Dorothea's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:39:11 -0700 60 Dorothea's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Dorothea 5 favorites 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> News of the World 25817493 Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.� Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.

]]> 209 Paulette Jiles 0062409204 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.02 2016 News of the World
author: Paulette Jiles
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Perelandra (The Space Trilogy, #2)]]> 100924 The second book in C. S. Lewis's acclaimed Space Trilogy, which also includes Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, Perelandra continues the adventures of the extraordinary Dr. Ransom. Pitted against the most destructive of human weaknesses, temptation, the great man must battle evil on a new planet — Perelandra — when it is invaded by a dark force. Will Perelandra succumb to this malevolent being, who strives to create a new world order and who must destroy an old and beautiful civilization to do so? Or will it throw off the yoke of corruption and achieve a spiritual perfection as yet unknown to man? The outcome of Dr. Ransom's mighty struggle alone will determine the fate of this peace-loving planet.

]]> 288 C.S. Lewis 0007157169 Dorothea 4 4.00 1943 Perelandra (The Space Trilogy, #2)
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
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Science fiction from a guy who loves medieval cosmology. Lewis imagines what happens when the first created woman on another planet is faced with the same temptation that Eve faced. Lewis adds in a fallen human being from Earth who has good intentions and attempts to intervene. The result is pretty deep. I liked it a lot. It’s worthy of a re-read.
]]> The Language of Remembering 221311470 Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery and as past traumas are exposed, they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are.
The Language of Remembering asks how we connect to the people we love and how we move on from the past to find meaning in the present.]]> 242 Patrick Holloway 1739188195 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.32 The Language of Remembering
author: Patrick Holloway
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.32
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]]> Small Boat 228394781 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.]]> 160 Vincent Delecroix 1913109372 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.05 Small Boat
author: Vincent Delecroix
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.05
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date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> Mother Naked 213661136 The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men.

Mother Naked is his name, and the story he’s come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome ‘walking ghost� some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier.

But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith � and do the murders � have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery � of class, religion, art, and ale � it starts to seem as though the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine.

Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls, ‘Modyr Nakett� was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.]]> 256 Glen James Brown 1913512487 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.41 Mother Naked
author: Glen James Brown
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.41
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]]> <![CDATA[Out of the Silent Planet (The Space Trilogy, #1)]]> 25350 160 C.S. Lewis 0007157150 Dorothea 5 3.93 1938 Out of the Silent Planet (The Space Trilogy, #1)
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1938
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> The Queen of Fives 212378270 A confidence scheme, when properly executed, will follow five movements in close and inviolable order.

I. The Mark II. The Intrusion. III. The Ballyhoo. IV. The Knot. V. All In.

There may be many counterstrikes along the way, for such is the nature of the game; it contains so many turns, so many endless possibilities�

1898. Quinn le Blanc, London’s most talented con woman, has five days to pull off her most ambitious plot trap a highly eligibleduke into marriage and lift a fortune from the richest family in England.

Masquerading as the season’s most enviable debutante,Quinn puts on a brilliantact that earns her entrance into the grand drawing rooms and lavish balls of high society—and propels her straight into the inner circle of her the charismatic Kendals.Among those shemust convince are the handsome bachelor heir,the rebellious younger sister, and the esteemed duchess eager to see her son married.

But the deeper she forges into their world,the more Quinn finds herself tangled in a complicated web of love, lies, and loyalty. The Kendalsall have secrets of their own, andshe may not be the only one playing a game of high deception�

]]> 384 Alex Hay 1525809857 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.49 2025 The Queen of Fives
author: Alex Hay
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> The Tolstoy Estate 51119688 Epic in scope, ambitious and astonishingly good, The Tolstoy Estate proclaims Steven Conte as one of Australia's finest writers.

From the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award, Steven Conte, comes a powerful, densely rich and deeply affecting novel of love, war and literature

'Grave, moving, engaging ... full of the flash and fire of dramatic incident, but also full of real feeling, humour and poignancy, and equipped with plenty of panache ... It deserves the widest possible readership.' The Saturday Paper

In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana - the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trubetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer's hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, becomes erratic and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel...

From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate is ambitious, accomplished and astonishingly good: an engrossing, intense and compelling exploration of the horror and brutality of conflict, and the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual limits that people reach in war time. It is also a poignant, bittersweet love story - and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Scott Prize

'Breathtaking ... an intelligent. cinematic blockbuster. celebrating the power of literature to dissolve barriers and forge connections.' The West Australian

'Reading a book that is such a complete world, evoked in such fine detail, is almost wickedly satisfying ... Elegant, intelligent, utterly engrossing and immersive ... He reminds us that travel is always possible in the imagination even when reality goes dark and that literature always leads us towards the light.' Caroline Baum

'Steven Conte has written a sweeping historical saga spanning the second world WAR and the frigid decades of PEACE that followed; an essential novel about essential things - love's triumphs and failures, the redoubtable human spirit, and the power of literary art itself. Tolstoy, of course, is at the novel's heart, and in its very soul.' Luke Slattery, author, journalist, Books Editor of Australian Financial Review

'A riveting story of war, love and literature - Conte's prose does not miss a beat.' Jane Gleeson-White, award-winning author of Classics and Double Entry]]> 416 Steven Conte 1460712579 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.83 2020 The Tolstoy Estate
author: Steven Conte
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)]]> 112077 543 Dorothy Dunnett 0679777431 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.15 1961 The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)
author: Dorothy Dunnett
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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]]> Anna Karenina in our time 921126 288 Gary Saul Morson 0300100701 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.41 2007 Anna Karenina in our time
author: Gary Saul Morson
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter]]> 62121793
Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.

Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions�: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness�? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi―the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny.

What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity―a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.]]> 512 Gary Saul Morson 0674971809 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.58 2023 Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
author: Gary Saul Morson
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> Once Upon a River 40130093
Those who dwell on the river bank apply all their ingenuity to solving the puzzle of the girl who died and lived again, yet as the days pass the mystery only deepens. The child herself is mute and unable to answer the essential questions: Who is she? Where did she come from? And to whom does she belong? But answers proliferate nonetheless.

Three families are keen to claim her. A wealthy young mother knows the girl is her kidnapped daughter, missing for two years. A farming family reeling from the discovery of their son’s secret liaison, stand ready to welcome their granddaughter. The parson’s housekeeper, humble and isolated, sees in the child the image of her younger sister. But the return of a lost child is not without complications and no matter how heartbreaking the past losses, no matter how precious the child herself, this girl cannot be everyone’s. Each family has mysteries of its own, and many secrets must be revealed before the girl’s identity can be known.

Once Upon a River is a glorious tapestry of a book that combines folklore and science, magic and myth. Suspenseful, romantic, and richly atmospheric, the beginning of this novel will sweep you away on a powerful current of storytelling, transporting you through worlds both real and imagined, to the triumphant conclusion whose depths will continue to give up their treasures long after the last page is turned.]]> 464 Diane Setterfield 0743298071 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.91 2018 Once Upon a River
author: Diane Setterfield
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Thirteenth Tale [13TH TALE] [Paperback]]]> 200329591
The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.

As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.

Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.]]> 0 Diane Setterfield Dorothea 0 to-read 4.11 2006 The Thirteenth Tale [13TH TALE] [Paperback]
author: Diane Setterfield
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> Long Bright River 43834909 Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then, one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]> 482 Liz Moore 0525540679 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.03 2020 Long Bright River
author: Liz Moore
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> Our Lady of the Nile 20263229 244 Scholastique Mukasonga 0914671030 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.79 2012 Our Lady of the Nile
author: Scholastique Mukasonga
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> The Consolation of Philosophy 31837
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 155 Boethius 0140447806 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.03 524 The Consolation of Philosophy
author: Boethius
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.03
book published: 524
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> God, Where is the Wound? 91550717 214 Siluana Vlad 1936773864 Dorothea 0 currently-reading 4.79 God, Where is the Wound?
author: Siluana Vlad
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.79
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> Small Rain 205363938 A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.]]> 306 Garth Greenwell 0374279543 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.06 2024 Small Rain
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> Eurotrash 55834180
»Also, ich musste wieder auf ein paar Tage nach Zürich. Es war ganz schrecklich. Aus Nervosität darüber hatte ich mich das gesamte verlängerte Wochenende über so unwohl gefühlt, dass ich unter starker Verstopfung litt. Dazu muss ich sagen, dass ich vor einem Vierteljahrhundert eine Geschichte geschrieben hatte, die ich aus irgendeinem Grund, der mir nun nicht mehr einfällt, ›Faserland� genannt hatte. Es endet in Zürich, sozusagen auf dem Zürichsee, relativ traumatisch.« Christian Krachts lange erwarteter neuer Roman beginnt mit einer Erinnerung: vor 25 Jahren irrte in »Faserland« ein namenloser Ich-Erzähler (war es Christian Kracht?) durch ein von allen Geistern verlassenes Deutschland, von Sylt bis über die Schweizer Grenze nach Zürich. In »Eurotrash« geht derselbe Erzähler erneut auf eine Reise � diesmal nicht nur ins Innere des eigenen Ichs, sondern in die Abgründe der eigenen Familie, deren Geschichte sich auf tragische, komische und bisweilen spektakuläre Weise immer wieder mit der Geschichte dieses Landes kreuzt. »Eurotrash« ist ein berührendes Meisterwerk von existentieller Wucht und sarkastischem Humor.]]> 209 Christian Kracht 3462050834 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.65 2021 Eurotrash
author: Christian Kracht
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Dorothea 5
At one point, a minor character in the novel gives a speech about climate change that really resonated with me. It struck me that perhaps Murray’s whole purpose in writing this novel was to give voice to that speech. And that speech seems to me to be a solution to our current political crisis though I doubt such a movement would ever gather momentum because it does not center around hating an enemy. It has to do with shedding the false version of ourselves that everyone creates to hide their vulnerability and need.

Here is a portion of that speech:

“The sad truth is that right now, at the worst possible moment, we’re being deluged in new ways to hide. So let me be clear. Togetherness is crucial, if we’re to tackle something as total as climate change. Banging your own little drum, demanding everyone look at your mask, be it a consumer status symbol or one of sexuality or race or religious belief or whatever else, that will do no good. Division will do no good. You may gain some attention for your particular subgroup, there may even be minor accommodations made. But you are moving deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest—every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end. As the poet says, We must love one another, or die. And from bitter experience I know that you can’t love when you’re wearing a mask.�

This novel has faint glimmers of hope, but the hope is mostly smothered.

