Cathy's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:17:29 -0800 60 Cathy's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Secret Lives of Church Ladies]]> 51582376 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year� arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.]]> 217 Deesha Philyaw 1949199738 Cathy 0 currently-reading 4.16 2020 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
author: Deesha Philyaw
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Cathy 5 2024-books 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: 2024-books
review:
Bill Furlong Walks Away from Omelas/New Ross
]]> Hill William 16057212 224 Scott McClanahan 0985023554 Cathy 0 currently-reading, 2024-books 4.04 2013 Hill William
author: Scott McClanahan
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: currently-reading, 2024-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (American Lives)]]> 201301285 178 Sherrie Flick 1496238540 Cathy 0 to-read 4.39 Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (American Lives)
author: Sherrie Flick
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Not in Love (Not in Love, #1) 198716261 A forbidden, secret affair proves that all’s fair in love and science.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down.

Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through - and he's a man who gets what he wants. With one burning exception: Rue. The woman he can't stop thinking about. The woman who's off-limits to him.

Torn between loyalty and an undeniable attraction, Rue and Eli throw caution out the lab and the boardroom windows. Their affair is secret, no-strings-attached, and has a built-in deadline: the day one of their companies will prevail. But the heart is risky business - one that plays for keeps.]]> 384 Ali Hazelwood 1408728915 Cathy 0 2024-books 3.59 2024 Not in Love (Not in Love, #1)
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: 2024-books
review:

]]> God Emporer of Dune 130574758 404 Frank Herbert Cathy 0 3.76 1981 God Emporer of Dune
author: Frank Herbert
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
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]]> Slow Dance 198530925
They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha—Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed.

Now Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there—and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost.

It’s the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start.]]> 400 Rainbow Rowell 0063380196 Cathy 0 2024-books 3.63 2024 Slow Dance
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self]]> 4887 The bestselling book on childhood trauma and the enduring effects of repressed anger and pain.

Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.

Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.]]> 136 Alice Miller 0465016901 Cathy 0 2024-books 4.05 1979 The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
author: Alice Miller
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: 2024-books
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]]> The Hundred-Year House 18693644
The Hundred-Year House unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.]]> 338 Rebecca Makkai 052542668X Cathy 0 2024-books 3.44 2014 The Hundred-Year House
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: 2024-books
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]]> The Book Thief 19063 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)]]> 592 Markus Zusak Cathy 0 2024-books 4.38 2005 The Book Thief
author: Markus Zusak
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: 2024-books
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]]> Bride (Bride, #1) 181344829 A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha Werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance.

Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again...

Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was�.

Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf.]]> 410 Ali Hazelwood Cathy 0 2024-books OMG. The KNOT! 3.98 2024 Bride (Bride, #1)
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: 2024-books
review:
OMG. The KNOT!
]]> Dune Messiah (Dune #2) 44492285
Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atreides, better known--and feared--as the man christened Muad'Dib. As Emperor of the Known Universe, he possesses more power than a single man was ever meant to wield. Worshipped as a religious icon by the fanatical Fremens, Paul faces the enmity of the political houses he displaced when he assumed the throne--and a conspiracy conducted within his own sphere of influence.

And even as House Atreides begins to crumble around him from the machinations of his enemies, the true threat to Paul comes to his lover, Chani, and the unborn heir to his family's dynasty...

Includes an introduction by Brian Herbert]]> 336 Frank Herbert 0593098234 Cathy 0 2024-books 3.89 1969 Dune Messiah (Dune #2)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: 2024-books
review:

]]> Indiana, Indiana 384651
As a young man, Noah, a true innocent, fell deeply in love with Opal, a young woman with a penchant for flames. Once married, the couple move into their own house on his family’s farm. After forty-two idyllic days, Opal is overcome by her fascination with fire and institutionalized. Though Noah embarks on a journey to save her, he cannot, and must instead rely on her letters, his memories, and the strength of his family to sustain him.

Written in a masterful elegiac style that echoes Faulkner and Steinbeck, Indiana, Indiana is a compellingly beautiful and surreal Midwestern saga firmly grounded in an Indiana landscape populated by farmers, drifters, sheriffs, and ministers, and overflowing with musical saws, family bibles stuffed with flowers, and appliances rusting in the fields.]]> 204 Laird Hunt 1566891442 Cathy 0 2024-books 3.87 2003 Indiana, Indiana
author: Laird Hunt
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: 2024-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?]]> 374988 245 Henry Farrell 0881847259 Cathy 0 2024-books 3.94 1960 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
author: Henry Farrell
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/03
shelves: 2024-books
review:

]]> The Name of the Rose 119073 552 Umberto Eco 0156001314 Cathy 0 2023-books 4.13 1980 The Name of the Rose
author: Umberto Eco
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways: A Memoir]]> 123087730
As Brittany grew older, struggling through her own complicated relationships, she began to recognize that hell wasn't only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the experience of her family, caught in a cycle of violence. While untangling the spider web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a harrowing tale of self-preservation with a unique narrative style that is part memoir and part modern-day feminist coming-of-age tale. The result is a masterpiece, a marvel, and a sparkling example of a woman’s ability to withstand the most horrific experiences â€� and still thrive. Ěý Ěý]]> 304 Brittany Means Cathy 5 2023-books 4.29 2023 Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways: A Memoir
author: Brittany Means
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Check & Mate 60683957 done with chess. Every move counts nowadays. After the sport led to the destruction of her family four years earlier, Mallory's focus is on her mom, her sisters, and the dead-end job that keeps the lights on. That is, until she begrudgingly agrees to play in one last charity tournament and inadvertently wipes the board with notorious "Kingkiller" Nolan Sawyer: current world champion and reigning bad boy of chess.

Nolan's loss to an unknown rook-ie shocks everyone—especially Mallory. What's even more confusing? His desire to cross pawns again. What kind of gambit is Nolan playing? The smart move would be to walk away. Resign. Game over. But Mallory's victory opens the door to sorely needed cash prizes and, despite everything, she can't help feeling drawn to the enigmatic strategist....

