sarah 5 No, YOU'RE crying 4.03 2025 The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir
author: Neko Case
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves:
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No, YOU'RE crying
]]> <![CDATA[Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family]]> 22047086 265 June Carbone 0199382980 Sarah 0 3.78 2014 Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family
author: June Carbone
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
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]]> <![CDATA[American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus]]> 35167684

Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and honest, American Hookup explains where we are and how we got here, asking, “Where do we go from here?”]]> 304 Lisa Wade 0393355535 Sarah 0 3.99 2017 American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus
author: Lisa Wade
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States]]> 28588179
Rebel Crossings relates the interweaving lives of four women and two men as they journey from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from Britain to America, and from Old World conventions toward New World utopias. Radicalised by the rise of socialism, Helena Born, Miriam Daniell, Gertrude Dix, Robert Nicol and William Bailie cross the Atlantic dreaming of liberty and equality. The hope for a new age is captured in the name Miriam and Robert give their love child, born shortly after their Sunrise. A young Bostonian, Helen Tufts learns of Miriam’s defiant spirit through her close friendship with Helena; the love she feels for Helena and later for William fundamentally alters her life.

All six are part of a wider historical search for self-fulfillment and an alternative to a cruelly competitive capitalism. In articles, poems and allegories Helena, Helen and Miriam resist the cultural constraints women face, while female characters in Gertrude’s novels struggle to combine personal happiness with radical social commitment. William campaigns against class inequality as a socialist and an anarchist while longing to read and study. Robert, the former union militant, becomes preoccupied with personal growth and mystical enlightenment in the wilds of California.

Rebel Crossings offers fascinating perspectives on the historical interaction of feminism, socialism, and anarchism and on the incipient consciousness of a new sense of self, so vital for women seeking emancipation. These six lives bring fresh slants on political and cultural movements and upon influential individuals like Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Patrick Geddes and Benjamin Tucker. It is a work of significant originality by one of our leading feminist historians and speaks to the dilemmas of our own time.]]> 512 Sheila Rowbotham 1784785881 Sarah 0 to-read-kindle, to-read 4.00 2016 Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States
author: Sheila Rowbotham
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read-kindle, to-read
review:

]]> Bandits 43093
In his celebrated study of these fascinating figures, Eric Hobsbawm, "one of the few genuinely great historians of our century" ( The New Republic ), spans four hundred years and four continents, setting these historical figures against the ballads, legends, and films they have inspired. The result is "a dazzling historical squib, fizzling with ideas and strange stories" ( The Guardian ).

For this new edition Hobsbawm has substantially extended and revised his original text. It appears at a time when the disintegration of state power is once again introducing fertile conditions for banditry to flourish in many parts of the world.]]> 226 Eric J. Hobsbawm 1565846192 Sarah 0 3.85 1969 Bandits
author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves:
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]]> Our Share of Night 180636041
...one of the best novels of the 21st century - Paul Tremblay

...a magnificent accomplishment and a genuine work of power. - Alan Moore

His father could find what was lost. His father knew when someone was going to die. His father had talked to him about the dead who rode in on the wind. The dead travel fast.

Gaspar is six years old when the Order first come for him.

For years, they have exploited his father's ability to commune with the dead and the demonic, presiding over macabre rituals where the unwanted and the disappeared are tortured and executed, sacrificed to the Darkness. Now they want a successor.

Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar break free?

Spanning the brutal decades of Argentina's military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed inheritances, and the sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny.A novel so disquieting, so unsettling I could neither put it down, nor read it late at night. Enriquez's short stories had already made me a fan for life - her novel is going to haunt me for the rest of my life -- Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog and Get in Trouble, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Very dark, very powerful, very compelling... An extraordinary thing -- John Lanchester]]> 724 Mariana EnrĂ­quez 1783788224 Sarah 5 4.05 2019 Our Share of Night
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Digital Barricades)]]> 59362016
We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organizing and mapping the future. What we don't seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.

Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire - re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible.

From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. This book considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.]]> 160 Alfie Bown 0745344887 Sarah 0 3.61 Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Digital Barricades)
author: Alfie Bown
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: end-of-heterosexuality, to-read
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]]> The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Sarah 0 to-read, fiction 3.62 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> Metal from Heaven 205762592 “WHEN MY VIOLENCE SUBSIDES, WE WILL HAVE NOTHING, AND BE CHAMPIONS.�

Ichorite is progress. More durable and malleable than steel, ichorite is the lifeblood of a dawning industrial revolution. Yann I. Chauncey owns the sole means of manufacturing this valuable metal, but his workers are on strike. They demand Chauncey research the hallucinatory illness befalling them. Marney Honeycutt, a lustertouched child worker, stands proud at the picket line with her best friend and family. That’s when Chauncey sends in the guns.

Only Marney survives the massacre.
She vows bloody vengeance.

A decade later, Marney is the nation’s most notorious highwayman, and Chauncey’s daughter seeks an opportune marriage. Marney’s rage and the ghosts of her past will drive her to masquerade as an aristocrat, outmaneuver powerful suitors, and win the heart of his daughter, so Marney can finally corner Chauncey and satisfy her need for revenge. But war ferments in the north, and deeper grudges are surfacing. . .]]> 429 August Clarke 1645660982 Sarah 5 3.88 2024 Metal from Heaven
author: August Clarke
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> The Totality for Kids 765285 The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective� and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.� The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.� The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.]]> 88 Joshua Clover 0520246004 Sarah 5 poetry 4.02 2006 The Totality for Kids
author: Joshua Clover
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Female Masculinity 75407
Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. He considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. He also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"---lesbians who pass as men---and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.

Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.]]> 329 J. Jack Halberstam 0822322439 Sarah 0 4.00 1998 Female Masculinity
author: J. Jack Halberstam
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read, end-of-heterosexuality
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)]]> 31373240
Niall and MĂłr escaped their homeland for a new start, and lost themselves in what they found.

Declan has grown up as the responsible son, the responsible brother--only to find there is no way for him to keep his family safe.

Ronan has always lived on the edge between dreams and waking... but now that edge is gone, and he is falling.

Matthew has been the happy child, the brightest beam. But rebellion beckons, because it all feels like an illusion now.

This world was not made for such a family--a family with the power to make a world and break it. If they cannot save each other or themselves, we are all doomed.]]> 336 Maggie Stiefvater 1338188410 Sarah 0 4.28 2022 Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy, #2)]]> 31373233
Ronan Lynch isn't planning to wait and find out. Backed by his mentor, Bryde, he is ready to do what needs to be done to save the dreamers and the dreamed . . . even if it takes him far from his family and the boy he loves.

Jordan Hennessy knows she will not survive if the dreaming fails. So she plunges into a dark underworld in order to find an object that may sustain her.

Carmen Farooq-Lane is afraid of the dreamers -- which is why she's agreed to hunt them down. The closer she gets, though, the more complicated her feelings become. Will the dreamers destroy the world . . . or will the world be destroyed trying to eliminate the dreamers?

In the remarkable second book of The Dreamer Trilogy, Maggie Stiefvater pushes her characters to their limits -- and shows what happens when they start to break.]]> 340 Maggie Stiefvater 1338188364 Sarah 0 4.13 2021 Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy, #2)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom]]> 208580597 The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask, How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before the resulting essay, “Sick Woman Theory,� became a seminal work on disability. In reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.]]> 384 Johanna Hedva 163893116X Sarah 0 to-read 3.80 How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy, #1)]]> 31373184 The dreamers walk among us . . . and so do the dreamed. Those who dream cannot stop dreaming � they can only try to control it. Those who are dreamed cannot have their own lives � they will sleep forever if their dreamers die.