Another quote I want to remember:


“He would have to fight, he would have to try to protect them, even though he knew it was impossible to win. You couldn’t protect the people you loved—that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.”]]> 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray was published in 2023 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s set in present day Ireland and follows the lives of a dysfunctional family of four who are each struggling with their own issues centered around the father’s failing business. It deals with themes of climate change, sexuality, consumerism, infidelity, and domestic violence. It is at times funny, but mostly dark.

At one point, a minor character in the novel gives a speech about climate change that really resonated with me. It struck me that perhaps Murray’s whole purpose in writing this novel was to give voice to that speech. And that speech seems to me to be a solution to our current political crisis though I doubt such a movement would ever gather momentum because it does not center around hating an enemy. It has to do with shedding the false version of ourselves that everyone creates to hide their vulnerability and need.

Here is a portion of that speech:

“The sad truth is that right now, at the worst possible moment, we’re being deluged in new ways to hide. So let me be clear. Togetherness is crucial, if we’re to tackle something as total as climate change. Banging your own little drum, demanding everyone look at your mask, be it a consumer status symbol or one of sexuality or race or religious belief or whatever else, that will do no good. Division will do no good. You may gain some attention for your particular subgroup, there may even be minor accommodations made. But you are moving deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest—every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end. As the poet says, We must love one another, or die. And from bitter experience I know that you can’t love when you’re wearing a mask.�

This novel has faint glimmers of hope, but the hope is mostly smothered.

Another quote I want to remember:


“He would have to fight, he would have to try to protect them, even though he knew it was impossible to win. You couldn’t protect the people you loved—that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.�
]]> Shy Creatures 199531966
Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen's home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

Shy Creatures is a life-affirming novel about all the different ways we can be confined, how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience, the joy of freedom and the transformative power of kindness.]]> 400 Clare Chambers 0063258226 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Shy Creatures
author: Clare Chambers
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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review:

]]> The Lion Women of Tehran 199798217 A heartfelt novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.�

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls� high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.]]> 327 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.47 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Dorothea 4 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)]]> 4921
"We agree that we are overworked, and need a rest - A week on the rolling deep? - George suggests the river -"

And with the co-operation of several hampers of food and a covered boat, the three men (not forgetting the dog) set out on a hilarious voyage of mishaps up the Thames. When not falling in the river and getting lost in Hampton Court Maze, Jerome K. Jerome finds time to express his ideas on the world around - many of which have acquired a deeper fascination since the day at the end of the 19th century when this excursion was so lightly undertaken.]]> 185 Jerome K. Jerome Dorothea 0 to-read 3.86 1889 Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)
author: Jerome K. Jerome
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1889
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Now We Shall Be Entirely Free 37805364 421 Andrew Miller 1444784692 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.81 2018 Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
author: Andrew Miller
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Dorothea 5 favorites 4.12 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Dorothea 4 favorites 3.83 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Soviet Milk 216334322
Romāns tapis, pateicoties Valsts kultūrkapitāla fonda un, jo īpaši, mecenāta Valērija Belokoņa un Baltic International Bank atbalstam.

Grāmatas mākslinieks Jānis Esītis.]]> Nora Ikstena Dorothea 0 to-read 4.00 2015 Soviet Milk
author: Nora Ikstena
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.

Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Dorothea 4 Intelligence is not a virtue. 4.19 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
Intelligence is not a virtue.
]]> <![CDATA[The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith Dorothea 3 3.96 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories]]> 2282 162 Truman Capote 067960085X Dorothea 2 3.87 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories
author: Truman Capote
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1958
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
I found this book to be forgettable.
]]> Briefly Very Beautiful 195660436
In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war. His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children; while it’s a frightening time, there is also a surprising, quiet tenderness in living on the edge of societal collapse. When things start to feel more dangerous in the city, Cass evacuates with the children to her mother-in-law’s house deep in the countryside. Initially, it’s a place of safety, but her mother-in-law’s erratic behavior and increasing grip over the children worries Cass, and so they flee again to a commune on the coast. It’s an idyllic place, but Cass comes to suspect this seemingly harmonious community has a dark underbelly.

Briefly Very Beautiful is a magnetic novel about love and resilience. Against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, it is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal. Roz Dineen’s lush prose combines with epic and precise world-building to create a society that feels at once unrecognizable but deeply, chillingly familiar. The result is a compelling portrait of what it is to parent through apocalypse.]]> 336 Roz Dineen 141976795X Dorothea 0 to-read 3.70 2024 Briefly Very Beautiful
author: Roz Dineen
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Secret to Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime]]> 41223596
It’s 2 a.m.—do you know who your child is online with?

According to author Scott Augenbaum, between 80 to 90 percent of students say they do whatever they want on their smartphones—and their parents don’t have a clue. Is that you? What about your online banking passwords, are they safe? Has your email account or bank/debit card ever been compromised? In 2018, there were data breaches at several major companies—If those companies have your credit or debit information, that affects you .

There are bad people in the world, and they are on the internet. They want to hurt you. They are based all over the world, so they’re hard at “work� when even you’re sleeping. They use automated programs to probe for weaknesses in your internet security programs. And they never stop.

Cybercrime is on the increase internationally, and it’s up to you to protect yourself. But how?

The Secret to Cybersecurity is the simple and straightforward plan to keep you, your family, and your business safe. Written by Scott Augenbaum, a 29-year veteran of the FBI who specialized in cybercrimes, it uses real-life examples to educate and inform readers, explaining who/why/how so you’ll have a specific takeaway to put into action for your family. Learn about the scams, methods, and ways that cyber criminals operate—and learn how to avoid being the next cyber victim.]]> 192 Scott Augenbaum 1948677083 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.20 The Secret to Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime
author: Scott Augenbaum
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.


