Mark's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 05:01:03 -0700 60 Mark's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories]]> 17707691 Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro

Haunted Castles is the definitive, complete collection of Ray Russell's masterful Gothic horror stories, including the famously terrifying novella trio of 'Sardonicus', 'Sanguinarius', and 'Sagittarius'. The characters that sprawl through Haunted Castles are frightful to the core: the heartless monster holding two lovers in limbo; the beautiful dame journeying down a damned road toward depravity (with the help of an evil gypsy); the man who must wear his fatal crimes on his face in the form of an awful smile. Engrossing, grotesque, perverted, and completely entrancing, Russell's Gothic tales are the best kind of dreadful.]]> 235 Ray Russell 0143124013 Mark 0 currently-reading 4.06 1985 Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
author: Ray Russell
name: Mark
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Night and Day in Misery (The Shivers Collection, #4)]]> 229214163 USA Today bestselling author Catriona Ward.

Room 17 was the last stop on her husband and son’s journey. Eight years after their deaths, Stella books the same room, hoping to commune with their memories. But as she tries to sleep, disturbing and urgent visions blur the lines between reality and the supernatural, and the other side sends a terrifying message.

Catriona Ward’s Night and Day in Misery is part of The Shivers, a collection of haunting stories that reveal the otherworldly terrors all around us. Once you know, there’s no going back. Read or listen to each story in one unsettling sitting.]]> 35 Catriona Ward 1662532806 Mark 5 3.79 Night and Day in Misery (The Shivers Collection, #4)
author: Catriona Ward
name: Mark
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
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]]> Four Squares 199426316
Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.

Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.

Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.]]> 336 Bobby Finger 0593713559 Mark 3 3.97 Four Squares
author: Bobby Finger
name: Mark
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
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3.5 stars for this mild-mannered story stressing the importance of making and keeping connections with people. Somewhat lighter than I hoped; I would have liked more intensity.
]]> The Frozen River 112975658 A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

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

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

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546874 Mark 5 4.37 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Mark
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
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Very well written page Turner set in a 1790s and based on a actual murder in a village in Maine. The main character, a midwife, is the narrator and is an admirable character
]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Mark 4 3.77 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Mark
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
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Well, written character study of four close friends in their 20s over a weekend as they examine their lives, goals and sexual identities. This book has a lot of aspects of a soap opera but the good character development redeemed it. It was slow the first half but improved the second half.
]]> <![CDATA[Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance � award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film � Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future � and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team � well trained but eccentric � has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch� somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 Mark 0 currently-reading 3.61 2024 Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Mark
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[The Indigo Room (The Shivers Collection, #2)]]> 229214157 New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

When the lights go out and the slideshow begins, middle manager Jennifer has a disturbing a headless colleague right across the boardroom table. Is it a trick of the light, or a vision of the future? She tries to brush it off and salvage the afternoon—but when her ex unexpectedly drops off her son at the office after school, suddenly her whole world takes an alarming turn.

Stephen Graham Jones’s The Indigo Room is part of The Shivers, a collection of haunting stories that reveal the otherworldly terrors all around us. Once you know, there’s no going back. Read or listen to each story in one unsettling sitting.]]> 36 Stephen Graham Jones 1662532180 Mark 3 3.02 2025 The Indigo Room (The Shivers Collection, #2)
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Mark
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Mark 5 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Mark
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Mark 5 4.18 1985 Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Mark
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain]]> 6163 All the Pretty Horses and continuing through The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy chronicles the lives of two young men coming of age in the Southwest and Mexico, poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier.]]> 1020 Cormac McCarthy 0375407936 Mark 0 to-read 4.48 1998 The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Mark
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> Suttree 394469 471 Cormac McCarthy 0679736328 Mark 0 to-read 4.20 1979 Suttree
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Mark
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Mighty Red 199793431
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Mark 3 3.78 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Mark
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
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review:
3.5 stars which really surprises me because I love this author and have read many of her books. This book has won many awards, but I just felt it needed to be more intense. This book seemed to lack her theme of social justice somewhat compared to her other books. Like all her books, her characters Were very believable as just common everyday people. Her books are never action packed , and plot is never their strength. It’s her fantastic character development that, to me , make her books a success. This book was entertaining to read, but , just to me ,didn’t seem to generate as much interest as her other books have.
]]> <![CDATA[Letter Slot (The Shivers Collection, #5)]]> 229214160 New York Times bestselling author Owen King, the cost of living keeps rising—and it collects payment from the soul.

Sensing his mother’s failing health, a struggling teenager pours out his worries in a letter and drops it through the mail slot of an abandoned show house. He’s surprised when a response arrives, promising good fortune for the price of just one someone he hates. He’d give anything for his mother. But the true cost may be more than he’s willing to pay.

Owen King’s Letter Slot is part of The Shivers, a collection of haunting stories that reveal the otherworldly terrors all around us. Once you know, there’s no going back. Read or listen to each story in one unsettling sitting.]]> 46 Owen King 1662531567 Mark 5 3.94 Letter Slot (The Shivers Collection, #5)
author: Owen King
name: Mark
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Blanks (The Shivers Collection, #3)]]> 229214159 New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix’s thrilling short story, one boy can’t look away—and pays the price.

Jeckle Island offers Rachel’s children the chance to spend summers roaming wild and free, as long as they follow the rules. But when her son comes face to face with a terror they dare not speak of, she must prepare for their perfect world to change. Forever.

Grady Hendrix’s The Blanks is part of The Shivers, a collection of haunting stories that reveal the otherworldly terrors all around us. Once you know, there’s no going back. Read or listen to each story in one unsettling sitting.]]> 36 Grady Hendrix 1662532407 Mark 5 4.06 2025 The Blanks (The Shivers Collection, #3)
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Mark
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> Unwind (Unwind, #1) 764347 Connor, Risa, and Lev are running for their lives.

The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, a ward of the state, is not enough to be kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. Together, they may have a chance to escape and to survive.]]> 337 Neal Shusterman Mark 4 4.17 2007 Unwind (Unwind, #1)
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Mark
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> The Storyteller 15753740
Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.

Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret—one that nobody else in town would ever suspect—and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?

In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future]]> 461 Jodi Picoult 1439102767 Mark 0 to-read 4.28 2013 The Storyteller
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Mark
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> Mother Naked 213661136 The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men.

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

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

Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls, ‘Modyr Nakett� was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.]]> 256 Glen James Brown 1913512487 Mark 2 4.42 Mother Naked
author: Glen James Brown
name: Mark
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/22
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Great reviews but this book just never took off for me.
]]> The Bones Beneath My Skin 211004023 A spine-tingling thriller by New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, about a 10-year-old girl with an impossible power, her father, and an unlikely stranger, who come together to confront the dangerous forces that want her at all costs. A strange story of family, love, comets, and bacon. Perfect for fans of Stranger Things.

In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his older brother wants nothing to do with him, and he's been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington DC. With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family's summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not. Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary little girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn't exactly as she appears.

Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 416 T.J. Klune 1250890438 Mark 5 4.11 2018 The Bones Beneath My Skin
author: T.J. Klune
name: Mark
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
review:
Much darker, but much more action pack than his best selling books. Some trademarks still are present, namely same-sex romance and heartfelt magic.
]]> The Language of Remembering 221311470 Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery and as past traumas are exposed, they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are.
The Language of Remembering asks how we connect to the people we love and how we move on from the past to find meaning in the present.]]> 242 Patrick Holloway 1739188195 Mark 0 to-read 4.33 The Language of Remembering
author: Patrick Holloway
name: Mark
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Mark 5 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Mark
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves:
review:
4.5stars. I probably could’ve gone to five stars, but I felt the book was a little draggy in places. As usual this author has fantastic character development, and this book is certainly set up to be a trilogy. If you haven’t read the wonderful book Brooklyn, that’s OK because this book would be OK as a standalone book. To me this author always comes through with well written literary fiction that moves slowly, but every page has high-quality.
]]> Under the Eye of the Big Bird 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Mark 0 to-read 3.77 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Mark
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> From the Terrace 180936 912 John O'Hara 0786706821 Mark 0 to-read 3.93 1958 From the Terrace
author: John O'Hara
name: Mark
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic]]> 54823166 A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s “The Decameron.�

When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote “The Decameron�: one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables.

In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction?

These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory.

Table of Contents:
“Preface� by Caitlin Roper
“Introduction� by Rivka Galchen
“Recognition� by Victor LaValle
“A Blue Sky Like This� by Mona Awad
“The Walk� by Kamila Shamsie
“Tales from the LA River� by Colm Tóibín
“Clinical Notes� by Liz Moore
“The Team� by Tommy Orange
“The Rock� by Leila Slimani
“Impatient Griselda� by Margaret Atwood
“Under the Magnolia� by Yiyun Li
“Outside� by Etgar Keret
“Keepsakes� by Andrew O’Hagan
“The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase� by Rachel Kushner
“The Morningside� by Téa Obreht
“Screen Time� by Alejandro Zambra
“How We Used to Play� by Dinaw Mengestu
“Line 19 Woodstock/Glisan� by Karen Russell
“If Wishes Was Horses� by David Mitchell
“Systems� by Charles Yu
“The Perfect Travel Buddy� by Paolo Giordano
“An Obliging Robber� by Mia Cuoto
“Sleep� by Uzodinma Iweala
“Prudent Girls� by Rivers Solomon
“That Time at My Brother’s Wedding� by Laila Lalami
“A Time of Death, The Death of Time� by Julián Fuks
“The Cellar� by Dina Nayeli
“Origin Story� by Matthew Baker
“To the Wall� by Esi Edugyan
“Barcelona: Open City� by John Wray
“One Thing� by Edwidge Danticat]]> 297 The New York Times 1982170794 Mark 2 3.58 2020 The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic
author: The New York Times
name: Mark
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
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review:
The stories in this anthology were hit and miss in my opinion
]]> Devotion 57865361 Prussia, 1836. Hanne is nearly fifteen and the domestic world of womanhood is quickly closing in on her. A child of nature, she yearns instead for the rush of the river, the wind dancing around her. Hanne finds little comfort in the local girls and friendship doesn't come easily, until she meets Thea and she finds in her a kindred spirit and finally, acceptance.

Hanne's family are Old Lutherans, and in her small village hushed worship is done secretly - this is a community under threat. But when they are granted safe passage to Australia, the community rejoices: at last a place they can pray without fear, a permanent home. Freedom.

It's a promise of freedom that will have devastating consequences for Hanne and Thea, but, on that long and brutal journey, their bond proves too strong for even nature to break...]]> 432 Hannah Kent 1509863915 Mark 0 to-read 3.83 2021 Devotion
author: Hannah Kent
name: Mark
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Burial Rites 17333319
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard.

Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?]]> 336 Hannah Kent 0316243914 Mark 0 to-read 4.00 2013 Burial Rites
author: Hannah Kent
name: Mark
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Mark 5 3.94 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Mark
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
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review:
4.5 stars for this creative plot that deals with class struggle and racism in both China during the cultural revolution and current times in America. This book, which is a Jenna book group choice, deals with three generations of a family. Very good character development.
]]> Out 25365
The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of Out and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako's own search for a way out of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan's yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a Thelma and Louise kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.]]> 400 Natsuo Kirino 1400078377 Mark 5 3.95 1997 Out
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Mark
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for this award-winning book I heard about on book tube. A major best seller in Japan, this book is dark crime fiction. That is very interesting. I never read crime fiction, but I really enjoyed this book because it wasn’t too intense but had lots of good character development. The four main characters are down in their luck women who work the night shift at a box lunch factory. They are just average people who get trapped in a nightmare scenario by one impulsive choice. Even though this book is overwhelmingly crime fiction, it does a good job of showing the struggles of the under class and people just trying to make their way through life. Seriously I’m surprised how much I enjoy this book. I could be convinced to give it five stars.
]]> Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) 6088007 Neuromancer is a cyberpunk, science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.

The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace...

Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.]]> 288 William Gibson Mark 0 to-read 3.94 1984 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)
author: William Gibson
name: Mark
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Journeyman (The Commons, #1)]]> 22558396
And so begins the battle for the afterlife, known as The Commons. It’s been taken over by a corporate raider who uses the energy of its souls to maintain his brutal control. The result is an imaginary landscape of a broken America—stuck in time and overrun by the heroes, monsters, dreams, and nightmares of the imprisoned dead.

Three people board a bus to nowhere: a New York street kid, an Iraq War veteran, and her five-year-old special-needs son. After a horrific accident, they are the last, best hope for The Commons to free itself. Along for the ride are a shotgun-toting goth girl, a six-foot-six mummy, a mute Shaolin monk with anger-management issues, and the only guide left to lead them.

Three Journeys: separate but joined. One mission: to save forever.

But first they have to save themselves.]]> 315 Michael Alan Peck 0986082309 Mark 4 4.30 2014 The Journeyman (The Commons, #1)
author: Michael Alan Peck
name: Mark
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves:
review:
The first 3/4 of this book, which I heard about on Booktube and wasn’t available at the library or Libby,was fantastic! Very imaginative and gripping. Excellent world-building and good character development. Well written. Then I began to grow tired of the constant action-packed challenges the “good guys� faced as they fought evil. Still, I think many would enjoy this book that sort of reminds me of Swan Song by McCammon and also of Stephen King books. A caution though is that this is the first book in a trilogy—not sure if I will continue, only because my TBR is so huge.
]]> The Book Censor's Library 175678711
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 Mark 0 to-read 3.93 2019 The Book Censor's Library
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Mark
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> All Down Darkness Wide 59575964 A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.]]> 240 Seán Hewitt 0593300084 Mark 0 to-read 4.16 2022 All Down Darkness Wide
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Mark
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Open, Heaven 216522629 A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.]]> 224 Seán Hewitt 0593802845 Mark 0 to-read 4.18 2025 Open, Heaven
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Mark
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)]]> 68520 431 Bernard Cornwell Mark 0 to-read 4.27 1994 The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)
author: Bernard Cornwell
name: Mark
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World]]> 10374 Lord Jim.

Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.]]> 400 Haruki Murakami Mark 0 to-read 4.14 1985 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Mark
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Incidents Around the House 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’sMommy,Daddo,and Grandma Ruth.But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”�

When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.

Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.

But Other Mommy needs an answer.

Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]> 367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Mark 4 3.61 2024 Incidents Around the House
author: Josh Malerman
name: Mark
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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review:
Interesting in and entertaining, but kind of run of the mill. Therefore, I can’t give it a strong recommendation.
]]> Playthings 26201833 235 Alex Pheby 1910296473 Mark 4 3.92 2015 Playthings
author: Alex Pheby
name: Mark
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves:
review:
I really found this book to be interesting. Based on a real schizophrenic’s life —he actually wrote a disjointed memoir—this book compassionately provides a snapshot of an upper middle class husband and father trying to be cured in an asylum. Set in 1900-1910, the treatment is not state of the art. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator who has strange episode and who readers will back. Freud even studied this person’s illness. Worthwhile and educational read!
]]> The Familiar 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

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

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

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]> 387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X Mark 3 3.74 2024 The Familiar
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Mark
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:
In spite of rather excellent reviews, this book just didn’t do it for me. I found it slow and meandering. I enjoyed the historical time period said in Spain, but I just felt the book really lacked an intensity. From overall reviews on ŷ and Amazon, I am in the minority.
]]> Notes from the Underground 436982 Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov � Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821�1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes � moral, religious, political and social � that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works. Notes from the Underground, then, aside from its own compelling qualities, offers readers an ideal introduction to the creative imagination, profundity and uncanny psychological penetration of one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction.]]> 96 Fyodor Dostoevsky Mark 0 to-read 4.09 1864 Notes from the Underground
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Mark
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1864
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Murder at Gulls Nest (Nora Breen Investigates #1)]]> 214151311 A cozy mystery series about a former nun who searches for answers in a small seaside town after her pen pal mysteriously disappears

1954: When her former novice’s dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda’s letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent. A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests—but when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it’s time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.]]> 325 Jess Kidd 1668034034 Mark 0 to-read 3.89 2025 Murder at Gulls Nest (Nora Breen Investigates #1)
author: Jess Kidd
name: Mark
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Interestings 15815333
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.]]> 468 Meg Wolitzer 1594488398 Mark 4 3.58 2013 The Interestings
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Mark
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
I bought this book when it came out in 2014 and probably the most informative thing I can say about it is that it was a ŷ choice nominate, so you know it was good. I’m glad I finally read it because it was very well written with great character development about a group of high school friends going through life. It was a worthwhile and enjoyable read, but yet I’m not gonna highly recommend it because it’s similar to many books we’ve all read. So I guess my main point is it’s not the most creative book but is definitely a worthwhile read.
]]> People of the Book 1379961 The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war.
Inspired by a true story, "People of the Book" is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author.
Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.

When it falls to Australian rare book expert Hanna Heath to conserve this priceless work, the tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—a butterfly wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock the book’s deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
]]> 372 Geraldine Brooks 067001821X Mark 5 4.02 2008 People of the Book
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Mark
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
I think all of the books this author has written have been excellent. She’s one of my favorite authors.
]]> Burn 202102018 From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence

Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital.

But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men—secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell—as they seek a path to safety. Then, a startling discovery drastically alters their path and the stakes of their escape.

Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families.]]> 291 Peter Heller 0593801628 Mark 3 3.51 2024 Burn
author: Peter Heller
name: Mark
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
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Even though this book is an Amazon best book of the month and I’ve enjoyed this author‘s previous books, I reluctantly say this book did not work for me as as well as as his other books did. The ending was abrupt, which makes me think a sequel could be coming, and the author left way too many unanswered questions. Usually, I love character development, but in this book, I was frustrated that the author often left the present action-packed , dystopian present to delve into the backstory of the two characters. I think the book would’ve been much better if the author would’ve Kept the plot focused on the present, which had a creative storyline, even though it could be considered to be far fetched.
]]> Cloud Cuckoo Land 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Mark 5 4.24 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Mark
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves:
review:
I’m so glad I finish this book because I consider reading it an accomplishment. It’s been on my list forever and this book definitely involves work to read. It involves five main characters over various timelines and historical periods. In the beginning, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on, but I knew From reviews to stick with it. The more you read the better the book gets. In some ways, it is a clever masterpiece. If you like CLOUD ATLAS, you will like this book. Because this book also deals with a manuscript written around 100 BC in Greece in this book influences events clear up to the 2150s, it also reminded me of the book.THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK by Geraldine Brooks. To me this book had memorable characters can I have definitely glad I read it because it was so creatively written. It’s 627 pages so many readers will not wanna bother with this book. I definitely do recommend this book though for people that like a challenging read
]]> <![CDATA[Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)]]> 199347538 Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges!

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.

He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.]]> 416 T.J. Klune 125088120X Mark 4 4.17 2024 Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)
author: T.J. Klune
name: Mark
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:
I certainly enjoyed this sequel, but not as much as the original. In some ways, I felt this book was too much like the plot of the original and at times a little bit too saccharin. Still though, I did like the harder edge appearing sometimes when the book dealt with the political ramifications of the trans community and championed DEI. I kind of wished the author would’ve dealt more with Arthur’s childhood and parents so the book would’ve been a little bit less of a rehash of a wonderful family on the island. I would highly recommend reading this book on the audio version because the narrator is fantastic and really brings out the comedic aspect of the book
]]> 33 Place Brugmann 214339548 “Beautiful and deeply engaging."—Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel—a love story, mystery, and philosophical puzzle—told in the singular voices of the residents of a Beaux Arts apartment building in Belgium in 1939

On the eve of the occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever.

Art student Charlotte Sauvin, daughter of a prominent architect in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls and voices echo, the distinct knock of her dearest friend, Julian Raphaël, the eldest son of an art collector’s family across the hall in 4R. But all that’s familiar for Charlotte and the other residents of 33 starts to fracture as whispers of Nazi occupation become reality. The Raphaëls disappear—becoming refugees, nurses, soldiers, reluctant heroes. Masha, the seamstress on the 5th floor, deepens a dangerous affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3R, a man far less feckless than he’d have his neighbors believe. In the face of a perilous new reality, every member of this accidental community will discover they are not the person they believed themselves to be. When confronted with a cruel choice—submit to the regime or risk their lives to resist—each discovers the truth about what, and who, matters to them the most.