And then there are those who are drawn to the dreamers. To use them. To trap them. To kill them before their dreams destroy us all.

Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams and into his compromised reality.

Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it.

Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer . . . and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person. And she has seen the damage that dreamers can do. But that is nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed. . . .]]> 472 Maggie Stiefvater 1338188321 Sarah 0 4.24 2019 Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy, #1)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ponies At The Edge Of The World: On nature, belonging and finding home]]> 62897703 'Uplifting and moving' BBC RADIO 2

'A meditation on connection between humans and animals, and the homes we make in wild places. I was completely immersed' Katherine May

Catherine Munro transforms her life when she moves to Shetland to study the hardy ponies who call this archipelago home. Over the course of her first year, she is welcomed into the rhythms and routines that characterise life at the edge of the world.

When faced with personal loss, Catherine finds comfort and connection in the shared lives of the people, animals and wild landscapes of Shetland. The Ponies at the Edge of the World is a heartfelt love letter to the beauty and resilience of these magical ponies and their native land. This is a stunning book on community, hope and finding home.]]> 288 Catherine Munro 1846047277 Sarah 0 4.22 Ponies At The Edge Of The World: On nature, belonging and finding home
author: Catherine Munro
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> Good Girl 63248286
Lucy tries so hard to be good. She was always a good student, tries to be a good friend, a good citizen, a good feminist, and now she wants a lover who will give her a good beating, preferably after tying her up.

Dating swings from the sublime to the humiliating, but then Lucy hooks up with someone who challenges her to pursue the writing career she has been letting idle. When she discovers a teen magazine from the 1970s, it sparks her imagination and her life finally seems to come into focus; but as she learns more about how women were treated behind the scenes, she has to decide what to do. How to be true to herself, as chaotic as she believes herself to be; how to be good to those around her; how to survive as a young woman in the still messy media culture of 2015.

Surprising, sexy, and hilarious, Good Girl is a thoughtful and endearing portrait of a young woman unsure of what she’s supposed to want from a world where the rules keep changing.]]> 304 Anna Fitzpatrick 1770417532 Sarah 0 to-read, fiction 3.15 2023 Good Girl
author: Anna Fitzpatrick
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Own Devices: Essays From the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love]]> 38526745
Dessa defies category--she is an academic with an international rap career; a lyrical writer fascinated by behavioral science; and a funny, charismatic performer dogged by blue moods and a perseverant case of heartache. In "The Fool That Bets Against Me," Dessa wonders if the romantic anguish that's helped her write so many sad songs might be an insurable professional asset. To find out, she applies to Geico for coverage. "A Ringing in the Ears" tells the story of her father building an airplane in their backyard garage--a task that took him almost seven years. The essay titled "Congratulations" reflects on recording a song for The Hamilton Mixtape in a Minneapolis basement, straining for a high note and hoping for a break. The last piece in the collection, "Call off Your Ghost," relays the fascinating project Dessa undertook with a team of neuroscientists that employed fMRI technology and neurofeedback to try to clinically excise her romantic feelings for an old flame.

Her onstage and backstage stories are offset by her varied fascinations--she studies sign language, algebra, neuroanatomy--and this collection is a prism of her intellectual life. Her writing is infused with fascinating bits of science and sociology, philosophical insights, and an abiding tenderness for the people she tours with and the people she leaves behind to do it.