As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.


Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Dorothea 3 4.11 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> The Future 123163147 The bestselling, award-winning author ofThe Power deliversa dazzling tour de forcewherea handful of friendsplota daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.]]> 432 Naomi Alderman 166802568X Dorothea 0 to-read 3.82 2023 The Future
author: Naomi Alderman
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hours 11899 The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that became a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.]]> 230 Michael Cunningham 0312305060 Dorothea 0 currently-reading, dnf 3.95 1998 The Hours
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: currently-reading, dnf
review:

]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Dorothea 3
The Shipping News is set in Newfoundland in the early 90s. Man, that a harrowing landscape up there with the winter storms, and the sea. The prose was so different and rough, hard to get into the rhythm of it, so very different from O’Farrell’s prose. It’s not right to compare the two.

I feel like The Shipping News is a rare type of book these days, one where the reader roots for the male protagonist who is treated terribly by his wife. ]]> 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves:
review:
This is more of a 3.75 star read for me. I read it right after reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and that is a tough act to follow!

The Shipping News is set in Newfoundland in the early 90s. Man, that a harrowing landscape up there with the winter storms, and the sea. The prose was so different and rough, hard to get into the rhythm of it, so very different from O’Farrell’s prose. It’s not right to compare the two.

I feel like The Shipping News is a rare type of book these days, one where the reader roots for the male protagonist who is treated terribly by his wife.
]]> <![CDATA[Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1)]]> 15196
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.]]> 159 Art Spiegelman 0394541553 Dorothea 5 favorites
In a way, I’m actually glad that a Tennessee county school board banned this book because it will cause more people to read it. I’ve been meaning to read this book for three decades, and the recent controversy surrounding this book is responsible for me finally plucking it off the shelf and reading it.

Any teacher who uses this book as a tool should address Spiegelman’s representation of Poles as pigs, which according to the Norton anthology of American literature seventh edition was a “a calculated insult� leveled against Poles. This representation may make some people of Polish heritage feel that Poland was responsible for the holocaust or at least that many Poles collaborated in it. This isn’t the only book about the holocaust and it shouldn’t be the only book about the holocaust. It’s a well done and very important book uniquely able to teach students about history.]]> 4.39 1986 Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1)
author: Art Spiegelman
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/08
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:
I am shocked that this book was banned by a Tennessee county school board. A graphic novel that is essentially a historical memoir about the author’s father who survived the Holocaust is a great tool for teaching students from middle school and up about the holocaust. My understanding is that the school board objected to one small artistic depiction of a dead body where a woman’s breasts are partially shown and the use of the word “damn.�

In a way, I’m actually glad that a Tennessee county school board banned this book because it will cause more people to read it. I’ve been meaning to read this book for three decades, and the recent controversy surrounding this book is responsible for me finally plucking it off the shelf and reading it.

Any teacher who uses this book as a tool should address Spiegelman’s representation of Poles as pigs, which according to the Norton anthology of American literature seventh edition was a “a calculated insult� leveled against Poles. This representation may make some people of Polish heritage feel that Poland was responsible for the holocaust or at least that many Poles collaborated in it. This isn’t the only book about the holocaust and it shouldn’t be the only book about the holocaust. It’s a well done and very important book uniquely able to teach students about history.
]]> Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Dorothea 5 favorites 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/07
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)]]> 1736739
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life � sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.]]> 270 Elizabeth Strout Dorothea 4 favorites 3.85 2008 Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/05
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:
This book is a series of short stories that form a novel. The stories are simple, intriguing and well-written. The middle third of the book seemed to drag a bit my favorite story was the one titled “Security� where Olive goes to visit her son Christopher and his new wife in Brooklyn. Overall this book was sobering, causing me to think about my mom‘s widowhood, my mother-in-law‘s widowhood, and what my own widowhood will be like. I don’t like thinking about losing my husband. And this book made me do that. This book was published in 2008. It’s possible that both of my parents read this book before their passings. I wonder if they read this book and what did they think of it. I imagine their response may have been similar to mine.
]]> Angela's Ashes (Hardcover) 125606118 0 Frank McCourt (Author) Dorothea 5 favorites
I re-read this book in 2023, reading most of it out loud to my 81 year old mother-in-law and listening to a good chunk of it on audiobook on a drive with her to and from Ashland, OR. Listening to the audiobook was stellar because it was narrated by the author who sang all of the many of the songs he referred to in the book. My first rating was four stars, the re-read is five stars.]]> 4.39 Angela's Ashes (Hardcover)
author: Frank McCourt (Author)
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:
My first reading of this book was some time in the late 90’s.

