en-US Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:27:31 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 382 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Axel 0 4.28 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Axel
average rating: 4.28
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Axel 0 3.86 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Axel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
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]]> 18693910 A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.]]> 447 William Finnegan 1594203474 Axel 0 4.27 2015
author: William Finnegan
name: Axel
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Axel 0 3.34 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Axel
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 33313 A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts

Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,� by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.]]> 312 Anthony Bourdain 0060899220 Axel 0 4.17 2000
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: Axel
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> 7905092
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
(jacket)]]> 562 Jonathan Franzen 0374158460 Axel 0 3.78 2010
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Axel
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> 57933306 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]> 357 Johann Hari 0593138511 Axel 2 4.22 2022
author: Johann Hari
name: Axel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what � or who � is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Axel 0 4.03 2023
author: Paul Lynch
name: Axel
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
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]]> 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 Axel 0 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Axel
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 51022071
All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance that could not be explained - until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood, to Washington, and beyond.

This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability and silence victims of abuse - and it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.

Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power - and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook the culture.

In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.]]> 608 Ronan Farrow 0316454133 Axel 0 4.33 2019
author: Ronan Farrow
name: Axel
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
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]]> 33539583 From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a new spy thriller about treason and conscience, loyalty and betrayal, set against the backdrop of the fateful Munich Conference of September, 1938.

Guy Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving in 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Rikard von Holz is on the staff of the German Foreign Office--and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Guy flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and Rikard travels on Hitler's train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course. And once again, Robert Harris gives us actual events of historical importance--here are Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier--at the heart of an electrifying, un-put-downable novel.]]> 352 Robert Harris 1473519691 Axel 0 3.77 2017
author: Robert Harris
name: Axel
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 226369 328 Anna Funder 1862076553 Axel 0 4.20 2003
author: Anna Funder
name: Axel
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
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date added: 2024/02/18
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]]> 1845 Librarian's Note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

In April, 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.]]> 207 Jon Krakauer 0385486804 Axel 0 4.01 1996
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Axel
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
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]]> 75665931 From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times� Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.]]> 368 BenjamĂ­n Labatut 0593654471 Axel 0 4.33 2023
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: Axel
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
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]]> 101673225 The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.]]> 240 C Pam Zhang 0593538242 Axel 0 3.50 2023
author: C Pam Zhang
name: Axel
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
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]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Axel 0 4.00 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Axel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
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]]> 28277145 CSI and curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn't know . . . Everyone around him, it seems, has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.

But when Manju begins to get to know Radha's great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju's world begins to change and he is faced by decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him.

As sensitively observed as The White Tiger -- Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 -- was brilliantly furious, Selection Day reveals another facet of Aravind Adiga's remarkable talent.]]> 330 Aravind Adiga 1509806237 Axel 0 3.18 2016
author: Aravind Adiga
name: Axel
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2016
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]]> 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion Axel 0 4.20 1968
author: Joan Didion
name: Axel
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1968
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]]> 53308149
Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous; a visit to San Simeon; being rejected by Stanford; dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home; and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on "Why I Write"; a piece about short stories from New West in 1978; and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.]]> 149 Joan Didion 059331848X Axel 0 3.85 2021
author: Joan Didion
name: Axel
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
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]]> 57792078 From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world's largest search engine/social media company, the Circle, merges with the planet's dominant ecommerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous--and, oddly enough, most beloved--monopoly ever known: the Every.

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for the Every's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

Studded with unforgettable characters, outrageous outfits, and lacerating set-pieces, this companion to The Circle blends absurdity and terror, satire and suspense, while keeping the reader in apprehensive excitement about the fate of the company--and the human animal.]]> 580 Dave Eggers 0593315340 Axel 2 3.66 2021
author: Dave Eggers
name: Axel
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/14
date added: 2023/05/13
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]]> 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 Axel 3 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Axel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/04/30
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]]> 33257757 They call him father, liberator, warlord, Reaper. But he feels a boy as he falls toward the pale blue planet, his armor red, his army vast, his heart heavy. It is the tenth year of war and the thirty-second of his life.