As she rockets up the ranks, Mallory struggles to keep her family safely separated from the game that wrecked it in the first place. And as her love for the sport she so desperately wanted to hate begins to rekindle, Mallory quickly realizes that the games aren't only on the board, the spotlight is hotter than she imagined, and the competition can be fierce(-ly attractive. And intelligent...and infuriating...)]]> 347 Ali Hazelwood 0593619919 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.93 2023 Check & Mate
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/17
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> The Shipping News 77470
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
--back cover

Cover illustration by David Blackwood

]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0671510053 Cathy 0 3.76 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/16
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives]]> 57531095 Ěý
Burnout has become our go-to term for talking about the pressure and dissatisfaction we experience at work. But in the absence of understanding what burnout means, the discourse often does little to help workers who suffer from exhaustion and despair. Jonathan Malesic was a burned out worker who escaped by quitting his job as a tenured professor. In The End of Burnout , he dives into the history and psychology of burnout, traces the origin of the high ideals we bring to our jobs, and profiles the individuals and communities who are already resisting our cultural commitment to constant work.
Ěý
In The End of Burnout , Malesic traces his own history as someone who burned out of a tenured job to frame this rigorous investigation of how and why so many of us feel worn out, alienated, and useless in our work. Through research on the science, culture, and philosophy of burnout, Malesic explores the gap between our vocation and our jobs, and between the ideals we have for work and the reality of what we have to do. He eschews the usual prevailing wisdom in confronting burnout (“Learn to say no!� “Practice mindfulness!�) to examine how our jobs have been constructed as a symbol of our value and our total identity. Beyond looking at what drives burnout—unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values—this book spotlights groups that are addressing these failures of ethics. We can look to communities of monks, employees of a Dallas nonprofit, intense hobbyists, and artists with disabilities to see the possibilities for resisting a “total work� environment and the paths to recognizing the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike. In this critical yet deeply humane book, Malesic offers the vocabulary we need to recognize burnout, overcome burnout culture, and acknowledge the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike.]]> 288 Jonathan Malesic 0520344073 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.72 2022 The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives
author: Jonathan Malesic
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/08
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Lessons in Chemistry 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus Cathy 0 2023-books 4.23 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1)]]> 39943621
Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire and Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire and Blood is the ultimate game of thrones, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros.]]> 706 George R.R. Martin 152479628X Cathy 0 2023-books 4.03 2018 Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/26
shelves: 2023-books
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]]> Circe 35959740
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.]]> 393 Madeline Miller 0316556343 Cathy 0 2023-books 4.22 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/04
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Divided the Nation, and How to Fix It]]> 60511640 From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, the epic untold story of college—the great political and cultural fault line of American life

"This book is simply terrific." —Heather Cox Richardson, publisher of the "Letters from an American" Substack

"A must-read." —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains

Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college� crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy of clustered, educated elites. Somewhere in the winding last half-century of the United States, the quest for a college diploma devolved from being proof of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death. That quest has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat.

In After the Ivory Tower Falls, award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. That journey begins in Gambier, Ohio, home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,� there is no better entry point than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students amidst a sea of economic despair.

From there, Bunch traces the history of college in the U.S., beginning with the first technical schools, through the landmark GI Bill, and the culture wars of the 60’s and 70’s, which found their start on college campuses. We see how resentment of college-educated elites morphed into a rejection of knowledge itself—and how the explosion in student loan debt fueled major social movements like Occupy Wall Street. Bunch then takes a question we need to ask all over again—what, and who, is college even for?—and pushes it into the 21st century by proposing a new model that works for all Americans.

The sum total is a stunning work of journalism, one that lays bare the root of our political, cultural, and economic division—and charts a path forward for America.]]> Will Bunch Cathy 0 currently-reading, 2023-books 4.00 After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Divided the Nation, and How to Fix It
author: Will Bunch
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: currently-reading, 2023-books
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]]> Love, Theoretically 61326735
Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down. Because Jack Smith, the annoyingly attractive and broody older brother of her favorite client, turns out to be the cold-hearted experimental physicist who ruined her mentor’s career and undermined the reputation of theorists everywhere. And that same Jack who now sits on the hiring committee at MIT, right between Elsie and her dream job.

Elsie is prepared for an all-out war of scholarly sabotage but…those long, penetrating looks? Not having to be anything other than her true self when she’s with him? Will falling into an experimentalist’s orbit finally tempt her to put her most guarded theories on love into practice?]]> 389 Ali Hazelwood 1408725797 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.07 2023 Love, Theoretically
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/28
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves: 2023-books
review:
I read Ali Hazelwood because I'm a woman in academia, and through her protagonists, all my dreams come true. I'm recognized as definitively brilliant in my field. I have a tried-and-true female bestie with whom I never lose touch. A hunkalicious, progressive, similarly brilliant man digs my less-than-perfect body AND my brain AND my particular strain of neurosis/maladaptive behavior. (This one mostly came true for me, praise the Lord.) My fear that, because I spend most of my time up in my head, I've drained all the energy and physical joy from my body is proved groundless. My fear that love and ambition are incompatible is proved groundless. Importantly, my bestie and my love interest are not in the least bit threatened by my work, and I am never envious of theirs. And last but certainly not least, I wind up finding my dream academic position at an Ivy or an R1. God bless these books. They make me so damn happy.
]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Cathy 5 2023-books 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/17
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Heavy 63026545
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 248 Kiese Laymon Cathy 5 2023-books 4.47 2018 Heavy
author: Kiese Laymon
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/06/23
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Do the Work 10645233
Our enemy is not lack of preparation; it's not the difficulty of the project, or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.

The enemy is resistance.

The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why he can't/shouldn't/won't do what we know we need to do.

Start before you're ready.]]> 109 Steven Pressfield 1455820997 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.93 2011 Do the Work
author: Steven Pressfield
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them]]> 61423989
The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows � their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman � Madge Oberholtzer � who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.]]> 432 Timothy Egan 0735225265 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.33 2023 A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
author: Timothy Egan
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2023/06/03
shelves: 2023-books
review:
I hope someone adapts this book into a movie. It would do Indiana a world of good.
]]> <![CDATA[Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents]]> 23129659 If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life.

In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents� emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life.