I re-read this book in 2023, reading most of it out loud to my 81 year old mother-in-law and listening to a good chunk of it on audiobook on a drive with her to and from Ashland, OR. Listening to the audiobook was stellar because it was narrated by the author who sang all of the many of the songs he referred to in the book. My first rating was four stars, the re-read is five stars.
]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Dorothea 5 favorites 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Ascetic Of Love 75414333 400 Nun Gavrilia 1950022005 Dorothea 5 favorites
“� there is much more to wonder at, to rescue and to love in the ruins of man than in the most magnificent ruins of stone. Courage, faith, patience, endurance, and, above all, hope and joy can take root and blossom in the human heart, if it is given opportunity, if it is given love.�

“Every sigh of the heart, every longing for something that is in the love of God, will certainly be answered by the Lord after a while.�

“What is the use of obeying, if you do not love? What is the use of being a lifeless robot? What is important is to love. Because love, humility, patience are synonyms. I do not obey, I love.”]]> 4.33 The Ascetic Of Love
author: Nun Gavrilia
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: favorites
review:
What a fascinating life this Greek nun lead! I love how different she was from traditional nuns who generally do not travel around the world. Before becoming a nun she decided to renounce money and say “yes� to everything, having faith that God would direct her life. She ended up in India and used her training in physiotherapy to treat those with leprosy. I love how strongly she believed that serving others with love is the best way to preach the gospel. She did not use words, only actions.

“� there is much more to wonder at, to rescue and to love in the ruins of man than in the most magnificent ruins of stone. Courage, faith, patience, endurance, and, above all, hope and joy can take root and blossom in the human heart, if it is given opportunity, if it is given love.�

“Every sigh of the heart, every longing for something that is in the love of God, will certainly be answered by the Lord after a while.�

“What is the use of obeying, if you do not love? What is the use of being a lifeless robot? What is important is to love. Because love, humility, patience are synonyms. I do not obey, I love.�
]]> <![CDATA[Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall]]> 28510777
Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own.

Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart.

In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.

A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.

Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.]]> 416 Nina Willner 0062410334 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.35 2016 Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
author: Nina Willner
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1) 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm Tóibín 1439138311 Dorothea 4 3.71 2009 Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1)
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> Jane Austen at Home 31450766
Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy.

Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world’s favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.]]> 387 Lucy Worsley 125013160X Dorothea 0 to-read 4.26 2017 Jane Austen at Home
author: Lucy Worsley
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Dorothea 5 favorites 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
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]]> Nervous Conditions 158674 204 Tsitsi Dangarembga 1580051340 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.05 1988 Nervous Conditions
author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> The Axeman's Carnival 62996820
Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,� says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.� But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds � and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them � bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest � comic, profound, poetic and true.]]> 350 Catherine Chidgey 1776920058 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.32 2022 The Axeman's Carnival
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> Pet 86546624
Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, and probing themes of racism and misogyny, Pet is an elegant and chilling psychological thriller by the bestselling author of The Wish Child, Remote Sympathy and The Axeman’s Carnival.]]> 352 Catherine Chidgey 1776920740 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.99 2023 Pet
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Girl with the Louding Voice]]> 50214741 All you have are your words.

Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education.

As the only daughter of a broke father, she is a valuable commodity. Removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man, Adunni's life amounts to this: four goats, two bags of rice, some chickens and a new TV. When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a household in the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor, Rebecca. No one but Adunni...

As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless servant, fourteen-year-old Adunni is repeatedly told that she is nothing. But Adunni won't be silenced. She is determined to find her voice - in a whisper, in song, in broken English - until she can speak for herself, for the girls like Rebecca who came before, and for all the girls who will follow.

]]> 371 Abi Daré 1524746029 Dorothea 4 favorites 4.40 2020 The Girl with the Louding Voice
author: Abi Daré
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> The Redemption of Galen Pike 23598956
Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.]]> 134 Carys Davies 1907773711 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.08 2014 The Redemption of Galen Pike
author: Carys Davies
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> This Motherless Land 199531828 READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY

From the acclaimed author of Wahala, a “vibrant� (Charmaine Wilkerson) decolonial retelling of Mansfield Park: Jane Austen meets The Vanishing Half

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends.

But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.

Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades, This Motherless Land is a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted.]]> 352 Nikki May 0063084295 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.21 2024 This Motherless Land
author: Nikki May
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right]]> 28695425 Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country � a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets � among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident � people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.

Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Russell Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream � and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Russell Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in "red" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from "liberal" government intervention abhor the very idea?]]> 242 Arlie Russell Hochschild 1620972255 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.11 2016 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> And So I Roar 201751081 A stunning, heartwrenching new novel from Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice

When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother—terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades.

Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky fourteen-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia’s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she’s finally found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. It’s always been Adunni’s dream to get an education, and she’s bursting with excitement.

Suddenly, there’s a horrible knocking at the front gate. . . .

It’s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth behind the secret her mother has hidden from her. And Adunni will learn that her “louding voice,� as she calls it, is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village, Ikati.

If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve—and shout their stories to the world.]]> 400 Abi Daré 0593186559 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.05 2024 And So I Roar
author: Abi Daré
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Great Expectations 2623
Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations, one of Dickens's most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.

This edition includes the original, discarded ending, Dickens's brief working notes, and the serial instalments and chapter divisions in different editions. It also uses the definitive Clarendon text.]]> 544 Charles Dickens 0192833596 Dorothea 4 favorites 3.78 1861 Great Expectations
author: Charles Dickens
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1861
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #2)]]> 41433634
Few mere mortals have ever embarked on such bold and heart-stirring adventures, overcome myriad monstrous perils, or outwitted scheming vengeful gods, quite as stylishly and triumphantly as Greek heroes.

In this companion to his bestselling Mythos, Stephen Fry brilliantly retells these dramatic, funny, tragic and timeless tales. Join Jason aboard the Argo as he quests for the Golden Fleece. See Atalanta - who was raised by bears - outrun any man before being tricked with golden apples. Witness wily Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx and discover how Bellerophon captures the winged horse Pegasus to help him slay the monster Chimera.