33 Place Brugmann is a deeply empathetic and disarmingly hopeful tour-de-force about love, courage, and the role of art in a time of threat]]> 368 Alice Austen 0802164080 Mark 0 to-read 3.75 2025 33 Place Brugmann
author: Alice Austen
name: Mark
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Twist 215361877
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.]]> 256 Colum McCann 0593241738 Mark 0 to-read 3.75 2025 Twist
author: Colum McCann
name: Mark
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Act of Disappearing 146145936 —Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue

“A thrilling story, remarkably told.�
—Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept

Julia White is struggling: her bartending job isn’t cutting it and her first book has sold hardly any copies. She’s broke, barely able to make ends meet while drowning in her late mother’s medical bills and reeling after a one-night stand with her ex-boyfriend, who’s now completely ghosted her. Enter Johnathan Aster, world-renowned photographer, with a proposal: he has a never-before-seen photograph of a woman falling from a train bridge, clutching what appears to be a baby. And he wants Julia to research the story.

Alternating between present-day Brooklyn and Kentucky as it enters the 1960s, the story unfolds as Julia races to find answers: Who was the woman in the photograph? Why was she on the bridge? And what happened to the baby? Each detail is more propulsive than the last as Julia unravels the mystery surrounding the Fairchilds of Gray Station and discovers a story more staggering than anything she could have imagined.]]> 400 Nathan Gower 0778369544 Mark 0 to-read 4.27 2024 The Act of Disappearing
author: Nathan Gower
name: Mark
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Shards 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Mark 4 3.98 2023 The Shards
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Mark
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
review:
Perhaps 4.5 stars even, but this somewhat surreal book about a closeted, hedonistic high school senior caught up in a murder mystery concerning a high school student and some murders in the LA area by a serial killer was a little too long. It was a few pages short of 600 pages and I felt some of the interaction with the high school friends group could’ve been condensed. Still this book is a page Turner and keeps you guessing clear to the end, and even at the end you’re not sure exactly who the murderer was. From the author of American psycho, this book is being made into a movie on Max.
]]> King Sorrow 223420465
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.

But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.]]> 896 Joe Hill 0062200607 Mark 0 to-read 4.50 2025 King Sorrow
author: Joe Hill
name: Mark
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nesting 214175077 An extraordinary and urgent debut by a prize-winning Irish writer, Nesting introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control � and what will be the cost?

Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.]]> 400 Roisín O’Donnell 1643755706 Mark 0 to-read 4.28 2025 Nesting
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Mark
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb]]> 9689093 Alice I Have Been, Melanie Benjamin imagined the life of the woman who inspired Alice in Wonderland. Now, in this jubilant new novel, Benjamin shines a dazzling spotlight on another fascinating female figure whose story has never fully been told: a woman who became a nineteenth century icon and inspiration - and whose most daunting limitation became her greatest strength.

"Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead, I would define it."

She was only two-foot eight-inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P. T. Barnum, married the tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century, and transformed into the world's most unexpected celebrity.

Here, in Vinnie's singular and spirited voice, is her amazing adventure - from a showboat "freak" revue where she endured jeering mobs to her fateful meeting with the two men who would change her life: P. T. Barnum and Charles Stratton, AKA Tom Thumb. Their wedding would captivate the nation, preempt coverage of the Civil War, and usher them into the White House and the company of presidents and queens. But Vinnie's fame would also endanger the person she prized most: her similarly-sized sister, Minnie, a gentle soul unable to escape the glare of Vinnie's spotlight.

A barnstorming novel of the Gilded Age, and of a woman's public triumphs and personal tragedies, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb is the irresistible epic of a heroine who conquered the country with a heart as big as her dreams - and whose story will surely win over yours.]]> 424 Melanie Benjamin 0385344155 Mark 4 3.69 2011 The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb
author: Melanie Benjamin
name: Mark
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
I bought this book years ago and finally got around to reading it, and you know, it actually turned out to be a pretty good book! What a colorful character, Mrs. Tom Thumb was, and her life was definitely interesting. If you like historical fiction about people you don’t know much about, I would suggest this book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Girl With All the Gifts: Extended Free Preview]]> 19418277 Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh.

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

The Girl With All the Gifts is a sensational thriller, perfect for fans of Stephen King, Justin Cronin and Neil Gaiman.

]]> M.R. Carey Mark 4 4.5 stars. 3.98 The Girl With All the Gifts: Extended Free Preview
author: M.R. Carey
name: Mark
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars.
]]> Once Was Willem 212987930 From the bestselling author M. R. Carey comes an utterly unique and enchantingly dark epic fantasy fable like no other.

This is the tale of Once Was Willem, who - eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England - rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham.

Pennick for all its beauty was ever a place with a dark reputation. The forests of the Chase were said to be home to nixies and boggarts, and there was a common belief, passed down through many generations, that the castle housed an unquiet ghost of terrible and malign power. These rumours I can attest were all true; indeed they fell short of the truth by a long way . . .]]> 310 M.R. Carey 0316505129 Mark 0 to-read 4.10 2025 Once Was Willem
author: M.R. Carey
name: Mark
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Choke 29059 Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times.

Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved� by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him.

When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park.

His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, renowned author of classics like Fight Club, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.]]> 293 Chuck Palahniuk 0385720920 Mark 0 to-read 3.71 2001 Choke
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Mark
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Haunted 22288
The stories are told by people who have all answered an ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.]]> 419 Chuck Palahniuk 1400032822 Mark 0 to-read 3.60 2005 Haunted
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Mark
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Uncle Silas 49190 477 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 0140437460 Mark 0 to-read 3.75 1864 Uncle Silas
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Mark
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1864
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Carmilla 48037
But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day� Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.]]> 108 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 0809510839 Mark 0 to-read 3.88 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Mark
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1872
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On the Savage Side 61153745 Six women--mothers, daughters, sisters--gone missing. When the first is found floating dead in the river, it reveals the disturbing truth of a small Ohio town. Inspired by the unsolved murders of the Chillicothe Six, this harrowing and haunting novel tells the story of two sisters, both of whom could be the next victims, from the internationally-bestselling author of Betty.

Arcade and Daffodil are twin sisters born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for an escape, they forge an unbreakable bond nurtured by both their grandmother's stories and their imaginations. Together, they create a world where a patch of grass reveals an archaeologist's dig, the smoke emerging from the local paper mill becomes the dust rising from wild horses galloping on the ground, and an abandoned 1950s convertible transforms into a time machine that can take them anywhere.

But the two sisters can't escape the generational chaos that grips their family. Growing up in the shadow of the town, the sisters cling tight to one another. As an adult, Arcade wrestles with these memories of her life, just as a local woman is discovered drowned in the river. Soon, more bodies are found. While her friends disappear around her, Arcade is forced to reckon with the past while the killer circles ever closer. Arcade's promise to keep herself and her sister safe becomes increasingly desperate while the powerful riptide of the savage side becomes more difficult to resist.