Dessa's music has been praised as "forceful and whip-smart" (NPR) with a sound "like no one else" (The Los Angeles Times); and My Own Devices is as uncompromising and brilliant. Dessa finds unconventional approaches to all of her subjects--braiding her lived experience with academic research and a poet's tone and timing. In the vein of thinkers who defy categorization, we get the debut of a deft, likable, and unusual voice.]]> 288 Dessa 1524742295 Sarah 0 4.47 2018 My Own Devices: Essays From the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
author: Dessa
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
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]]> Opal (The Raven Cycle, #4.5) 38464776 45 Maggie Stiefvater 1338306642 Sarah 0 4.11 2018 Opal (The Raven Cycle, #4.5)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)]]> 17378527
All her life, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love's death. She doesn't believe in true love and never thought this would be a problem, but as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she's not so sure anymore.]]> 439 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424984 Sarah 0 4.26 2016 The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)]]> 17378508
Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things, though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.
Mothers can disappear.
Visions can mislead.
Certainties can unravel.]]> 391 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424968 Sarah 0 4.26 2014 Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)]]> 17347389 439 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424941 Sarah 0 4.22 2013 The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1)]]> 17675462 “There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,� Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.�

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.]]> 409 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424925 Sarah 0 4.05 2012 The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
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]]> Don't Call Us Dead 33375618 Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.]]> 88 Danez Smith 1555977855 Sarah 0 4.47 2017 Don't Call Us Dead
author: Danez Smith
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19]]> 176443740
AIDS, cholera, the Spanish flu—epidemics become catastrophic not only by chance, but by human design. With clear-eyed research and accessible prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to bloom in times of good health. These self-defeating practices have time and again undermined public health efforts, and ultimately furthered damage to the already marginalized and vulnerable communities they target.

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humankind’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel the shocking truths about the history of race, class, and gender-based discrimination in the face of disease. From Haitians targeted and ostracized as the alleged source of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, to the creation of concentration camps and depraved medical experimentations in the face of sleeping sickness in western Africa, and to marginalized communities overlooked and scapegoated while the wealthy sheltered from COVID-19 in relative safety, Bonhomme effortlessly shows us the oppressive practices that shape our history and our present. Much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call to action for change.]]> 320 Edna Bonhomme 1982197838 Sarah 0 2.89 A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19
author: Edna Bonhomme
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.89
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)]]> 55858638 New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate.

The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out. Not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way. But it's all we dream about, the hideously slim chance we'll survive to make it out the gates and improbably find ourselves with a life ahead of us, a life outside the Scholomance halls.

And now the impossible dream has come true. I'm out, we're all out--and I didn't even have to turn into a monstrous dark witch to make it happen. So much for my great-grandmother's prophecy of doom and destruction. I didn't kill enclavers, I saved them. Me, and Orion, and our allies. Our graduation plan worked to perfection: we saved everyone and made the world safe for all wizards and brought peace and harmony to all the enclaves of the world.

Ha, only joking! Actually it's gone all wrong. Someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in my stead, and probably everyone we saved is about to get killed in the brewing enclave war on the horizon. And the first thing I've got to do now, having miraculously got out of the Scholomance, is turn straight around and find a way back in.]]> 407 Naomi Novik 0593158369 Sarah 0 4.08 2022 The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)]]> 55559887 A budding dark sorceress determined not to use her formidable powers uncovers yet more secrets about the workings of her world in the stunning sequel to A Deadly Education, the start of Naomi Novik’s groundbreaking crossover series.

At the Scholomance, El, Orion, and the other students are faced with their final year—and the looming specter of graduation, a deadly ritual that leaves few students alive in its wake. El is determined that her chosen group will survive, but it is a prospect that is looking harder by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules . . .]]> 388 Naomi Novik 0593128869 Sarah 0 4.20 2021 The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist]]> 214151728 With unprecedented access and unsparing analysis, this is the definitive investigation into Spotify, weaving interviews with incisive cultural criticism, and illuminating how streaming has reshaped music for listeners and artists alike.

Flush with testimony from over a hundred industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us into the inner workings of the highly consolidated modern music business and how it has become personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.

With an expert’s eye, music journalist Liz Pelly reveals how Spotify’s two-sided marketplace—the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all—has changed music media forever. She also explores how musicians and listeners are coming together to fight this era of musical individualism and advocate for artists� futures.