Discover the four types of difficult parents:



The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety

The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone

The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting

The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory
Ěý]]> 201 Lindsay C. Gibson 1626251703 Cathy 5 2023-books Wowza. 4.36 2015 Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
author: Lindsay C. Gibson
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/27
date added: 2023/05/27
shelves: 2023-books
review:
Wowza.
]]> You Are Here 58118307
The only hair stylist at Sunshine Clips secretly watches YouTube primers on how to draw and paint, just as her awkward young son covertly studies new illusions for his magic act. His friend and magician’s assistant, a high school cashier in the food court, has attracted the unwanted attention of a strange boy at school. She tells no one except the mall’s chain bookstore manager, a failed academic living in the tiny house he built in his mother-in-law's backyard. His family is watched over by the judgmental old woman next door, whose weekly trips to Sunshine Clips hide a complicated and emotional history and will spark the moment when everything changes for them all.

Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition, ultimately illuminating the magical connections that can bloom from the ordinary wonder of our everyday lives.]]> 304 Karin Lin-Greenberg 1640095438 Cathy 5 2023-books 3.69 2023 You Are Here
author: Karin Lin-Greenberg
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves: 2023-books
review:
I was really impressed by the book's form. I'm always interested when fiction writers who mostly publish stories "finally" publish a novel. Critics wonder: has the story-writer-turned-novelist really mastered the new form? In this case, the answer is yes, but readers should understand that Lin-Greenberg's mastery of the story form will be very much on display. On the spectrum between "novel" and "collection of stories" with "linked stories" in the middle, I'd say YOU ARE HERE rests smack dab in between "novel" and "linked stories." And I'm good with that, especially given that the book is about linked people.
]]> Girlhood 53138199 A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others� expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.

Written with Febos� characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.]]> 320 Melissa Febos 1635572525 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.23 2021 Girlhood
author: Melissa Febos
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/21
date added: 2023/05/21
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Main Street 11376 Main Street, the story of an idealistic young woman's attempts to reform her small town, brought Lewis immediate acclaim when it was published in 1920. It remains one of the essential texts of the American scene. Lewis Mumford observed: "In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them." Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and graduated from Yale in 1907. In 1930 he became the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Main Street (1920) was his first critical and commercial success. Lewis's other noted books include Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).']]> 454 Sinclair Lewis 0375753141 Cathy 5 2023-books
Experiment
Make it your motto day and night
Experiment
And it will lead you to the light
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve
So take an example from Eve
Experiment
Be curious
Though interfering friends may frown,
Get furious
At each attempt to hold you down
If this advice you'll only employ
The future can offer you infinite joy
And merriment
Experiment
And you'll see]]> 3.78 1920 Main Street
author: Sinclair Lewis
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1920
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/10
date added: 2023/05/10
shelves: 2023-books
review:
This novel can be a bit of a slog at times, but the last act...oh, it broke me in a million wonderful ways. How can an artistic or progressive person born in the Midwest survive unscathed? Should they stay or should they go? That is the question. I'm reminded of a song by native Hoosier, Cole Porter. "Experiment."

Experiment
Make it your motto day and night
Experiment
And it will lead you to the light
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve
So take an example from Eve
Experiment
Be curious
Though interfering friends may frown,
Get furious
At each attempt to hold you down
If this advice you'll only employ
The future can offer you infinite joy
And merriment
Experiment
And you'll see
]]> Letters to a Young Poet 46199
A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.]]> 80 Rainer Maria Rilke 0486422453 Cathy 0 2023-books 4.32 1929 Letters to a Young Poet
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/30
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Opioid, Indiana 43797420 During a week-long suspension from school, a teenage transplant to impoverished rural Indiana searches for a job, the whereabouts of his vanished drug-addicted guardian, and meaning in the America of the Trump years.

Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle’s girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It’s Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who’s been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals—encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names.

With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it’s like to be a high school kid in in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight that pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist.]]> 224 Brian Allen Carr 1641290781 Cathy 5 2023-books 3.34 2019 Opioid, Indiana
author: Brian Allen Carr
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/14
date added: 2023/04/28
shelves: 2023-books
review:
I don't know how I missed this book when it first came out, but I'm so glad I found it. This is the Indiana novel I've been waiting to read for a long, long time.
]]> Super Sad True Love Story 7334201 The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,� as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.

After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork� effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness� and “sustainability� with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.

Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
Ěý]]> 331 Gary Shteyngart 1400066409 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.45 2010 Super Sad True Love Story
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/27
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year]]> 2081356 Ěý
Jay Parini moves deftly between a colorful cast of characters to create a stunning portrait of one of the world’s most treasured authors. Dancing between fact and fiction, The Last Station is a brilliant and moving literary performance.]]> 372 Jay Parini 1841959677 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.54 1990 The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year
author: Jay Parini
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the �80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Cathy 0 2023-books 4.39 2017 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/11
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> The Bridge of San Luis Rey 92508
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

This new edition of Wilder's 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.]]> 160 Thornton Wilder 0060088877 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.80 1927 The Bridge of San Luis Rey
author: Thornton Wilder
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Animal Farm 170448 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 Cathy 0 2023-books 4.07 1945 Animal Farm
author: George Orwell
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/25
date added: 2023/03/25
shelves: 2023-books
review:
Why would you ask high school children to read this book? You must have lived a while to really appreciate it.
]]> The Nickel Boys 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Cathy 5 2023-books 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2023/03/22
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (American Lives)]]> 59468707
Playing like a lively mixtape in both subject and style, If This Were Fiction focuses an open-hearted, frequently funny, clear-eyed feminist lens on Christman’s first fifty years and sends out a message of love, power, and hope.]]> 228 Jill Christman 1496232356 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.46 If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (American Lives)
author: Jill Christman
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/20
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Birds of America 123250513 Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.

From the opening story, "Willing" --about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being -- Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America.

In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People", a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is.

In "Charades", a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties.

In "Community Life", a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose.

And in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens", a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.

Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.]]> 294 Lorrie Moore 0571201334 Cathy 0 4.00 1998 Birds of America
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 194 Ray Bradbury Cathy 0 2023-books 3.97 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2023/03/12
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.90 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/09
date added: 2023/03/09
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Assembly 56646330 Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.