Drawing from the true story of women killed in her native Ohio, acclaimed novelist and poet Tiffany McDaniel has written a powerful literary testament and fearless elegy for missing women everywhere.]]> 464 Tiffany McDaniel 0593320700 Mark 5 3.98 2023 On the Savage Side
author: Tiffany McDaniel
name: Mark
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for this book written by one of my favorite authors. I’ve read all three of her books, and this recent one, though I must say it’s slightly my least favorite of the three. As with all her books, this author delivers a gut punch to the reader with characters that are on the gritty side of society. They are good people making very bad decisions. Drugs and poverty weigh these people down. The book basically deals with the two main characters who are twin sisters, who are very close, who live with their totally dysfunctional, mother and aunt. These twins, develop a close set of friendships in this broken downtown with women, who like they are, are prostitutes. These two sisters, whom we meet as a little girls grow into adulthood and present struggles that gives them a poignancy and dignity. In all three of this author’s books, I’ve been impressed with the lyrical writing. This author just has a way with words. Her second book Betty, is fantastic and her first book,The Summer that Melted Everything, I also loved. If you are a reader who does not like books that deal with tragedy and despair, you may want to skip this author, Betty, however, has remained one of my favorite books.
]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Wisdom of the Earth]]> 22217702
Medgar is beset by a massive mountaintop removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the "company" and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Buzzy witnesses a brutal hate crime, a sequence is set in play that tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.]]> 466 Christopher Scotton 1455551929 Mark 5 4.09 2015 The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
author: Christopher Scotton
name: Mark
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:
There was just so much about this book I enjoyed! It can be so many things to different readers: it’s a coming-of-age story set the 60s or 70s, it deals with a hate crime, it set in a town in Appalachia Kentucky that seems Andy Griffith could live there, it shows a family torn apart from a horrific death in the family, it deals with environmental issues caused from coal mining, and finally it’s a murder mystery. Since the main character is a 14-year-old boy, this would be a great YA book. I also could see book groups liking this that tend to like more easy, non-intense reads. All this being said, this book struck me as a somewhat wholesome book reflecting a bygone era. I’m surprised this book has not been made into a movie.
]]> <![CDATA[The Exorcist's House (The Exorcist's House, #1)]]> 60718943
Along with his wife, Nora, and their teenage daughter, Alice, the family uproots their lives in Ohio and moves south. At first, they are seduced by the natural beauty of the farm and enjoy the bonding experience of fixing the old house, but that all changes when they discover a hidden room in the basement with a well, boarded shut and adorned with crucifixes.

Local legends about the previous owner’s predilection for performing exorcisms come to light, but by then, all Hell has broken loose.]]> 287 Nick Roberts Mark 0 to-read 3.93 2022 The Exorcist's House (The Exorcist's House, #1)
author: Nick Roberts
name: Mark
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45]]> 978689
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.

They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.� “These ten men were not men of distinction,� Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.

A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.]]> 346 Milton Sanford Mayer 0226511928 Mark 3 4.14 1955 They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
author: Milton Sanford Mayer
name: Mark
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1955
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves:
review:
Excellent book for showing how gradually a totalitarian state can be implemented. I would have enjoyed the book better if it would have dealt with fewer than 10 test subjects.
]]> Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 14201
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke Mark 5 3.84 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Mark
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1)]]> 51862863 A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians is a genre-defying story of magic, war, and the struggle for freedom in the early modern world.

It is the Age of Enlightenment -- of new and magical political movements, from the necromancer Robespierre calling for revolution in France to the weather mage Toussaint L'Ouverture leading the slaves of Haiti in their fight for freedom, to the bold new Prime Minister William Pitt weighing the legalization of magic amongst commoners in Britain and abolition throughout its colonies overseas.

But amidst all of the upheaval of the early modern world, there is an unknown force inciting all of human civilization into violent conflict. And it will require the combined efforts of revolutionaries, magicians, and abolitionists to unmask this hidden enemy before the whole world falls to darkness and chaos.]]> 531 H.G. Parry 0316459089 Mark 4 3.73 2020 A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1)
author: H.G. Parry
name: Mark
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:
Not sure whether to give this book 4 or 4.5 stars. If you like the book, Jonathan strange and Mr. Norrell , you will definitely like this book as they are very similar. Both are big books and deal with the use of magic to explain the events that occurred during the French revolution. This book brings in the politics also of England and the French colony of Haiti at the time. It probably uses less magic than the other book and is more historical fiction novel. Still, it is unique and very interesting how it ties the three countriies� tumultuous events together. Since I love the period of the French revolution and also magical realism, this book was a plus for me, although it was a little long.
]]> The Heart of Winter 211025449
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.

But when Ruth’s loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they’ve created together comes to a crisis. As Ruth struggles with her crumbling independence, Abe must learn how to take care of her while their three living children question his ability to look after his wife. And once again, the couple has to reconfigure how to be there for each other.

In this bighearted and profound portrait of a marriage, Jonathan Evison explores seventy years of big moments in subtle ways, elegantly braiding the Winters� turbulent history with their present-day battles, showing us how the oddly paired college kids became parents, fell apart and back together, andgrew into the Abe and Ruth of today. Endlessly heartwarming and moving, The Heart of Winter is a reminder that true love lives in small, everyday moments.]]> 368 Jonathan Evison 059347354X Mark 0 to-read 4.10 2025 The Heart of Winter
author: Jonathan Evison
name: Mark
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest]]> 208971054
Set against the backdrop of Lynchburg, Tennessee, this narrative weaves together a thrilling blend of personal discovery, historical investigation, and the revelation of a story long overshadowed by time. Through extensive research, personal interviews, and the uncovering of long-buried documents, Weaver brings to light not only the remarkable bond between Nearest Green and Jack Daniel but also Daniel’s concerted efforts during his lifetime to ensure Green’s legacy would not be forgotten. This deep respect for his teacher, mentor, and friend was mirrored in Jack's dedication to ensuring that the stories and achievements of Nearest Green's descendants, who continued the tradition of working side by side with Jack and his descendants, would also not be forgotten.

Love & Whiskey is more than just a recounting of historical facts; it's a live journey into the heart of storytelling, where every discovery adds a layer to the rich tapestry of American history. Weaver's pursuit highlights the importance of acknowledging those who have shaped our cultural landscape; yet remained in the shadows.]]> 376 Fawn Weaver 1595911340 Mark 3 3.99 2024 Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest
author: Fawn Weaver
name: Mark
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves:
review:
I’m glad I read this book because I enjoyed learning about Nearest Green. My disappointment was that there really is next to nothing known about Nearest and the book turned out to be mostly the author’s method of researching his life and descendants, and starting a highly successful whiskey business based on Nearest’s legacy. A plus was seeing how the black and white men were lifelong friends.
]]> Briefly Very Beautiful 195660436
In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war. His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children; while it’s a frightening time, there is also a surprising, quiet tenderness in living on the edge of societal collapse. When things start to feel more dangerous in the city, Cass evacuates with the children to her mother-in-law’s house deep in the countryside. Initially, it’s a place of safety, but her mother-in-law’s erratic behavior and increasing grip over the children worries Cass, and so they flee again to a commune on the coast. It’s an idyllic place, but Cass comes to suspect this seemingly harmonious community has a dark underbelly.