A decade ago, Darrow was the hero of the revolution he believed would break the chains of the Society. But the Rising has shattered everything: Instead of peace and freedom, it has brought endless war. Now he must risk everything he has fought for on one last desperate mission. Darrow still believes he can save everyone, but can he save himself?

And throughout the worlds, other destinies entwine with Darrow’s to change his fate forever:

A young Red girl flees tragedy in her refugee camp and achieves for herself a new life she could never have imagined.

An ex-soldier broken by grief is forced to steal the most valuable thing in the galaxy—or pay with his life.

And Lysander au Lune, the heir in exile to the sovereign, wanders the stars with his mentor, Cassius, haunted by the loss of the world that Darrow transformed, and dreaming of what will rise from its ashes.

Red Rising was the story of the end of one universe, and Iron Gold is the story of the creation of a new one. Witness the beginning of a stunning new saga of tragedy and triumph from masterly New York Times bestselling author Pierce Brown.]]> 602 Pierce Brown 042528591X Axel 0 4.19 2018
author: Pierce Brown
name: Axel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/22
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]]> 29226553
For a decade Darrow led a revolution against the corrupt color-coded Society. Now, outlawed by the very Republic he founded, he wages a rogue war on Mercury in hopes that he can still salvage the dream of Eo. But as he leaves death and destruction in his wake, is he still the hero who broke the chains? Or will another legend rise to take his place?

Lysander au Lune, the heir in exile, has returned to the Core. Determined to bring peace back to mankind at the edge of his sword, he must overcome or unite the treacherous Gold families of the Core and face down Darrow over the skies of war-torn Mercury.

But theirs are not the only fates hanging in the balance.

On Luna, Mustang, Sovereign of the Republic, campaigns to unite the Republic behind her husband. Beset by political and criminal enemies, can she outwit her opponents in time to save him?

Once a Red refugee, young Lyria now stands accused of treason, and her only hope is a desperate escape with unlikely new allies.

Abducted by a new threat to the Republic, Pax and Electra, the children of Darrow and Sevro, must trust in Ephraim, a thief, for their salvation—and Ephraim must look to them for his chance at redemption.

As alliances shift, break, and re-form—and power is seized, lost, and reclaimed—every player is at risk in a game of conquest that could turn the Rising into a new Dark Age.]]> 704 Pierce Brown 0425285952 Axel 0 4.49 2019
author: Pierce Brown
name: Axel
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2019
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date added: 2023/03/21
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]]> 35215524 The Monk of Mokha is the exhilarating true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana’a by civil war.

Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen’s central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains and meet beleagured but determined farmers. But when war engulfs the country and Saudi bombs rain down, Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen without sacrificing his dreams or abandoning his people.]]> 353 Dave Eggers Axel 0 4.08 2018
author: Dave Eggers
name: Axel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/06
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]]> 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Axel 0 3.77 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Axel
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 42389 Foreword
"We wanted those wings"; Camp Toccoa, 7-12/42
"Stand up & hook up"; Benning, Mackall, Bragg, Shanks, 12/42-9/43
"Duties of the latrine orderly"; Aldbourne, 9/43-3/44
"Look out, Hitler! Here we come!"; Slapton Sands, Uppottery, 4/1-6/5/44
"Follow me"; Normandy, 6/6/44
"Move out!"; Carentan, 6/7-7/12/44
Healing wounds & scrubbed missions; Aldbourne, 7/13-9/16/44
"Hell's highway"; Holland, 9/17-10/1/44
Island; Holland, 10/2-11/25/44
Resting, recovering & refitting: Mourmelon-le-Grand, 11/26-12/18/44
"They got us surrounded-the poor bastards"; Bastogne, 12/19-31/44
Breaking point; Bastogne, 1/1-13/45
Attack; Noville, 1/14-17/45
Patrol: Haguenau, 1/18-2/23/45
"Best feeling in the world": Mourmelon, 2/25-4/2/45
Getting to know the enemy: Germany, 4/2-30/45
Drinking Hitler's champagne; Berchtesgaden, 5/1-8/45
Soldier's dream life; Austria, 5/8-7/31/45
Postwar careers; 1945-91
Acknowledgments & Sources
Index]]> 432 Stephen E. Ambrose 0743464117 Axel 0 4.43 1992
author: Stephen E. Ambrose
name: Axel
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/10
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]]> 52064314
On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have the view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Curzio Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her in the darkness of the ancient ruins of a Roman villa and they are caught by her snobbish, disapproving cousin, Charlotte. “Your mother is Chinese so it’s no surprise you’d be attracted to someone like him,� Charlotte teases.