Filled with white-knuckle chases and battles, impossible puzzles and riddles, acts of base cowardice and real bravery, not to mention murders and selfless sacrifices, Heroes is the story of what we mortals are truly capable of - at our worst and our very best.

Read by the author. Running time 15 hours.]]> 415 Stephen Fry 0241380375 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.32 2018 Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #2)
author: Stephen Fry
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)]]> 35074096
This stunning book features classical artwork inspired by the myths, as well as learned notes from the author. Each adventure is infused with Fry's distinctive wit, voice, and writing style. Connoisseurs of the Greek myths will appreciate this fresh-yet-reverential interpretation, while newcomers will feel welcome. Retellings brim with humor and emotion and offer rich cultural context

Celebrating the thrills, grandeur, and unabashed fun of the Greek myths, Mythos breathes life into ancient tales—from Pandora's box to Prometheus's fire.

This gorgeous volume invites you to explore a captivating world with the brilliant storyteller Stephen Fry as your guide.]]> 416 Stephen Fry 0718188721 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.27 2017 Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)
author: Stephen Fry
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien]]> 208512484 The Mythmakers is a graphic novel biography of two literary icons—C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—following the story of their friendship and creative fellowship, and how each came to write their masterworks

Through narrative and comic panels, Hendrix chronicles Lewis and Tolkien’s near-idyllic childhoods, then moves on to both men’s horrific tour of the trenches of World War I to their first meeting at Oxford in 1929, and then the foreshadowing, action, and aftermath of World War II. He reveals the shared story of their friendship, in all its ups and downs, that gave them confidence to venture beyond academic concerns (fantasy wasn’t considered suitable for adult reading, but the domain of children), shaped major story/theme ideas, and shifted their ideas about the potential of mythology and faith.

The Mythmakers also shows the camaraderie and the importance of the social/literary circle of friends called the Inklings, and how the friendship of these two great men fell apart and came together again. Hendrix concludes describing how the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had re-enchanted the 20th century, after two World Wars. In writing aimed at scholars, adults, and young people, these two tweedy academics altered the course of storytelling and embraced the concept that fantasy writing for an adult audience was an accepted form of literature.]]> 218 John Hendrix 1419746340 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.60 2024 The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien
author: John Hendrix
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> The History of Sound 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Dorothea 0 to-read 4.37 2024 The History of Sound
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> The Blue Book of Nebo 56824553
Despite their close understanding, the relationship between mother and son changes subtly as Dylan must take on adult responsibilities. And they each have their own secrets, which emerge as, in turn, they jot down their thoughts and memories win a found notebook � the Blue Book of Nebo.]]> 120 Manon Steffan Ros 1646051017 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.15 2018 The Blue Book of Nebo
author: Manon Steffan Ros
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> The Golden State 34603596 But clarity proves elusive. Over the next ten days Daphne is anxious, she behaves a little erratically, she drinks too much. She wanders the town looking for anyone and anything to punctuate the long hours alone with the baby. Among others, she meets Cindy, a neighbor who is active in a secessionist movement, and befriends the elderly Alice, who has traveled to Altavista as she approaches the end of her life. When her relationships with these women culminate in a dangerous standoff, Daphne must reconcile her inner narrative with the reality of a deeply divided world.
Keenly observed, bristling with humor, and set against the beauty of a little-known part of California, The Golden State is about class and cultural breakdowns, and desperate attempts to bridge old and new worlds. But more than anything, it is about motherhood: its voracious worry, frequent tedium, and enthralling, wondrous love.]]> 304 Lydia Kiesling Dorothea 0 to-read 3.68 2018 The Golden State
author: Lydia Kiesling
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> Mobility 85323183 A propulsive novel about class, power, politics, and desire by the celebrated author of The Golden State.

The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age—from Azerbaijan to America—as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.

Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.]]> 352 Lydia Kiesling 1638930562 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.63 2023 Mobility
author: Lydia Kiesling
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Keanu Reeves is Not in Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud]]> 194028309 288 Becky Holmes 1789651638 Dorothea 4 3.76 2024 Keanu Reeves is Not in Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud
author: Becky Holmes
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage]]> 44780556 The bestselling author of The Willpower Instinct introduces a surprising science-based book that doesn't tell us why we should exercise but instead shows us how to fall in love with movement.

Exercise is health-enhancing and life-extending, yet many of us feel it's a chore. But, as Kelly McGonigal reveals, it doesn't have to be. Movement can and should be a source of joy.

Through her trademark blend of science and storytelling, McGonigal draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, as well as memoirs, ethnographies, and philosophers. She shows how movement is intertwined with some of the most basic human joys, including self-expression, social connection, and mastery--and why it is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

McGonigal tells the stories of people who have found fulfillment and belonging through running, walking, dancing, swimming, weightlifting, and more, with examples that span the globe, from Tanzania, where one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet live, to a dance class at Juilliard for people with Parkinson's disease, to the streets of London, where volunteers combine fitness and community service, to races in the remote wilderness, where athletes push the limits of what a human can endure. Along the way, McGonigal paints a portrait of human nature that highlights our capacity for hope, cooperation, and self-transcendence.