Briefly Very Beautiful is a magnetic novel about love and resilience. Against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, it is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal. Roz Dineen’s lush prose combines with epic and precise world-building to create a society that feels at once unrecognizable but deeply, chillingly familiar. The result is a compelling portrait of what it is to parent through apocalypse.]]> 336 Roz Dineen 141976795X Mark 0 to-read 3.70 2024 Briefly Very Beautiful
author: Roz Dineen
name: Mark
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post]]> 58018175
Mrs. Post, the President and First Lady are here to see you. . . . So begins another average evening for Marjorie Merriweather Post. Presidents have come and gone, but she has hosted them all. Growing up in the modest farmlands of Battle Creek, Michigan, Marjorie was inspired by a few simple rules: always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard—even when deemed American royalty, even while covered in imperial diamonds. Marjorie had an insatiable drive to live and love and to give more than she got. From crawling through Moscow warehouses to rescue the Tsar’s treasures to outrunning the Nazis in London, from serving the homeless of the Great Depression to entertaining Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Hollywood’s biggest stars, Marjorie Merriweather Post lived an epic life few could imagine.

Marjorie’s journey began gluing cereal boxes in her father’s barn as a young girl. No one could have predicted that C. W. Post’s Cereal Company would grow into the General Foods empire and reshape the American way of life, with Marjorie as its heiress and leading lady. Not content to stay in her prescribed roles of high-society wife, mother, and hostess, Marjorie dared to demand more, making history in the process. Before turning thirty she amassed millions, becoming the wealthiest woman in the United States. But it was her life-force, advocacy, passion, and adventurous spirit that led to her stunning legacy.

And yet Marjorie’s story, though full of beauty and grandeur, set in the palatial homes she built such as Mar-a-Lago, was equally marked by challenge and tumult. A wife four times over, Marjorie sought her happily-ever-after with the blue-blooded party boy who could not outrun his demons, the charismatic financier whose charm turned to betrayal, the international diplomat with a dark side, and the bon vivant whose shocking secrets would shake Marjorie and all of society. Marjorie did everything on a grand scale, especially when it came to love.

Bestselling and acclaimed author Allison Pataki has crafted an intimate portrait of a larger-than-life woman, a powerful story of one woman falling in love with her own voice and embracing her own power while shaping history in the process.]]> 400 Allison Pataki Mark 5 4.33 2022 The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post
author: Allison Pataki
name: Mark
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
I really enjoyed this novel/biography. It was a comfortable read about an amazing, interesting woman. The whole book was interesting. Recommended for almost all readers.
]]> Rose/House 214143824 Rose/House is a breathtaking and taut sci-fi gothic thriller from Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire.

“I’m a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die?�

All of Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted. Rose House, his final architectural triumph built in the remote Mojave desert, was perhaps the most.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing. But a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every crevice and corner with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. That is Rose House.

When Detective Maritza Smith gets a call from Rose House, she’s shocked to learn that there is a dead body behind its sealed-up door. Everybody in town knows it’s haunted. But Basit died more than a year ago, and everybody also knows that only his former protege, Dr. Selene Gisil, is permitted inside. But Selene wasn’t in the country when Rose House called in the death. Who is the dead body? How did they get in? And who—or what—killed them?

The answers lie within the labyrinthine halls of Rose House. But even if Martiza can get inside, there is no guarantee she will ever be able to leave ...

Also by Arkady Martine:
A Memory Called Empire
A Desolation Called Peace

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 115 Arkady Martine Mark 4 3.63 2023 Rose/House
author: Arkady Martine
name: Mark
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
Maybe up to 4.5 stars for this novella, which is one of the 4 finalists for the 2024 Hugo Award for best sci fi novel, mainly because it was so atmospheric and affecting. It’s a combination murder mystery, gothic somewhat horror story, and a glimpse of the future when A I has control.
]]> Mystic River 21671
Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.]]> 416 Dennis Lehane 0060584750 Mark 0 to-read 4.17 2001 Mystic River
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Mark
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Mark 5 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Mark
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
No surprise at all that this Elizabeth Strout’s book was five stars for me, as she is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read all her books , and this one brings characters together from her two major series, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, and also her novel The Burgess Boys. This was very comfortable and satisfying for me, as all these flawed characters have become such memorable people over the years. This author always captures the joy and despair of every day life in ways everyone can understand. Her writing is simple but yet perfect.
]]> The Prague Cemetery 10314376
19th-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined,lay one lone man? What ifthat evil genius created its mostinfamous document?　

Eco takes his readers here on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. This is Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as his masterpiece. 　
]]> 445 Umberto Eco 0547577532 Mark 0 to-read 3.51 2010 The Prague Cemetery
author: Umberto Eco
name: Mark
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Mark 0 to-read 3.65 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Mark
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> Graveyard Shift 203578770 Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.

Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.

One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.]]> 144 M.L. Rio 1250356792 Mark 3 3.18 2024 Graveyard Shift
author: M.L. Rio
name: Mark
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
Although I loved this author’s novel, IF WE WERE VILLIANS, this novella just didn’t do it for me. It had all the trappings of a good horror novel, but the plot seemed to rushed. This probably should have been extended into being a novel. As it is, I would say it’s not worth your time.
]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Mark 0 to-read 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Mark
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Other Valley 176450755
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town--except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme––who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile––is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.]]> 290 Scott Alexander Howard 1668015471 Mark 4 3.85 2024 The Other Valley
author: Scott Alexander Howard
name: Mark
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:
Although I found this book to be creative and well written, and also a nominee for ŷ best debut novel of 2024, I was a little disappointed in it. Part one seemed to resemble a YA book, but part two seem much more interesting. I was expecting more of a science fiction book, but I would say it’s more of a literary fiction book. Rather than being plot driven, I would say it is very much character driven. This book put a creative spin on time travel with the heavy, good dose of literary fiction. My second criticism would be that it was a little too slow moving.
]]> When These Mountains Burn 49099786
After a workplace accident left him out of a job and in pain, Denny Rattler has spent years chasing his next high. He supports his habit through careful theft, following strict rules that keep him under the radar and out of jail. But when faced with opportunities too easy to resist, Denny makes two choices that change everything.

For months, the DEA has been chasing the drug supply in the mountains to no avail, when a lead—just one word—sets one agent on a path to crack the case wide open... but he'll need help from the most unexpected quarter. As chance brings together these men from different sides of a relentless epidemic, each may come to find that his opportunity for redemption lies with the others.]]> 272 David Joy 0525536884 Mark 0 to-read 4.07 2020 When These Mountains Burn
author: David Joy
name: Mark
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Those We Thought We Knew 63249462 From award-winning writer David Joy comes a searing new novel about the cracks that form in a small North Carolina community and the evils that unfurl from its center.

Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.

Meanwhile, local deputies find a man sleeping in the back of a station wagon and believe him to be nothing more than some slack-jawed drifter. Yet a search of the man's vehicle reveals that he is a high-ranking member of the Klan, and the uncovering of a notebook filled with local names threatens to turn the mountain on end.