Amazon Unbound and Weapons of Math Destruction for the music industry, Mood Machine is a timely and unputdownable exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music.]]> 288 Liz Pelly 1668083507 Sarah 0 3.90 2025 Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
author: Liz Pelly
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Igniting Darkness (Courting Darkness Duology, #2)]]> 30622326 From New York Times best-selling author Robin LaFevers comes the follow up to “sharp and breathless� (Kirkus Reviews) historical fantasy Courting Darkness. Set in the world of the beloved His Fair Assassin series, this is perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Game of Thrones.

When you count Death as a friend, who can stand as your enemy?

Sybella, novitiate of the convent of Saint Mortain and Death’s vengeance on earth, is still reeling from her God’s own passing, and along with him a guiding hand in her bloody work. But with her sisters on the run from their evil brother and under the watchful eye of her one true friend (and love) at court, the soldier known as Beast, Sybella stands alone as the Duchess of Brittany’s protector.

After months of seeking her out, Sybella has finally made contact with a fellow novitiate of the convent, Genevieve, a mole in the French court. But when Genevieve mistakenly draws the attention of the French king to the convent of Saint Mortain and its deadly arts, she may do her sisters (and herself) more harm than good. Sybella, having already drawn the ire of the French regent, may not be able to depend on her sister and ally as much as she hoped. Still, Death always finds a way, even if it’s not what one expects.

No one can be trusted and the wolves are always waiting in this thrilling conclusion to the Courting Darkness duology, set in the world of Robin’s beloved His Fair Assassins trilogy.]]> 496 Robin LaFevers 0358335809 Sarah 0 4.13 2020 Igniting Darkness (Courting Darkness Duology, #2)
author: Robin LaFevers
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/27
date added: 2024/10/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism]]> 21950558 A collection of essays that “do an incredible job of balancing the wonders and horrors of the force that is Wal-Martâ€� (Booklist, starred review). Ěý Edited by one of the nation’s preeminent labor historians, this book marks an ambitious effort to dissect the full extent of Wal-Mart’s business operations, its social effects, and its role in the United States and world economy. Wal-Mart is based on a spring 2004 conference of leading historians, business analysts, sociologists, and labor leaders that immediately attracted the attention of the national media, drawing profiles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books. Their contributions are adapted here for a general audience. Ěý At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad declared itself “the standard of the world.â€� In more recent years, IBM and then Microsoft seemed the template for a new, global information economy. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wal-Mart had overtaken all rivals as the world-transforming economic institution of our time. Ěý Presented in an accessible format and extensively illustrated with charts and graphs, Wal-Mart examines such topics as the giant retailer’s managerial culture, revolutionary use of technological innovation, and controversial pay and promotional practices to provide the most complete guide yet available to one of America’s largest companies. Ěý “Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here [are] examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture.â€� —The New York Times Ěý “Stimulating perspectives on the world’s largest corporation.â€� —Publishers Weekly]]> 522 Nelson Lichtenstein 1595587462 Sarah 0 4.12 2006 Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
author: Nelson Lichtenstein
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read, necessary-trouble-research, labor-research
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The King's Guard (Fire and Thorns, #0.7)]]> 16148645
At fifteen years old, Hector is the youngest squire in the most elite military force in the country. And his first day is disastrous. Everyone assumes the only reason he was recruited is his close personal association with King Alejandro, not because he's really earned it.

But Alejandro needs Hector for a secret mission, one that gives him the chance to prove to everyone—including himself—that he is worthy to be a Royal Guard. Hector must break into the ancient Fortress of Wind to retrieve something so important that the kingdom's future depends on it. What Hector finds in the fortress will stretch his bond of friendship with his king near to breaking. And it will prepare him to become the fearsome warrior and lord commander Elisa will never let go.

A riveting prequel to Rae Carson's epic and acclaimed Fire and Thorns series.]]> 84 Rae Carson 0062273043 Sarah 0 4.09 2013 The King's Guard (Fire and Thorns, #0.7)
author: Rae Carson
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2017/08/20
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
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]]> Trouble the Saints 52383433 The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in this timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City at the dawn of WWII.

Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens.

But the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she loves most.

Can one woman ever sacrifice enough to save an entire community?

Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling chronicle of interracial tension, and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.]]> 320 Alaya Dawn Johnson 125017533X Sarah 0 3.50 2020 Trouble the Saints
author: Alaya Dawn Johnson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2020/08/23
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)]]> 50548197
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) � until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.

There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate� or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.

El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.]]> 320 Naomi Novik 0593128486 Sarah 0 3.93 2020 A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s]]> 49046488 South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.

In The Southern Key, Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and
steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is
today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the
US.

A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over
the course of the last century.
]]> 432 Michael Goldfield 0190079320 Sarah 5 labor-research 4.33 2020 The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s
author: Michael Goldfield
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/05
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: labor-research
review:

]]> The Skin and Its Girl 59070295 A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis� centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s every known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the U.S. But as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and even wield the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.]]> 352 Sarah Cypher 0593499549 Sarah 0 3.76 2023 The Skin and Its Girl
author: Sarah Cypher
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.]]> 211411309 For readers of Naomi Klein and Nicole Perlroth, A myth-dissolving exposé of what “artificial intelligence� really means, and a resounding argument for an equitable future of A.I.

Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible. This book presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network that maintains this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of A.I.

Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, Feeding the Machine describes the lives of the workers deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. It gives voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, from accomplished writers and artists to the armies of data annotators, content moderators and warehouse workers, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized, and colonial exploitation.

A.I. is an extraction machine that feeds off humanity's collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms. This book is a call to arms that details what we need to do to fight for a more just digital future.]]> 272 James Muldoon 163973497X Sarah 5 4.12 2024 Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.
author: James Muldoon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> We Ride Upon Sticks 50215350 Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts (which in 1692 was Salem Village, site of the origins of the Salem Witch Trials), the story follows the Danvers High field hockey team as they discover that the dark impulses of their Salem forebears may be the key to a winning season.

The 1989 Danvers Falcons are on an unaccountable winning streak. Quan Barry weaves together the individual and collective journeys of this enchanted team as they storm their way to the state championship. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza, whose bleached blond "Claw" sees and knows all, the DHS Falcons prove to be as wily and original as their North of Boston ancestors, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport.]]> 367 Quan Barry 1524748099 Sarah 0 3.78 2020 We Ride Upon Sticks
author: Quan Barry
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Luminaries (The Luminaries, #1)]]> 60188249
Winnie Wednesday wants nothing more than to join the Luminaries, the ancient order that protects Winnie's town—and the rest of humanity—from the monsters and nightmares that rise in the forest of Hemlock Falls every night.

Ever since her father was exposed as a witch and a traitor, Winnie and her family have been shunned. But on her sixteenth birthday, she can take the deadly Luminary hunter trials and prove herself true and loyal—and restore her family's good name. Or die trying.

But in order to survive, Winnie enlists the help of the one person who can help her train: Jay Friday, resident bad boy and Winnie’s ex-best friend. While Jay might be the most promising new hunter in Hemlock Falls, he also seems to know more about the nightmares of the forest than he should. Together, he and Winnie will discover a danger lurking in the forest no one in Hemlock Falls is prepared for.

Not all monsters can be slain, and not all nightmares are confined to the dark.]]> 294 Susan Dennard 1250194040 Sarah 0 3.66 2022 The Luminaries (The Luminaries, #1)
author: Susan Dennard
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hunting Moon (The Luminaries, #2)]]> 58163757 The Hunting Moon is the highly anticipated sequel to The Luminaries by New York Time s bestselling author Susan Dennard.

Winnie Wednesday has gotten everything she thought she wanted. She passed the deadly hunter trials, her family has been welcomed back into the Luminaries, and overnight, she has become a local celebrity.