The result is a revolutionary narrative that goes beyond familiar arguments in favor of exercise, to illustrate why movement is integral to both our happiness and our humanity. Readers will learn what they can do in their own lives and communities to harness the power of movement to create happiness, meaning, and connection.]]> 272 Kelly McGonigal 0525534105 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.85 2019 The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage
author: Kelly McGonigal
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> The Queen of Dirt Island 61111300 From the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author Donal Ryan, a searing, jubilant story about four generations of women and fierce love

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know that--in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes--their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.

Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. Of all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn't. The Queen of Dirt Island is an uplifting celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that bind generations together.
]]> 256 Donal Ryan 0593652932 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.98 2022 The Queen of Dirt Island
author: Donal Ryan
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman]]> 240188 224 Nuala O'Faolain 0805056645 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.62 1996 Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
author: Nuala O'Faolain
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> Dusk 213854079 272 Robbie Arnott 176156353X Dorothea 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Dusk
author: Robbie Arnott
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> Drift 58603381
Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove.

Hamza is a Syrian mapmaker, incarcerated in a military base a few miles up the coast.

A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together - but other forces will soon try to tear them apart...

Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit.]]> 0 Caryl Lewis 0857527878 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.13 2022 Drift
author: Caryl Lewis
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> The Frozen River 112975658 A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546874 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.37 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/24
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]]> Human Acts 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.26 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> The Vagrants 3575636
Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.

In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; a
crippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction.

Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art.]]> 352 Yiyun Li 1400063132 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.87 2009 The Vagrants
author: Yiyun Li
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2009
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]]> The Black Album 535239 288 Hanif Kureishi 0684825406 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.48 1995 The Black Album
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> The Encyclopedia of the Dead 259655 A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead. These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kiš final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983.

Kiš is one of the great European writers of the post-war period - Guardian
Compulsively readable - Daily Telegraph

Fantasy chases reality and reality chases fantasy. Pirandello and Borges are not far away. But these names are intended as approximate references. Kiš is a new, original writer - Times Literary Supplement

Intense and exotic, his mysteries hint at unspeakable secrets that remain forever beyond the story-teller's grasp - Boyd Tonkin

Danilo Kiš was born in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1935. After an unsettled childhood during the Second World War, in which several of his family members were killed, Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade where he lived for most of his adult life. He wrote novels, short stories and poetry and went on to receive the prestigious NIN Award for his novel Pešcanik. He died in Paris in 1989.]]> 199 Danilo Kiš 081011514X Dorothea 0 to-read 4.16 1983 The Encyclopedia of the Dead
author: Danilo Kiš
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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]]> Amongst Women 304209 184 John McGahern 0571195261 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.96 1990 Amongst Women
author: John McGahern
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> Man in the Dark 3136288 Man in the Dark is Paul Auster’s brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill’s story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death.

Passionate and shocking, Man in the Dark is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

*Time Out (Chicago)]]> 180 Paul Auster 0571240763 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.64 2008 Man in the Dark
author: Paul Auster
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> Nostromo 115476 ]]> 336 Joseph Conrad 0486424529 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.81 1904 Nostromo
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1904
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Burning Angel and Other Stories]]> 63216160 'Brilliant' SUNDAY TIMES
'Compelling and unnerving' SPECTATOR

**A NEW STATESMAN Book of the Year 2023**

This first collection of stories by Lawrence Osborne perfectly showcases his talent for tension, atmosphere - and characters out of their depth

A naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career; while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing, which leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants.

Collected here for the first time, Lawrence Osborne's stories, like his novels - 'elaborate and intricately plotted dances macabres' (The Times) - feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds. With their nods to Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl, these nine long-form stories explore characters lost in the shadowed borders between the mundane, the fantastical and the violence of the natural world.]]> 333 Lawrence Osborne 1473594332 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.93 Burning Angel and Other Stories
author: Lawrence Osborne
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.93
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]]> The End of Days 20724710 The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,� each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there�.

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.]]> 239 Jenny Erpenbeck 081122192X Dorothea 0 to-read 3.79 2012 The End of Days
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right]]> 206303798 In her first book since the widely acclaimedStrangers in Their Own Land,the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the “pride paradox� that has given the right’s appeals such resonance. For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. In Stolen Pride, Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Donald Trump has turned lost pride into stolen pride and shame into blame, and that the result of his rhetorical alchemy has been to weaponize that shame and introduce a potent blend of anger and often violent rhetoric—undermining democracy and highlighting revenge.

Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where its residents faced the perfect storm. The city was coal jobs had left, crushing poverty arrived, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region more powerfully than anywhere else in the nation. Although Pikeville had been in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild’s brilliant exploration of how the town responded in 2017, when a white nationalist march came to town—a rehearsal for the deadly “unite the right� march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just four months later—takes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild—whose previous book,Strangers in Their Own Land, was heralded by theNew York Timesas one of a small handful of books to read to understand Trump and the 2016 election—focuses on a group at the center of the shifting political blue-collar men. Long conversations over six years with mayors and felons, clerks and shopkeepers, road workers and teachers, ex-coal miners, and recovering addicts form the core of the book, movingly introducing readers to real people living deep within the political storm.

Hochschild’s great gift is to decode the emotional narratives that demagogues can speak to and lay bare the pain that lies beneath the rage. And in some of the voices she listens to, Hochschild hears an alternative to the inchoate anger, as she and her subjects imagine a way we might build bridges and move forward.]]> 400 Arlie Russell Hochschild 1620976463 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.05 2024 Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes]]> 34617904 We in the west share a common narrative of world history. But our story largely omits a whole civilization whose citizens shared an entirely different narrative for a thousand years.