After two horrific crimes split the county apart, every soul must wrestle with deep and unspoken secrets that stretch back for generations. Those We Thought We Knew is an urgent unraveling of the dark underbelly of a community. Richly drawn and bracingly honest, it asks what happens when the people you've always known turn out to be monsters, what do you do when everything you ever believed crumbles away?]]> 400 David Joy 0525536914 Mark 0 to-read 4.25 2023 Those We Thought We Knew
author: David Joy
name: Mark
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Weight of This World 30763901 Where All Light Tends to Go, was hailed as "a savagely moving novel that will likely become an important addition to the great body of Southern literature" (The Huffington Post), returns to the mountains of North Carolina with a powerful story about the inescapable weight of the past.

A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it.]]> 260 David Joy 0399173110 Mark 0 to-read 3.97 2017 The Weight of This World
author: David Joy
name: Mark
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, #1)]]> 25893709 193 Elizabeth Strout 1400067693 Mark 4 3.56 2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Mark
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Burgess Boys 15823461
With a rare combination of brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose, and remarkable insight into character, Elizabeth Strout has brought to life two deeply human protagonists whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Tender, tough-minded, loving, and deeply illuminating about the ties that bind us to family and home, The Burgess Boys is Elizabeth Strout's newest and perhaps most astonishing work of literary art.]]> 320 Elizabeth Strout 1400067685 Mark 3 3.58 2013 The Burgess Boys
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Mark
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> Amy and Isabelle 167216
In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls—a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boys—only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.
A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitteridge to millions of readers.]]> 304 Elizabeth Strout 0375705198 Mark 4 3.82 1998 Amy and Isabelle
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Mark
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Anything Is Possible (Amgash, #2)]]> 32080126 Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.

Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.]]> 254 Elizabeth Strout 0812989406 Mark 0 3.74 2017 Anything Is Possible (Amgash, #2)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Mark
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
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review:

]]> Devoted 52287403 From Dean Koontz, the international bestselling master of suspense, comes an epic thriller about a terrifying killer and the singular compassion it will take to defeat him.

Woody Bookman hasn’t spoken a word in his eleven years of life. Not when his father died in a freak accident. Not when his mother, Megan, tells him she loves him. For Megan, keeping her boy safe and happy is what matters. But Woody believes a monstrous evil was behind his father’s death and now threatens him and his mother. And he’s not alone in his thoughts. An ally unknown to him is listening.

A uniquely gifted dog with a heart as golden as his breed, Kipp is devoted beyond reason to people. When he hears the boy who communicates like he does, without speaking, Kipp knows he needs to find him before it’s too late.

Woody’s fearful suspicions are taking shape. A man driven by a malicious evil has set a depraved plan into motion. And he’s coming after Woody and his mother. The reasons are primal. His powers are growing. And he’s not alone. Only a force greater than evil can stop what’s coming next.]]> 389 Dean Koontz 1542019508 Mark 0 to-read 3.82 2020 Devoted
author: Dean Koontz
name: Mark
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne]]> 211025396
On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Cornell was found hanging in a barn, four months pregnant, after a disgraceful liaison with a charismatic Methodist minister, Reverend Ephraim Avery. Some (Avery’s lawyers) claimed her death was suicide…but others weren’t so sure. Determined to uncover the real story, intrepid Victorian writer Catharine Williams threw herself into the investigation and wrote what many claim is the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The case and Williams� book became a sensation—one that divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. But the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now.

In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to 19th century small town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—such as “forensic knot analysis� to determine cause of death, the prosecutor’s notes from 1833, and criminal profiling which was invented 55 years later with Jack the Ripper—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams� research to find the truth. Along the way she also examines how society decides who is the “right kind� of crime victim and how America’s long history of religious evangelism may have clouded the facts both in the 1830s and today. Ultimately, The Sinners All Bow brings justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.]]> 320 Kate Winkler Dawson 0593713613 Mark 0 to-read 3.51 2025 The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
author: Kate Winkler Dawson
name: Mark
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Mermaid of Black Conch 49869087
Now David must work to win Aycayia's trust while she relearns what it is to be human, navigating not only her new body but also her relationship with others on the island--a difficult task after centuries of loneliness. As David and Aycayia grow to love each other, they juggle both the joys and the dangers of life on shore. But a lingering question remains: Will the former mermaid be able to escape her curse? Taking on many points of view, this mythical adventure tells the story of one woman's return to land, her healing, and her survival.]]> 187 Monique Roffey 184523457X Mark 5 3.86 2020 The Mermaid of Black Conch
author: Monique Roffey
name: Mark
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
Another great book I would like to recommend! I heard about this book on book tube because it was the winner of the 2020 COSTA book of the year award and many critics were frustrated that it was not nominated for the booker prize. Yes, this book is about a mermaid, but it’s actually a rugged type book set in the Caribbean that sort of a love story. It is not a fantasy book filled with rainbows and unicorns! Ha ha! The first chapter is a little slow and hard to get into, but do what I did and not give up because the rest of the book gets really good. All of us on this site read so many books, so I predict you are like me that you appreciate a book that’s different. Well this book is different and memorable. It’s only 240 pages.
]]> A Tree Full of Stars 12119560 158 Davis Grubb Mark 5 3.96 1965 A Tree Full of Stars
author: Davis Grubb
name: Mark
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
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Booktube introduced me to a great author, Davis Grubb,who’s now dead. I loved NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (made into a classic movie of the 1950s) and also A DREAM OF KINGS. ( I reviewed these both earlier.) Well, this short little book is a Christmas book upper elementary and adults could enjoy. Full of magical realism, fantasy, and good will in the spite of some mean neighbors. The great themes in this book resonate year round. Was it saccharine? Yes, but I loved the love and growth of the family. I’m disappointed about 2 things: this book published in 1966 is not in our area library system so you will have to request it for free from the library on SearchOhio. (Cincinnati library shipped it to my local library) …and also I’m disappointed that this book is not a widespread Christmas book. IT DEFINITELY SHOULD BE!
]]> The Briar Club 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Mark 5 4.26 2024 The Briar Club
author: Kate Quinn
name: Mark
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:
I’ve read 3 of this author’s works—liked them all—but this is my favorite, mainly because of the great character development. Each chapter in the first 2/3 of the book introduces another woman living in the rooming house in the 1950s. You know soon 2 murders occur later in the book, and when you find out what’s that was all about, it was great! Another big surprise happens at the end of the book. A very rewarding read!
]]> The Third Rule of Time Travel 215815771 Rule One: Travel can only occur to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.

In this riveting science fiction novel from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler's lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.

After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.

Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.

As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.]]> 325 Philip Fracassi 0316572527 Mark 0 to-read 3.87 2025 The Third Rule of Time Travel
author: Philip Fracassi
name: Mark
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Question 7 179455076
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.]]> 280 Richard Flanagan 1761343467 Mark 0 to-read 4.19 2023 Question 7
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Mark
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lost Story 199927030 The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game.

As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons� investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.]]> 352 Meg Shaffer 0593598873 Mark 3 3.78 2024 The Lost Story
author: Meg Shaffer
name: Mark
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars. This fantasy with some vibes of Narnia as the characters step into a magic kingdom through a hollow tree seemed to need more intensity. Although the two main characters enter the kingdom for the first time at age 15, but for the second time at age 30, the book seemed to much like a YA novel to me. Still, this was an enjoyable read but not too original.
]]> Fools' Parade 1177999
Set in the Appalachian backcountry in the midst of the Great Depression, Fools� Parade traces the adventures of three ex-convicts who become involved in a wild and woolly chase along the Ohio River.