Daughter of an American-born-Chinese mother and blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself in favor of the white side, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton where Lucie is weekending with her new fiancé, Lucie finds herself drawn to George again. Soon, Lucy is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé, the co-op board of her Fifth Avenue apartment, and ultimately herself as she tries mightily to deny George entry into her world–and her heart.

Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures.]]> 315 Kevin Kwan 0385695403 Axel 0 3.26 2020
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Axel
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2023/01/10
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]]> 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller Axel 0 4.30 2011
author: Madeline Miller
name: Axel
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 341879 Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.]]> 304 Patti Smith Axel 0 4.19 2010
author: Patti Smith
name: Axel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/31
date added: 2023/01/10
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]]> 265734 360 Nick Mason 0811848248 Axel 0 4.12 2004
author: Nick Mason
name: Axel
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 51733706 Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space� app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humor, and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.]]> 272 Anthony Veasna So 0063049910 Axel 0 3.94 2021
author: Anthony Veasna So
name: Axel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 28921 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 0571225381 here.

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.]]> 258 Kazuo Ishiguro Axel 0 4.14 1989
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Axel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/16
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]]> 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Axel 0 4.45 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Axel
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 57224204
Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a “thrilling satire� (Economist) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths.]]> 386 Shehan Karunatilaka 1908745908 Axel 0 3.89 2022
author: Shehan Karunatilaka
name: Axel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 58437521 From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.� Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.]]> 352 Jennifer Egan 1476716765 Axel 0 3.61 2022
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Axel
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 11991
The Fall (French: La Chute) is a philosophical novel by Albert Camus. First published in 1956, it is his last complete work of fiction. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence, and truth. In a eulogy to Albert Camus, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as "perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood" of Camus' books.]]> 147 Albert Camus 0679720227 Axel 0 4.07 1956
author: Albert Camus
name: Axel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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]]> 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]> 368 Ted Chiang Axel 0 4.27 2019
author: Ted Chiang
name: Axel
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Axel 0 4.41 1952
author: John Steinbeck
name: Axel
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> 59721
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.

Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.]]> 480 Thomas Pynchon 3499136287 Axel 0 3.75 1990
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Axel
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/16
date added: 2022/03/15
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]]> 19421824 The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway’s spare but powerful writing style. It celebrates the art and craft of Hemingway’s quintessential story of the Lost Generation—presented by the Hemingway family with illuminating supplementary material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library.

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is “an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose� (The New York Times).

The Hemingway Library Edition commemorates Hemingway’s classic novel with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author’s sole surviving son, and an introduction by Sean Hemingway, grandson of the author. Hemingway considered the extensive rewriting that he did to shape his first novel the most difficult job of his life. Early drafts, deleted passages, and possible titles included in this new edition elucidate how the author achieved his first great literary masterpiece.]]> 98 Ernest Hemingway Axel 0 3.83 1926
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Axel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1926
rating: 0
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]]> 56015023 This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?]]> 288 Michael Pollan 0593296907 Axel 0 3.86 2021
author: Michael Pollan
name: Axel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/01/05
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]]> 248596 Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.

Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.]]> 293 Ray Bradbury 0380729407 Axel 3 3.91 1962
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Axel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/11
date added: 2021/12/31
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]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Axel 0 3.53 2021
author: Sally Rooney
name: Axel
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/28
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]]> 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 Axel 0 4.46 2018
author: Tara Westover
name: Axel
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Axel 0 4.10 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Axel
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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]]> 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 Axel 0 4.07 1945
author: George Orwell
name: Axel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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]]> 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Axel 0 3.94 2001
author: Ian McEwan
name: Axel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2021/07/28
date added: 2021/07/27
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]]> 52260627
Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters]]> 345 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802157068 Axel 0 3.94 2021
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Axel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/07/27
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]]> 44678031
Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately hope are just funny at worst, and life-changingly amazing at best. (I understand that it’s likely the former, which is a fancy “book� way of saying “the first one.�)

I talk about my grandparents, doing stand-up comedy as a teenager, bar mitzvahs, and Jewish summer camp, and tell way more stories about doing drugs than my mother would like. I also talk about some of my adventures in Los Angeles, and surely say things about other famous people that will create a wildly awkward conversation for me at a party one day.