In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it, from the time of Mohammed to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized-had somehow hijacked destiny.

]]> 416 Tamim Ansary Dorothea 0 to-read 4.46 2009 Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
author: Tamim Ansary
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk]]> 78130090 An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want

Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl� and “Double Dare Ya� are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumul­tuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band� in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.]]> 326 Kathleen Hanna 0062825232 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.40 2024 Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
author: Kathleen Hanna
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America]]> 55643287 Poet and contributor to The Atlantic Clint Smith’s revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation named for the country from which most of its enslaved people arrived and which has since become one of the most gruesome maximum-security prisons in the world. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in understanding our country.]]> 336 Clint Smith 0316492930 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.71 2021 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
author: Clint Smith
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2021
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]]> <![CDATA[King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa]]> 40961621 King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West]]> 442 Adam Hochschild Dorothea 0 to-read 4.16 1998 King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
author: Adam Hochschild
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1998
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]]> Several People Are Typing 54468020
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from . . . wherever he says he is.

Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.

Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?

In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity…and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.]]> 256 Calvin Kasulke Dorothea 0 to-read 3.63 2021 Several People Are Typing
author: Calvin Kasulke
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories]]> 24885533
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary� (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware� (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves� (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species� (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors� (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King� (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie� (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.]]> 450 Ken Liu 1481442546 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.36 2016 The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
author: Ken Liu
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> Wave 15771862 274 Sonali Deraniyagala Dorothea 0 to-read 3.76 2013 Wave
author: Sonali Deraniyagala
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster]]> 34964868 The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse and using it to care for some of society's most in-need people.

Sandra Pankhurst founded her trauma cleaning business to help people whose emotional scars are written on their houses. From the forgotten flat of a drug addict to the infested home of a hoarder, Sandra enters properties and lives at the same time. But few of the people she looks after know anything of the complexity of Sandra's own life. Raised in an uncaring home, Sandra's miraculous gift for warmth and humour in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy mark her out as a one-off.]]> 291 Sarah Krasnostein 1250101204 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.88 2017 The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster
author: Sarah Krasnostein
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> I Am an Island 49569074
Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of rebirth and renewal. Tamsin begins the slow journey back from the brink.

Startling, raw and extremely moving, I Am An Island is a story about the incredible ability of the natural world to provide when everything else has fallen away- a stunning book about solitude, friendship, resilience and self-discovery.]]> 304 Tamsin Calidas 0857526650 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.72 2020 I Am an Island
author: Tamsin Calidas
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> <![CDATA[A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother]]> 522426
Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

“Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary―sort of Apocalypse Baby Now . . . A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.� � The New York Times Book Review

A Life’s On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself.

An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.]]> 224 Rachel Cusk 0312311303 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.95 2001 A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> Things I Have Withheld 56492752
Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Derek Walcott, Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.]]> 208 Kei Miller 1838852794 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.47 2021 Things I Have Withheld
author: Kei Miller
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Apples Fell from the Sky]]> 51551602 An unforgettable story of friendship and feuds in a remote Armenian mountain village

In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate.

As they go about their daily lives � harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying houses � the villagers sustain one another through good times and bad. But sometimes all it takes is a spark of romance to turn life on its head, and a plot to bring two of Maran's most stubbornly single residents together soon gives the village something new to gossip about...

Three Apples Fell from the Sky is an enchanting fable that brilliantly captures the idiosyncrasy of a small community. Sparkling with sumptuous imagery and warm humour, this is a vibrant tale of resilience, bravery and the miracle of everyday friendship.]]> 231 Narine Abgaryan 1786077310 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.05 2015 Three Apples Fell from the Sky
author: Narine Abgaryan
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> You Are Here 201465867
Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife's departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house.

Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.]]> 368 David Nicholls 0063394057 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.97 2024 You Are Here
author: David Nicholls
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Dorothea 0 to-read 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.85
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]]> The Hummingbird's Daughter 91289
It is 1889, and the civil war is brewing in Mexico. Sixteen year old Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream - a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from the dead with the power to heal - but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.

The Hummingbird's Daughter is a vast, hugely satisfying novel of love and loss, joy and pain. Two decades in the writing, this is the masterpiece that Luis Alberto Urrea has been building up to.]]> 499 Luis Alberto Urrea 0316154520 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.20 2005 The Hummingbird's Daughter
author: Luis Alberto Urrea
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis]]> 145624514
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.

This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.]]> 544 Jonathan Blitzer 1984880802 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.47 2024 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
author: Jonathan Blitzer
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence]]> 55723020
In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain...and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

"Brilliant... riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued."--Beth Macy, author of Dopesick


INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
“Brilliant� riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
As heard on Fresh Air]]> 304 Anna Lembke 1524746738 Dorothea 4 3.88 2021 Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
author: Anna Lembke
name: Dorothea
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs]]> 23197288 A revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.

In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.

Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder."

In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.]]> 482 Sally Mann 0316247766 Dorothea 0 to-read 4.07 2015 Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
author: Sally Mann
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2015
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> <![CDATA[How Much Land Does a Man Need?]]> 21206786 How Much Land Does A Man Need? gives a delightful insight into old Russian values]]> 66 Leo Tolstoy Dorothea 0 to-read 4.15 1886 How Much Land Does a Man Need?
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Dorothea
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1886
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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