Convicted murderer Mattie Appleyard has just served forty-seven years in Glory Penitentiary. His release puts him in possession of a check for $25,452.32—the result of his having salted away his meager earnings in the Prisoner’s Work-and-Hope Savings Plan of the local bank. With his friends Johnny Jesus and Lee Cottrill, he plans to open a general store that will compete with the company store in Stonecoal, West Virginia.

Unfortunately, banker Homer Grindstaff, prison guard Uncle Doc Council, and Sheriff Duane Ewing have no intention of allowing Mattie to realize his ambitions. Mattie’s efforts to cash his check set a deadly pursuit in motion and introduce the reader to a host of colorful characters and a vividly recreated regional and historical background. Good and evil meet head-on in this novel that is, by turns, warm and humorous, rousing and tumultuous.

The Davis Grubb (1919�1980) was the author of ten published novels, the most famous of which was Night of the Hunter. Both that book and Fools� Parade, originally published in 1969, were made into motion pictures.]]> 332 Davis Grubb 1572331143 Mark 0 to-read 4.05 1969 Fools' Parade
author: Davis Grubb
name: Mark
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Homecoming 61683285
Sixty years later, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for almost twenty years, she now finds herself laid off from her full-time job and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital.

Nora has always been a vibrant and strong presence: decisive, encouraging, young despite her years. When Jess visits her in the hospital, she is alarmed to find her grandmother frail and confused. It’s even more alarming to hear from Nora's housekeeper that Nora had been distracted in the weeks before her accident and had fallen on the steps to the attic—the one place Jess was forbidden from playing in when she was small.

At loose ends in Nora's house, Jess does some digging of her own. In Nora's bedroom, she discovers a true crime book, chronicling the police investigation into a long-buried tragedy: the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the book that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once-infamous crime—a crime that has never been resolved satisfactorily. And for a journalist without a story, a cold case might be the best distraction she can find�

An epic novel that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, and how we protect the lies we tell. It explores the power of motherhood, the corrosive effects of tightly held secrets, and the healing nature of truth. Above all, it is a beguiling and immensely satisfying novel from one of the finest writers working today.]]> 547 Kate Morton 0063020890 Mark 5 4.00 2023 Homecoming
author: Kate Morton
name: Mark
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:
I’m not entirely sure I’m doing the right thing, but I’m going to deduct 1/2 star to rate this book 4.5 stars only because I felt the first third of the book could’ve been tightened up so the book wouldn’t have been so long. Regardless, this book was greathow it all came together at the end. I’ve read all but one of this authors books, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them.
]]> Pink Slime 199797823
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.]]> 240 Fernanda Trías 1668049775 Mark 0 to-read 3.36 2020 Pink Slime
author: Fernanda Trías
name: Mark
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Purity 23754479
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother � her only family � is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world � including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters � Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers � and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.]]> 563 Jonathan Franzen 0374239215 Mark 0 to-read 3.62 2015 Purity
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Mark
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Have Always Lived in the Castle]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Mark 5 3.93 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Mark
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> The Paris Apartment 54817545
2017, London: When Aurelia Leclaire inherits an opulent Paris apartment, she is shocked to discover her grandmother’s hidden secrets—including a treasure trove of famous art and couture gowns. One obscure painting leads her to Gabriel Seymour, a highly respected art restorer with his own mysterious past. Together they attempt to uncover the truths concealed within the apartment’s walls.

Paris, 1942: The Germans may occupy the City of Lights, but glamorous Estelle Allard flourishes in a world separate from the hardships of war. Yet when the Nazis come for her friends, Estelle doesn’t hesitate to help those she holds dear, no matter the cost. As she works against the forces intent on destroying her loved ones, she can’t know that her actions will have ramifications for generations to come.

Set seventy-five years apart, against a perilous and a prosperous Paris, both Estelle and Lia must summon hidden courage as they navigate the dangers of a changing world, altering history—and their family’s futures—forever.]]> 406 Kelly Bowen 1538718154 Mark 0 to-read 4.24 2021 The Paris Apartment
author: Kelly Bowen
name: Mark
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Were the Lucky Ones 30267929
As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.

An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.]]> 403 Georgia Hunter 0399563083 Mark 4 4.39 2017 We Were the Lucky Ones
author: Georgia Hunter
name: Mark
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
I really should rate this book higher, 4.5 stars or maybe even five because it is very well written. Sometimes I did get a little frustrated with the jumping back-and-forth among the various characters in the family but overall I think I’m harder to impress with stories about World War II, as I’ve read a lot of of them in the last several years.
]]> I Remain in Darkness 58861255 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Written in journal form, Annie Ernaux's account of her mother's steady decline spans a period of nearly three years. When her mother first becomes ill, Ernaux takes her in. Soon, it becomes painfully obvious that professional help is needed. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, her mother enters a nursing home, never to leave. As it explores the complexities of death and parent-child role reversal, Ernaux's latest work takes its place on the shelf beside John Bayley's Elegy for Iris and Roger Kamenetz's Terra Infirma. "As revealed by Ernaux, the details of a loved one's deterioration have such emblematic force and terror that the particular becomes universal." - The New York Times Book Review]]> 94 Annie Ernaux Mark 4 4.08 1996 I Remain in Darkness
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Mark
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for a short depressing book dealing with dementia. A daughter Chronicles, her mother’s two year decline since I had to go through the same thing, I could really relate to this woman’s struggle, shock, and despair.
]]> The Lost Bookshop 65137920 The Keeper of Stories meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.

‘The thing about books,� she said ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.�

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found�

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.

But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder� where nothing is as it seems.]]> 432 Evie Woods 0008609209 Mark 0 to-read 4.03 2023 The Lost Bookshop
author: Evie Woods
name: Mark
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> No Two Persons 60196684 One book. Nine readers. Ten changed lives. New York Times bestselling author Erica Bauermeister’s No Two Persons is “a gloriously original celebration of fiction, and the ways it deepens our lives.�

That was the beauty of books, wasn’t it? They took you places you didn’t know you needed to go�

Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open, and she creates a stunning debut novel. Her words, in turn, find their way to readers, from a teenager hiding her homelessness, to a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. Each one is drawn into Alice’s novel; each one discovers something different that alters their perspective, and presents new pathways forward for their lives.

Together, their stories reveal how books can affect us in the most beautiful and unexpected of ways—and how we are all more closely connected to one another than we might think.]]> 314 Erica Bauermeister 1250284376 Mark 5 4.02 2023 No Two Persons
author: Erica Bauermeister
name: Mark
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
GREAT BOOK ALERT! I loved this book that I soon realized was just going to be “one of the books� that stand out as giving a wonderful reading experience. I cared about all the unique characters and the plot constantly kept me turning pages. This poignant book has real heart, and best of all, it celebrates the power and joy of books we all understand. Highly recommend!
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