The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?]]> 112 Natasha Brown 0316268267 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.84 2021 Assembly
author: Natasha Brown
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/03
date added: 2023/03/03
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/26
date added: 2023/02/26
shelves: 2023-books
review:
Anyone who doesn't like this book is stupid. It's absolutely amazing. Note: I have never played a video game in my life. Not even pac man.
]]> Tinkers 4957350
At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.]]> 192 Paul Harding 1934137197 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.41 2009 Tinkers
author: Paul Harding
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/24
date added: 2023/02/24
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Spare 62296528
For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love.

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.]]> 410 Prince Harry 0593593804 Cathy 5 2023-books 3.78 2023 Spare
author: Prince Harry
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/02/11
shelves: 2023-books
review:
This is what happens when you're born into a family that has been playing real-life Game of Thrones for hundreds of years, a family that has also allowed itself to become a reality show watched by the entire world. Honestly, I think this story is just absolutely heartbreaking. The only ethical response to reading this book should be to stop watching the show, period, stop clicking on the ginned-up headlines, don't watch the coronations or funerals or weddings. Take the whole institution out of the public eye. Sigh. Someday, we'll see the British monarchy like other rich folks who summer here and spend the holidays there and what not. Until then, it's up to us as individuals to either stop watching the reality show or not. This book made me feel guilty as hell for being a sometimes royal watcher. I also don't blame Harry one little bit for writing it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness]]> 58574423 AĚýlandmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases
Ěý

A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible� illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.
Ěý
Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color.
Ěý
Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease.ĚýThe Invisible KingdomĚýoffers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

]]> 324 Meghan O'Rourke 1594633797 Cathy 0 currently-reading, 2023-books 4.02 2022 The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
author: Meghan O'Rourke
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves: currently-reading, 2023-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative]]> 58393129 Memoir meets craft masterclass in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful� exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiences—“a must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr).

In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the questions which run through it.

How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw�? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong?

Drawing on her own path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and Harvard night school—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see themselves in a story.]]> 171 Melissa Febos 1646220854 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.23 2022 Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
author: Melissa Febos
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2023/01/29
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> We Ride Upon Sticks 50215350 Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts (which in 1692 was Salem Village, site of the origins of the Salem Witch Trials), the story follows the Danvers High field hockey team as they discover that the dark impulses of their Salem forebears may be the key to a winning season.

The 1989 Danvers Falcons are on an unaccountable winning streak. Quan Barry weaves together the individual and collective journeys of this enchanted team as they storm their way to the state championship. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza, whose bleached blond "Claw" sees and knows all, the DHS Falcons prove to be as wily and original as their North of Boston ancestors, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport.]]> 367 Quan Barry 1524748099 Cathy 0 2023-books 3.78 2020 We Ride Upon Sticks
author: Quan Barry
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/27
date added: 2023/01/27
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Matrix 57185348 Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie's vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
]]> 260 Lauren Groff 1594634491 Cathy 5 2023-books My goodness, what a triumph. 3.64 2021 Matrix
author: Lauren Groff
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/11
date added: 2023/01/11
shelves: 2023-books
review:
My goodness, what a triumph.
]]> <![CDATA[The Long Covid Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next]]> 59891838
For people living with Long COVID, navigating the uncharted territory of this new chronic illness can be challenging. With over two hundred unique symptoms, and with doctors continuing to work toward a cure, people experiencing Long COVID are often left with more questions than answers.

A support group in book form, The Long COVID Survival Guide is here to help. Twenty contributors—from award-winning journalists, neuroscientists, and patient-researchers to corporate strategists, activists, and artists—share their stories and insight on topics getting diagnosed; finding a caregiver; confronting medical racism and gaslighting; navigating employment issues; dealing with fatigue and brain fog; caring for your mental health; and more.

This vital resource provides the answers and reassurance you need, to live with and heal from Long COVID.]]> 288 Fiona Lowenstein 1615199101 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.26 2022 The Long Covid Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next
author: Fiona Lowenstein
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Educated 35133922
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.]]> 352 Tara Westover 0399590501 Cathy 5 2023-books 4.46 2018 Educated
author: Tara Westover
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: 2023-books
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Cathy 5 2022-books 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/12/28
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> The Glass Hotel 45754981 From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events–a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients� accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.]]> 307 Emily St. John Mandel 0525521143 Cathy 5 2022-books 3.66 2020 The Glass Hotel
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/23
date added: 2022/12/23
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> The Pale Blue Eye 110076
At a loss for answers and desperate to avoid any negative publicity, the Academy calls on the services of a local civilian, Augustus Landor, a former police detective who acquired some renown during his years in New York City before retiring to the Hudson Highlands for his health. Now a widower, and restless in his seclusion, Landor agrees to take on the case. As he questions the dead man's acquaintances, he finds an eager assistant in a moody, intriguing young cadet with a penchant for drink, two volumes of poetry to his name, and a murky past that changes from telling to telling. The cadet's name? Edgar Allan Poe.

Impressed with Poe's astute powers of observation, Landor is convinced that the poet may prove useful -- if he can stay sober long enough to put his keen reasoning skills to the task. Working in close contact, the two men -- separated by years but alike in intelligence -- develop a surprisingly deep rapport as their investigation takes them into a hidden world of secret societies, ritual sacrifices, and more bodies. Soon, however, the macabre murders and Landor's own buried secrets threaten to tear the two men and their newly formed friendship apart.]]> 432 Louis Bayard 0060733977 Cathy 5 2022-books 3.76 2006 The Pale Blue Eye
author: Louis Bayard
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/12/05
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When Trying to Return Home: Stories]]> 61275050 A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond--and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.

Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley's Black American and Afro-Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life--even if we haven't always been willing to listen.]]> 272 Jennifer Maritza McCauley 1640095683 Cathy 0 to-read 3.55 2023 When Trying to Return Home: Stories
author: Jennifer Maritza McCauley
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/10/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Rabbit Hutch 59576076
São vizinhos, e vivem num complexo habitacional de baixo custo em Vacca Vale, cidade em decadência. É a partir deste lugar inóspito que Tess Gunty conduz o leitor numa invulgar viagem pelo desconcerto do espírito humano, pelas grandes doenças sociais e pelo alcance incomensurável da imaginação. Uma estreia literária arrebatadora, que inscreve Tess Gunty na linhagem do Grande Romance Americano.]]> 399 Tess Gunty Cathy 0 2022-books 3.50 2022 The Rabbit Hutch
author: Tess Gunty
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/29
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> <![CDATA[College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be]]> 13518191
In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In arguing for what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise.

In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America's colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.]]> 240 Andrew Delbanco 0691130736 Cathy 0 2022-books 3.49 2012 College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be
author: Andrew Delbanco
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/26
date added: 2022/09/26
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> <![CDATA[What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma]]> 58214328 A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.

"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.]]> 352 Stephanie Foo 0593238109 Cathy 0 2022-books 4.50 2022 What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
author: Stephanie Foo
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/26
date added: 2022/09/26
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> The Memory Eaters 50518348
As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct―easy to hold.

At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.]]> 208 Elizabeth Kadetsky 162534502X Cathy 5 2022-books 4.70 2020 The Memory Eaters
author: Elizabeth Kadetsky
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/07/18
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> Weather 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Cathy 0 2022-books 3.57 2020 Weather
author: Jenny Offill
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/02
date added: 2022/07/02
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> Scar On / Scar Off 35749342 81 Jennifer Maritza McCauley 0999115200 Cathy 0 4.42 Scar On / Scar Off
author: Jennifer Maritza McCauley
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In Defense of a Liberal Education]]> 25622814 208 Fareed Zakaria 039335234X Cathy 0 2022-books 3.80 2015 In Defense of a Liberal Education
author: Fareed Zakaria
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/18
date added: 2022/05/18
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> Teenager: A Novel 59317650 Two teenagers, in love and insane, journey across the United States in this Bonnie and Clyde-like adventure, pursuing a warped American dream, where Elvis is still king and the corn dog is the "backbone of this great country."

"He told her he was a one-woman man and she was it for him. Teal said that was good because he was it for her. It and It. Both of them were It."

Kody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella "Teal Cartwheels" Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome--on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.

Leaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies. Along the road, of course, there's time to stop at Graceland, classic diners, a fairgrounds that smells of "pony shit and kettle corn, and time for run-ins with outsize personalities like the reincarnated Grand Canyon tour guide Dead Bob and the spurious Montana rancher Bill Gold. On their heels, all the while, is Teal's brother, Neil Carticelli, who's abandoned his post in the navy to rescue the sister he left behind. But does she really need saving?

These all too American tropes find new expression in Bud Smith's own freewheeling prose--and in Rae Buleri's original illustrations--filling Teenager with humor, poetry, and a joy that's palpable in every unforgettable sentence.]]> 400 Bud Smith 0593315227 Cathy 0 to-read 3.92 2022 Teenager: A Novel
author: Bud Smith
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hell of a Book 55964195 Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Jason Mott's novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

Throughout, these characters' stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.]]> 323 Jason Mott 059333096X Cathy 5 2022-books 4.00 2021 Hell of a Book
author: Jason Mott
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/13
date added: 2022/05/13
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Great Upheaval: Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future]]> 56916073
In The Great Upheaval, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt examine higher and postsecondary education to see how it has changed to become what it is today--and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future. Taking a unique historical, cross-industry perspective, Levine and Van Pelt perform a 360-degree survey of American higher education. Combining historical, trend, and comparative analysis of other business sectors, they ask

- how much will colleges and universities change, what will change, and how will these changes occur?
- will institutions of higher learning be able to adapt to the challenges they face, or will they be disrupted by them?
- will the industrial model of higher education be repaired or replaced?
- why is higher education more important than ever?

The book is neither an attempt to advocate for a particular future direction nor a warning about that future. Rather, it looks objectively at the contexts in which higher education has operated--and will continue to operate. It also seeks to identify likely developments that will aid those involved in steering higher education forward, as well as the many millions of Americans who have a stake in its future.

Concluding with a detailed agenda for action, The Great Upheaval is aimed at policy makers, college administrators, faculty, trustees, and students, as well as general readers and people who work for nonprofits facing the same big changes.]]> 352 Arthur Levine 1421442574 Cathy 0 2022-books 3.80 2021 The Great Upheaval: Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future
author: Arthur Levine
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/01
date added: 2022/05/01
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> Malibu Rising 55404546 Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, their lives will change forever.

Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.

Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there.

And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them... and what they will leave behind.]]> 369 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798657 Cathy 0 2022-books 4.02 2021 Malibu Rising
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/24
date added: 2022/03/24
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment]]> 56987198
In ongoing debates over the value of a college education, the role of the liberal arts in higher education has been blamed by some for making college expensive, impractical, and even worthless. Defenders argue that liberal arts education makes society innovative, creative, and civic-minded. But these qualities are hard to quantify, and many critics of higher education call for courses of study to be strictly job-specific. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Detweiler, drawing on interviews with more than 1,000 college graduates aged 25 to 65, offers empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education. Detweiler finds that a liberal arts education has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment over a lifetime.
Unlike other defenders of a liberal arts education, Detweiler doesn’t rely on philosophical arguments or anecdotes but on data. He developed a series of interview questions related to the content attributes of liberal arts (for example, course assignments and majors), the context attributes (out-of-class interaction with faculty and students, teaching methods, campus life), and the purpose attributes (adult life outcomes). Interview responses show that although both the content of study and the educational context are associated with significant life outcomes, the content of study has less relationship to positive adult life outcomes than the educational context. The implications of this research, Detweiler points out, range from the advantages of broadening areas of study to factors that could influence students� decisions to attend certain colleges.]]> 312 Richard A Detweiler 0262543109 Cathy 0 2022-books 4.11 The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment
author: Richard A Detweiler
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/21
date added: 2022/03/21
shelves: 2022-books
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]]> Shuggie Bain 52741293 Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.

Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs.

Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.