I hope you enjoy the book should you buy it, and if you don’t enjoy it, I’m sorry. If you ever see me on the street and explain the situation, I’ll do my best to make it up to you.]]> 260 Seth Rogen 1984825402 Axel 0 4.15 2021
author: Seth Rogen
name: Axel
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/14
date added: 2021/06/13
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]]> 223379 60 Ted Chiang 1596061006 Axel 0 4.39 2007
author: Ted Chiang
name: Axel
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2021/06/09
date added: 2021/06/09
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]]> 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 Axel 0 3.71 2021
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Axel
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/04/14
date added: 2021/04/14
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]]> 28920 Librarian note: This a previously-published edition of ISBN 9780571225378.

In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories take on a disturbing cast.]]> 183 Kazuo Ishiguro Axel 0 3.81 1982
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Axel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/03/28
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]]> 42074525
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.]]> 437 N.K. Jemisin Axel 0 to-read 3.83 2020
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Axel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52838315 From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.�

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life.

It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.

Good luck.]]> 289 Matthew McConaughey 0593139135 Axel 2 4.21 2020
author: Matthew McConaughey
name: Axel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 2
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date added: 2021/03/10
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]]> 35297339 A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 150116676X Axel 0 3.43 2018
author: Lisa Halliday
name: Axel
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/08/04
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]]> 22245552 New York Times Bestseller

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long.

In Chasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transgender crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit-man in Mexico searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovery that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade--and it ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results.

Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war--in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial--and consequential--questions of our time.]]> 400 Johann Hari 1620408902 Axel 0 4.50 2015
author: Johann Hari
name: Axel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/07/02
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]]> 203968 512 Elliot Aronson 071675715X Axel 0 to-read 4.30 1972
author: Elliot Aronson
name: Axel
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/06/11
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]]> 133518
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.]]> 246 Tim O'Brien 0767902890 Axel 0 4.14 1990
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Axel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2020/05/05
date added: 2020/05/04
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]]> 25816741
In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem.

Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.]]> 622 Lizzy Goodman 0062233092 Axel 0 4.15 2017
author: Lizzy Goodman
name: Axel
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/04/18
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]]> 5933841 Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dodgy dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .hang on. . .what]]> 369 Thomas Pynchon 1594202249 Axel 4 3.79 2009
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Axel
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/02
date added: 2020/04/01
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]]> 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Axel 0 3.74 2017
author: Sally Rooney
name: Axel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/03/03
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]]> 44581535 In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book� (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.]]> 260 André Aciman 0374155011 Axel 2 3.26 2019
author: André Aciman
name: Axel
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2020/02/19
date added: 2020/02/18
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]]> 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 Axel 0 4.22 2018
author: Madeline Miller
name: Axel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/15
date added: 2020/01/14
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]]> 41817481 Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet’s past and future.

Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.

In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”—the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present—he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place� where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.�

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?� Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.]]> 496 Robert Macfarlane 0393242145 Axel 0 to-read 4.22 2019
author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Axel
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 23168277
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.]]> 371 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802123457 Axel 0 4.00 2015
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Axel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2019/11/23
date added: 2019/11/22
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]]> 421 The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0374532079 Axel 0 4.06 1979
author: Joan Didion
name: Axel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2019/10/10
date added: 2019/10/09
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]]> 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Axel 0 3.81 2018
author: Sally Rooney
name: Axel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/11/14
date added: 2019/09/30
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]]> 315425 The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.,,,]]> 205 Michael Pollan 1594201455 Axel 0 4.07 2008
author: Michael Pollan
name: Axel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2019/09/23
date added: 2019/09/22
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]]> 40538583
In 1999, Hollywood as we know it Fight Club. The Matrix. Office Space. Election. The Blair Witch Project. The Sixth Sense. Being John Malkovich. Star Wars - The Phantom Menace. American Beauty. The Virgin Suicides. Boys Don’t Cry. The Best Man. Three Kings. Magnolia. Those are just some of the landmark titles released in a dizzying movie year, one in which a group of daring filmmakers and performers pushed cinema to new limits—and took audiences along for the ride. Freed from the restraints of budget, technology (or even taste), they produced a slew of classics that took on every topic imaginable, from sex to violence to the end of the world. The result was a highly unruly, deeply influential set of films that would not only change filmmaking, but also give us our first glimpse of the coming twenty-first century. It was a watershed moment that also produced The Sopranos ; Apple’s Airport; Wi-Fi; and Netflix’s unlimited DVD rentals.

Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is the story of not just how these movies were made, but how they re-made our own vision of the world. It features more than 130 new and exclusive interviews with such directors and actors as Reese Witherspoon, Edward Norton, Steven Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Nia Long, Matthew Broderick, Taye Diggs, M. Night Shyamalan, David O. Russell, James Van Der Beek, Kirsten Dunst, the Blair Witch kids, the Office Space dudes, the guy who played Jar-Jar Binks, and dozens more. It’s the definitive account of a culture-conquering movie year none of us saw coming…and that we may never see again.]]> 416 Brian Raftery 1501175386 Axel 0 4.05 2019
author: Brian Raftery
name: Axel
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2019/09/11
date added: 2019/09/10
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]]> 36613747 Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? One of America's most admired writers takes us on a mind-altering journey to the frontiers of human consciousness

When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.]]> 480 Michael Pollan 0241294223 Axel 0 4.25 2018
author: Michael Pollan
name: Axel
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 Axel 0 to-read 4.18 2006
author: Michael Pollan
name: Axel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
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]]> 168642
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.]]> 343 Truman Capote 0679745580 Axel 0 4.08 1966
author: Truman Capote
name: Axel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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]]> 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Axel 0 3.81 1951
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Axel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
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]]> 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

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

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

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]> 509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Axel 5 4.02 2004
author: David Mitchell
name: Axel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/27
date added: 2019/05/27
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]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Axel 0 3.89 2003
author: Mark Haddon
name: Axel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2016/05/03
date added: 2019/05/03
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]]> 30555488
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]> 320 Colson Whitehead 0385542364 Axel 3 4.04 2016
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Axel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2019/05/03
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]]> 22237161
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.]]> 289 Paul Beatty 0374260508 Axel 0 3.75 2015
author: Paul Beatty
name: Axel
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/01
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 41022133 ´ˇĚýNew York Times #1 Bestseller
A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage's best books of the year

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the long-awaited new novel—a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan—from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami.

Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.]]> 308 Haruki Murakami 0385352115 Axel 4 3.93 2013
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Axel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/20
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 40801157
But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone (as her grandmother might say), and Cam becomes an expert at both.

Then Coley Taylor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship--one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to "fix" her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self--even if she's not exactly sure who that is.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and unforgettable literary debut about discovering who you are and finding the courage to live life according to your own rules.]]> 485 Emily M. Danforth Axel 0 4.13 2012
author: Emily M. Danforth
name: Axel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2019/01/30
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 1768603
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life—having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ("Love -- Rape -- Revenge!"), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.

Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.

The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation —and a startling, provocative debut.]]> 276 Aravind Adiga 1416562591 Axel 4 3.76 2008
author: Aravind Adiga
name: Axel
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/20
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

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

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Axel 5 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Axel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/30
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 216363
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.]]> 259 Philip K. Dick 0679740678 Axel 4 3.64 1962
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Axel
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1962
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/04/10
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]]> 4952 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.
-back cover]]> 475 Dave Eggers 1932416641 Axel 0 4.14 2006
author: Dave Eggers
name: Axel
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/09
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]]> 40940205 War and The Perfect Storm, takes a critical look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the many challenges today’s returning veterans face in modern society.

There are ancient tribal human behaviors-loyalty, inter-reliance, cooperation-that flare up in communities during times of turmoil and suffering. These are the very same behaviors that typify good soldiering and foster a sense of belonging among troops, whether they’re fighting on the front lines or engaged in non-combat activities away from the action. Drawing from history, psychology, and anthropology, bestselling author Sebastian Junger shows us just how at odds the structure of modern society is with our tribal instincts, arguing that the difficulties many veterans face upon returning home from war do not stem entirely from the trauma they’ve suffered, but also from the individualist societies they must reintegrate into.