The Girl Who Jumped. The Girl Who Got Bitten.

Unfortunately, it all feels wrong. For one, nobody will believe her about the new nightmare called the Whisperer that's killing hunters each night. Everyone blames the werewolf, even though Winnie is certain the wolf is innocent.

On top of that, following her dad's convoluted clues about the Dianas, their magic, and what happened in Hemlock Falls four years ago is leaving her with more questions than answers.

Then to complicate it all, there is still only one person who can help Jay Friday, the boy with plenty of problems all his own.

As bodies and secrets pile up around town, Winnie finds herself questioning what it means to be a true Wednesday and a true Luminary—and also where her fierce-hearted loyalties might ultimately have to lie.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 272 Susan Dennard 1250194164 Sarah 0 3.94 2023 The Hunting Moon (The Luminaries, #2)
author: Susan Dennard
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System]]> 52730573 Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the 500 year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and effect of power, and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.]]> 240 Christopher Chitty 1478009586 Sarah 0 4.32 Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System
author: Christopher Chitty
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naĂŻve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TłÜ°ů˛Ô±đ»ĺ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Sarah 0 storage 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: storage
review:

]]> All This Could Be Different 61118341 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489136 Sarah 0 3.91 2022 All This Could Be Different
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Winterkeep (Graceling Realm, #4)]]> 53624358 Something is rotten in the heart of Winterkeep...

Four years after Bitterblue left off, a new land has been discovered to the east: Torla; and the closest nation to Monsea is Winterkeep. Winterkeep is a land of miracles, a democratic republic run by people who like each other, where people speak to telepathic sea creatures, adopt telepathic foxes as pets, and fly across the sky in ships attached to balloons.

But when Bitterblue’s envoys to Winterkeep drown under suspicious circumstances, she and Giddon and her half sister, Hava, set off to discover the truth–putting both Bitterblue’s life and Giddon’s heart to the test when Bitterbue is kidnapped. Giddon believes she has drowned, leaving him and Hava to solve the mystery of what’s wrong in Winterkeep.

Lovisa Cavenda is the teenage daughter of a powerful Scholar and Industrialist (the opposing governing parties) with a fire inside her that is always hungry, always just nearly about to make something happen. She is the key to everything, but only if she can figure out what’s going on before anyone else, and only if she’s willing to transcend the person she’s been all her life.]]> 528 Kristin Cashore 0803741502 Sarah 0 3.98 2021 Winterkeep (Graceling Realm, #4)
author: Kristin Cashore
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Bitterblue (Graceling Realm, #3)]]> 13188729 New York Times bestsellers Graceling and Fire

Eight years after Graceling, Bitterblue is now queen of Monsea. But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisors, who have run things since Leck died, believe in a forward-thinking Pardon all who committed terrible acts under Leck's reign, and forget anything bad ever happened. But when Bitterblue begins sneaking outside the castle--disguised and alone--to walk the streets of her own city, she starts realizing that the kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year spell of a madman, and the only way to move forward is to revisit the past.

Two thieves, who only steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with an extreme skill called a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart.]]> 437 Kristin Cashore 1101574976 Sarah 0 4.13 2012 Bitterblue (Graceling Realm, #3)
author: Kristin Cashore
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/08
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)]]> 10053149 Graceling tells the story of the vulnerable-yet-strong Katsa, a smart, beautiful teenager who lives in a world where selected people are given a Grace, a special talent that can be anything from dancing to swimming. Katsa’s is killing. As the king’s niece, she is forced to use her extreme skills as his thug. Along the way, Katsa must learn to decipher the true nature of her Grace� and how to put it to good use. A thrilling, action-packed fantasy adventure (and steamy romance!) that will resonate deeply with adolescents trying to find their way in the world. This ebook includes a sample chapter of BITTERBLUE. ]]> 481 Kristin Cashore Sarah 0 4.08 2008 Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)
author: Kristin Cashore
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/04
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:

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