A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.]]> 430 Douglas Stuart 0802148042 Cathy 5 2022-books 4.29 2020 Shuggie Bain
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/03/06
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> Reframing Academic Leadership 4056491 Ěý
Bolman and Gallos speak to those who care deeply about higher education, appreciate its strengths and its imperfections, and are committed to making it better.Ěý Colleges and university administrators who strive to be leaders with impact and significant forces for good will find in this book a readable, intellectually provocative, and pragmatic approach to their work and its possibilities.]]> 288 Lee G. Bolman 0787988065 Cathy 0 2019-books 3.93 2009 Reframing Academic Leadership
author: Lee G. Bolman
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2022/02/15
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: 2019-books
review:

]]> A Dark and Starless Forest 52132628
Derry and her eight siblings live in an isolated house by the lake, separated from the rest of the world by an eerie and menacing forest. Frank, the man who raised them after their families abandoned them, says it’s for their own good. After all, the world isn’t safe for people with magic. And Derry feels safe—most of the time.

Until the night her eldest sister disappears. Jane and Derry swore to each other that they’d never go into the forest, not after their last trip ended in blood, but Derry is sure she saw Jane walk into the trees. When another sibling goes missing and Frank’s true colors start to show, feeling safe is no longer an option. Derry will risk anything to protect the family she has left. Even if that means returning to the forest that has started calling to Derry in her missing siblings� voices.

As Derry spends more time amidst the trees, her magic grows more powerful . . . and so does the darkness inside her, the viciousness she wants to pretend doesn’t exist. But saving her siblings from the forest and from Frank might mean embracing the darkness. And that just might be the most dangerous thing of all.]]> 364 Sarah Hollowell 0358424410 Cathy 5 2022-books 3.93 2021 A Dark and Starless Forest
author: Sarah Hollowell
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/15
date added: 2022/02/15
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> Clean Air 56271460
In the decade since the event known as the Turning, humanity has rebuilt, and Izabel has gotten used to the airtight domes that now contain her life. She raises her young daughter, Cami, and attempts to make peace with her mother’s death. She tries hard to be satisfied with this safe, prosperous new world, but instead she just feels stuck.

And then the peace of her town is shattered. Someone starts slashing through the domes at night, exposing people to the deadly pollen—a serial killer. Almost simultaneously, Cami begins sleep-talking, having whole conversations about the murders that she doesn’t remember after she wakes. Izabel becomes fixated on the killer, on both tracking him down and understanding him. What could compel someone to take so many lives after years dedicated to sheer survival, with humanity finally flourishing again?]]> 320 Sarah Blake 1643751069 Cathy 5 2022-books 3.18 2022 Clean Air
author: Sarah Blake
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/05
date added: 2022/02/05
shelves: 2022-books
review:
There's so much love and magic woven into this "science story." So much hope despite all the calamity. The last third, especially, is INCREDIBLY suspenseful. I loved this novel so much.
]]> Quint 58266508 323 Dionne Irving 1736176722 Cathy 5 2022-books 4.37 Quint
author: Dionne Irving
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/30
date added: 2022/01/30
shelves: 2022-books
review:

]]> The Love Hypothesis 56732449
That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding... six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.]]> 356 Ali Hazelwood 0593336828 Cathy 0 2021-books Candy. 4.10 2021 The Love Hypothesis
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/15
date added: 2022/01/15
shelves: 2021-books
review:
Candy.
]]> Mistress of the Ritz 41708180 A captivating novel based on the story of the extraordinary real-life American woman who secretly worked for the French Resistance during World War II--while playing hostess to the invading Germans at the iconic Hotel Ritz in Paris--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Aviator's Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

Nothing bad can happen at the Ritz; inside its gilded walls every woman looks beautiful, every man appears witty. Favored guests like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor walk through its famous doors to be welcomed and pampered by Blanche Auzello and her husband, Claude, the hotel's director. The Auzellos are the mistress and master of the Ritz, allowing the glamour and glitz to take their minds off their troubled marriage, and off the secrets that they keep from their guests--and each other.

Until June 1940, when the German army sweeps into Paris, setting up headquarters at the Ritz. Suddenly, with the likes of Hermann Goring moving into suites once occupied by royalty, Blanche and Claude must navigate a terrifying new reality. One that entails even more secrets. One that may destroy the tempestuous marriage between this beautiful, reckless American and her very proper Frenchman. For the falsehoods they tell to survive, and to strike a blow against their Nazi "guests," spin a web of deceit that ensnares everything and everyone they cherish.

But one secret is shared between Blanche and Claude alone--the secret that, in the end, threatens to imperil both of their lives, and to bring down the legendary Ritz itself.

Based on true events, Mistress of the Ritz is a taut tale of suspense wrapped up in a love story for the ages, the inspiring story of a woman and a man who discover the best in each other amid the turbulence of war.]]> 372 Melanie Benjamin 0399182241 Cathy 0 2021-books 3.73 2019 Mistress of the Ritz
author: Melanie Benjamin
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/29
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> The Collector's Daughter 56197489 A Novel of the Discovery of Tutankhamun's Tomb

Bestselling author Gill Paul returns with a brilliant novel about Lady Evelyn Herbert, the woman who took the very first step into the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and who lived in the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, and the long after-effects of the Curse of Pharaohs.Ěý

Lady Evelyn Herbert was the daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, brought up in stunning Highclere Castle. Popular and pretty, she seemed destined for a prestigious marriage, but she had other ideas. Instead, she left behind the world of society balls and chaperones to travel to the Egyptian desert, where she hoped to become a lady archaeologist, working alongside her father and Howard Carter in the hunt for an undisturbed tomb.

In November 1922, their dreams came true when they discovered the burial place of Tutankhamun, packed full of gold and unimaginable riches, and she was the first person to crawl inside for three thousand years. She called it the “greatest moment� of her life—but soon afterwards everything changed, with a string of tragedies that left her world a darker, sadder place.