A 2011 study by the Canadian Forces and Statistics Canada reveals that 78 percent of military suicides from 1972 to the end of 2006 involved veterans. Though these numbers present an implicit call to action, the government is only just taking steps now to address the problems veterans face when they return home. But can the government ever truly eliminate the challenges faced by returning veterans? Or is the problem deeper, woven into the very fabric of our modern existence? Perhaps our circumstances are not so bleak, and simply understanding that beneath our modern guises we all belong to one tribe or another would help us face not just the problems of our nation but of our individual lives as well.

Well-researched and compellingly written, this timely look at how veterans react to coming home will reconceive our approach to veteran’s affairs and help us to repair our current social dynamic.]]> 182 Sebastian Junger Axel 4 4.00 2016
author: Sebastian Junger
name: Axel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/03/02
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]]> 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Axel 0 4.04 1942
author: Albert Camus
name: Axel
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/14
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]]> 22522805
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

Included on TIME Magazine's "THE 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME"]]> 317 Kazuo Ishiguro 030727103X Axel 0 3.56 2015
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Axel
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/01
date added: 2018/09/18
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]]> 25089757
Undermajordomo Minor is an ink-black comedy of manners, an adventure, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.]]> 352 Patrick deWitt 1770894144 Axel 4 3.74 2015
author: Patrick deWitt
name: Axel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2018/07/01
date added: 2018/08/21
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]]> 17934530 Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.]]> 195 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104093 Axel 3 3.80 2014
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Axel
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2018/03/11
date added: 2018/06/12
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]]> 298137
Until, that is, Madame Mao's cultural delegates came in search of young peasants to study ballet at the academy in Beijing and he was thrust into a completely unfamiliar world.

When a trip to Texas as part of a rare cultural exchange opened his eyes to life and love beyond China's borders, he defected to the United States in an extraordinary and dramatic tale of Cold War intrigue.

Told in his own distinctive voice, this is Li's inspirational story of how he came to be Mao's last dancer, and one of the world's greatest ballet dancers.]]> 480 Li Cunxin 0425201333 Axel 4 4.13 2003
author: Li Cunxin
name: Axel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/01
date added: 2018/02/27
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]]> 9850443
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters - losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life - and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West, and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.]]> 328 Patrick deWitt 0062041266 Axel 5 3.84 2011
author: Patrick deWitt
name: Axel
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2018/01/01
date added: 2018/02/26
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]]> 16143347 A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.]]> 242 E. Lockhart 0385741278 Axel 4 3.65 2014
author: E. Lockhart
name: Axel
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/02/19
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]]> 16085481
When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn't know is that Nick's family home happens to look like a palace, that she'll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia's most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back.

Initiated into a world of dynastic splendor beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and Eleanor, Nick's formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should—and should not—marry.

Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider's look at the Asian JetSet; a perfect depiction of the clash between old money and new money; between Overseas Chinese and Mainland Chinese; and a fabulous novel about what it means to be young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.]]> 403 Kevin Kwan 0385536976 Axel 4 3.91 2013
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Axel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2018/02/19
date added: 2018/01/30
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]]> 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Axel 4 3.87 2012
author: Maria Semple
name: Axel
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2018/02/07
date added: 2018/01/28
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]]> 2118745
But how do you escape when your pursuers can hear your every thought?]]> 479 Patrick Ness 1406310255 Axel 5 3.95 2008
author: Patrick Ness
name: Axel
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/01/21
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]]> 13480192
As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians.]]> 704 Tom Wolfe 0316036315 Axel 5 3.26 2012
author: Tom Wolfe
name: Axel
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/01/31
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]]> 231804 The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

Librarian note: This record is for one of the three editions published with different covers and with ISBN 0-140-38572-X / 978-0-14-038572-4. The records are for the 1988 cover (this record), the 1995 cover, and the 2008 cover which is also the current in-print cover.]]> 208 S.E. Hinton 0670532576 Axel 4 4.13 1967
author: S.E. Hinton
name: Axel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/01/31
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]]> 5470 328 George Orwell Axel 5 4.15 1949
author: George Orwell
name: Axel
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/01/31
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]]>