Newspapers claimed it was “the curse of Tutankhamun,� but Howard Carter said no rational person would entertain such nonsense. Yet fifty years later, when an Egyptian academic came asking questions about what really happened in the tomb, it unleashed a new chain of events that seemed to threaten the happiness Eve had finally found.]]> 384 Gill Paul 0063079860 Cathy 0 2021-books 3.68 2021 The Collector's Daughter
author: Gill Paul
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/18
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> The Lincoln Highway 57109107 The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.]]> 576 Amor Towles 0735222355 Cathy 0 2021-books 4.18 2021 The Lincoln Highway
author: Amor Towles
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/17
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation]]> 58558175 An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family–and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.

Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in a mental institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines, to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was a book-smart man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity� of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms.

Their divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, the meeting of her parents� lines in Maud inspired an anxiety that she could not shake; a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Maud researched her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors� roles in slavery and genocide–and sought family secrets through her DNA. But sunk in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy–a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors has for all of us.]]> 378 Maud Newton 0812997921 Cathy 0 to-read 3.37 2022 Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
author: Maud Newton
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Don't Tell Alfred (Radlett & Montdore, #3)]]> 50727 In this delightful comedy, Fanny -- the quietly observant narrator of Nancy Mitford’s two most famous novels -- finally takes center stage.

Fanny Wincham—last seen as a young woman in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate—has lived contentedly for years as housewife to an absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. But her life changes overnight when her beloved Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris. Soon she finds herself mixing with royalty and Rothschilds while battling her hysterical predecessor, Lady Leone, who refuses to leave the premises. When Fanny’s tender-hearted secretary begins filling the embassy with rescued animals and her teenage sons run away from Eton and show up with a rock star in tow, things get entirely out of hand. Gleefully sending up the antics of mid-century high society, Don’t Tell Alfred is classic Mitford.

]]> 223 Nancy Mitford 0881845973 Cathy 0 2021-books 3.56 1960 Don't Tell Alfred (Radlett & Montdore, #3)
author: Nancy Mitford
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/04
date added: 2021/12/04
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Alienist (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #1)]]> 40024
The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before--and will kill again before the hunt is over.

Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences.]]> 498 Caleb Carr 0812976142 Cathy 0 2021-books 4.06 1994 The Alienist (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #1)
author: Caleb Carr
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/14
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> Zorrie 53138232
From prize-winning, acclaimed author Laird Hunt, a poignant novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana.

“It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.�

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt’s extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.]]> 176 Laird Hunt 1635575362 Cathy 0 to-read 3.80 2021 Zorrie
author: Laird Hunt
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Courting Mr. Lincoln 40591951 From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln, the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a sparky, marriageable Mary Todd and Lincoln’s best friend, Joshua Speed.

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he’s a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. “I can only hope,� she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, “that his waters being so very still, they also run deep.�

It's not long, though, before she sees the Lincoln that Speed knows: a man who, despite his awkwardness, is amiable and profound, with a gentle wit to match his genius and a respect for her keen political mind. But as her relationship with Lincoln deepens, she must confront his inseparable friendship with Speed, who has taught his roommate how to dance, dress, and navigate the polite society of Springfield.

Told in the alternating voices of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, and rich with historical detail, Courting Mr. Lincoln creates a sympathetic and complex portrait of Mary unlike any that has come before; a moving portrayal of the deep and very real connection between the two men; and most of all, an evocation of the unformed man who would grow into one of the nation’s most beloved presidents.]]> 381 Louis Bayard 1616208473 Cathy 5 2021-books 3.67 2019 Courting Mr. Lincoln
author: Louis Bayard
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/10/30
shelves: 2021-books
review:
A terrifically well-crafted novel about the relationships that help us become who we want to be. I was incredibly moved by both viewpoints—Mary’s and Joshua’s—and how much each one loved Lincoln. Happily transported to Springfield, IL circa 1840, I devoured this book in two blissful days.
]]> The Personal Librarian 55333938 This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9780593101537.

The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian—who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps build a world-class collection.

But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle's complexion isn't dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths to which she must go—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.]]> 341 Marie Benedict Cathy 0 2021-books 3.98 2021 The Personal Librarian
author: Marie Benedict
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/26
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chakra Empowerment for Women: Self-Guided Techniques for Healing Trauma, Owning Your Power & Finding Overall Wellness]]> 43626398 Powerful Chakra Tools to Help You Heal, Achieve Balance, and Awaken to Your Greatness

Learn to move past trauma, find strength, and thrive with twelve chakra tools that are based on the feminine energy body and life phases. These tools focus on challenges that women often face in owning our power, balancing work and family, and maintaining physical and emotional health. Featuring an eight-page, full-color insert with clarifying chakra figures, this essential guide presents a no-nonsense, easy-to-use approach to the chakras that helps you manifest your highest potential.

Each chapter focuses on a new chakra tool, helping you explore how to use it within your daily life for long-term growth, overcoming blocks, healing sexual trauma, and more. Chakra Empowerment for Women supports your journey in practical ways as you recover the energy of your empowered self.

Includes a foreword by bestselling author Cyndi Dale.]]> 222 Lisa Erickson 0738761400 Cathy 0 to-read 4.29 2019 Chakra Empowerment for Women: Self-Guided Techniques for Healing Trauma, Owning Your Power & Finding Overall Wellness
author: Lisa Erickson
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year]]> 57005201
"This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?" —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box
Ěý
In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.
Ěý
In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami’s novels, reality television, the Beatles.Ěý
Ěý
What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless—a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.]]> 288 Charles Finch 0593319079 Cathy 0 to-read 3.91 2021 What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year
author: Charles Finch
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Great Circle 54976986 An alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780525656975 can be found here.

Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.]]> 608 Maggie Shipstead Cathy 5 2021-books 4.06 2021 Great Circle
author: Maggie Shipstead
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/29
date added: 2021/09/29
shelves: 2021-books
review:
I loved how this book refused to be a conventional work of historical fiction about a strong, female character. No woman in aviator gear on the book cover looking into the distance. That’s Carol Ffieffer’s “Marian Graves novel,� not Shipstead’s. I also loved how this book questions the very nature of “historical fiction� and emphasizes “fictional history� instead. Mostly, I loved these characters. I would have read another 100 or so pages about Marian and Jamie and Caleb. Even Hadley. Brava!
]]> Pale Horse, Pale Rider 672222
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.]]> 208 Katherine Anne Porter 0151707553 Cathy 5 2021-books 3.94 1939 Pale Horse, Pale Rider
author: Katherine Anne Porter
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/18
date added: 2021/09/18
shelves: 2021-books
review:
I wish all the anti vaxxers would read this. I mean, it’s definitely short. And it’s about what it feels like to have the Spanish Flu.
]]> Tender Is the Night 46164 Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.]]> 430 F. Scott Fitzgerald Cathy 0 2021-books, mrs-cole-porter 3.81 1934 Tender Is the Night
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/04
date added: 2021/09/17
shelves: 2021-books, mrs-cole-porter
review:
Want to know how hard it is to be married to a crazy lady? Well, lemme tell ya. Here you go. Here’s another example. Well, yeah, I kinda created that situation, but still, she didn’t have to flip out like that. Can you believe how she acted? I mean, don’t I deserve a little happiness for being such a stand-up guy? Oh, and here’s some racism, too. And some pretty sentences. The end.
]]> What Are You Going Through 51152434
A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.

In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.]]> 210 Sigrid Nunez 0593191412 Cathy 5 2021-books 3.73 2020 What Are You Going Through
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/05
date added: 2021/09/05
shelves: 2021-books
review:

]]> The Power of the Dog 128073
Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.

Phil is a vicious sadist, with a seething contempt for weakness to match his thirst for dominance; George has a gentle, loving soul. They sleep in the room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years. When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins a relentless campaign to destroy his brother's new wife. But he reckons without an unlikely protector.

From its visceral first paragraph to its devastating twist of an ending, The Power of the Dog will hold you in its grip.


WITH AN AFTERWORD BY ANNIE PROULX]]> 293 Thomas Savage 0316610895 Cathy 0 to-read 4.16 1967 The Power of the Dog
author: Thomas Savage
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Christie Affair 57693165 Why would the world's most famous mystery writer disappear for eleven days? What makes a woman desperate enough to destroy another woman's marriage? How deeply can a person crave revenge?

In 1925, Miss Nan O’Dea infiltrated the wealthy, rarefied world of author Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie. In every way, she became a part of their life––first, both Christies. Then, just Archie. Soon, Nan became Archie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted wife, desperate to marry him. Nan’s plot didn’t begin the day she met Archie and Agatha.

It began decades before, in Ireland, when Nan was a young girl. She and the man she loved were a star-crossed couple who were destined to be together––until the Great War, a pandemic, and shameful secrets tore them apart. Then acts of unspeakable cruelty kept them separated.

What drives someone to murder? What will someone do in the name of love? What kind of crime can someone never forgive? Nina de Gramont’s brilliant, unforgettable novel explores these questions and more.]]> 320 Nina de Gramont 1250274613 Cathy 0 to-read 3.65 2022 The Christie Affair
author: Nina de Gramont
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Thick: And Other Essays 46273726 256 Tressie McMillan Cottom 1620975874 Cathy 0 to-read 4.49 2019 Thick: And Other Essays
author: Tressie McMillan Cottom
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Second Mrs. Astor 56161317 Perfect for fans of Jennifer Chiaverini and Marie Benedict, this riveting novel takes you inside the scandalous courtship and catastrophic honeymoon aboard the Titanic of the most famous couple of their time—John Jacob Astor and Madeleine Force. Told in rich detail, this novel of sweeping historical fiction will stay with readers long after turning the last page.

Madeleine Talmage Force is just seventeen when she attracts the attention of John Jacob “Jack� Astor. Madeleine is beautiful, intelligent, and solidly upper-class, but the Astors are in a league apart. Jack’s mother was the Mrs. Astor, American royalty and New York’s most formidable socialite. Jack is dashing and industrious—a hero of the Spanish-American war, an inventor, and a canny businessman. Despite their twenty-nine-year age difference, and the scandal of Jack’s recent divorce, Madeleine falls headlong into love—and becomes the press’s favorite target.

On their extended honeymoon in Egypt, the newlyweds finally find a measure of peace from photographers and journalists. Madeleine feels truly alive for the first time—and is happily pregnant. The couple plans to return home in the spring of 1912, aboard an opulent new ocean liner. When the ship hits an iceberg close to midnight on April 14th, there is no immediate panic. The swift, state-of-the-art RMS Titanic seems unsinkable. As Jack helps Madeleine into a lifeboat, he assures her that he’ll see her soon in New York�

Four months later, at the Astors� Fifth Avenue mansion, a widowed Madeleine gives birth to their son. In the wake of the disaster, the press has elevated her to the status of virtuous, tragic heroine. But Madeleine’s most important decision still lies ahead: whether to accept the role assigned to her, or carve out her own remarkable path…]]> 323 Shana Abe 1496732049 Cathy 0 to-read 3.72 2021 The Second Mrs. Astor
author: Shana Abe
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Cathy 0 to-read 3.53 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
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]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Cathy 0 to-read 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
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]]> The Midnight Library 56241022
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of exchanging her life for a different one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.]]> 304 Matt Haig Cathy 0 to-read 4.04 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Cathy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
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]]> Bewilderment 56404444 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain�

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?]]> 278 Richard Powers 0393881148 Cathy 0 to-read 3.87 2021 Bewilderment
author: Richard Powers
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
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review:

]]> Blind Man's Bluff: A Memoir 55298361

In this unfailingly candid yet humorous memoir, Hill discloses the tricks he employed to pass for sighted, from displaying shelves of paperbacks he read on tape to arriving early on first dates so women would have to find him. He risked his life every time he crossed a street, doing his best to listen for approaching cars. A good memory and pop culture obsessions like Tom Cruise, Prince, and all things 1980s allowed him to steer conversations toward common experiences.


For fifteen years, Hill hid his blindness from friends, colleagues, and lovers, even convincing himself that if he stared long enough, his blurry peripheral vision would bring the world into focus. At thirty, faced with a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.]]> 256 James Tate Hill 039386717X Cathy 0 to-read 3.77 2021 Blind Man's Bluff: A Memoir
author: James Tate Hill
name: Cathy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>