Chad's bookshelf: all

Chad's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:27:27 -0700 60 Chad's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)]]> 208324
Here, Johnson’s almost mythic personality—part genius, part behemoth, at once hotly emotional and icily calculating—is seen at its most nakedly ambitious. This multifaceted book carries the President-to-be from the aftermath of his devastating defeat in his 1941 campaign for the Senate-the despair it engendered in him, and the grueling test of his spirit that followed as political doors slammed shut-through his service in World War II (and his artful embellishment of his record) to the foundation of his fortune (and the actual facts behind the myth he created about it).
��
The culminating drama—the explosive heart of the book—is Caro’s illumination, based on extraordinarily detailed investigation, of one of the great political mysteries of the century. Having immersed himself in Johnson’s life and world, Caro is able to reveal the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson was not believed capable of winning, which he “had to�� win or face certain political death, and which he did win-by 87 votes, the ��87 votes that changed history.��
��
Telling that epic story “in riveting and eye-opening detail,�� Caro returns to the American consciousness a magnificent lost hero. He focuses closely not only on Johnson, whom we see harnessing every last particle of his strategic brilliance and energy, but on Johnson’s “unbeatable�� opponent, the beloved former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, who embodied in his own life the myth of the cowboy knight and was himself a legend for his unfaltering integrity. And ultimately, as the political duel between the two men quickens—carrying with it all the confrontational and moral drama of the perfect Western—Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new—the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.]]> 522 Robert A. Caro 067973371X Chad 0 currently-reading 4.26 1990 Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

author: Robert A. Caro
name: Chad
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Stag Dance 215362032 The kaleidoscopic follow-up to the bestselling Detransition, Baby

In this collection of one novel and three stories, Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones�� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex. In “The Chaser,�� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,�� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 288 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Chad 0 currently-reading 3.98 2025

author: Torrey Peters
name: Chad
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age]]> 216247514 From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from us

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation?��

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with this question. In 2021, she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines, forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal��s first Facebook reporter, to testing early versions of ChatGPT—all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech’s incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.]]> 352 Vauhini Vara 0593701526 Chad 4 3.91 2025 Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

author: Vauhini Vara
name: Chad
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/20
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves:
review:
Fantastic blend of personal essays and interrogations into AI and what it means to be a person in this new era of digital selfhood. Plays with form in a really cool and rewarding way. The last chapter made me a bit emotional! Vauhini is a wonderful thinker and I can’t wait to see what she does next. 4.5/5
]]> Flesh 214152261 From Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.

What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,�� brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.

Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.]]> 368 David Szalay 198212279X Chad 3 3.85 2025 Flesh

author: David Szalay
name: Chad
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/14
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves:
review:
Terrific opening chapter and spare writing but the longer it went on, my engagement waned. The story is intentionally told in a very passive manner, which I can understand as an artistic choice, but I wasn't as compelled or interested by the end. 3/5
]]> Bleeding Edge 17208457
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?]]> 477 Thomas Pynchon 1594204233 Chad 3 3.61 2013 Bleeding Edge

author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Chad
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves:
review:
My first Pynchon. His writing is the real standout, and I liked how specific and funny this was (some great references to the culture of 2001-02), but eventually all the side plots and characters started to collapse under a weight that was too much for this reader to lift. I’ll probably try Inherent Vice next, or his upcoming new book. Glad to have finally read a book from this American titan. 3.5/5
]]> Perfection 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 Chad 3 3.83 2022

author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Chad
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
review:
I appreciate what Latronico is doing here, but I guess I didn't find it as thrilling as other readers? It's very much a 'wow, drag me' type of Millennial expose, even written in a cool, detached style a la Cusk, but I was hoping for a little more oomph. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Chad 0 to-read 3.82 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I

author: Solvej Balle
name: Chad
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ohio 42201345 Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.

On one pivotal summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park and now back to “The Cane�� with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her former lover’s mother; Dan Eaton, a veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a date with a woman he’s tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax.]]> 512 Stephen Markley 1501174487 Chad 0 to-read 3.94 2018 Ohio

author: Stephen Markley
name: Chad
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

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

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

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 382 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Chad 3 4.23 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Chad
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Some juicy anecdotes, and it will provide you with further proof that all these tech corporations are full of careless (to use her words), vindictive, ignorant people who will do whatever it takes to increase shareholder value at the expense of doing what is right and just when you hold the amount of power that Facebook holds in our global economy. That all being said, this book is far too long for what it tries to do, and because of the length, I began to question whether Wynn-Williams was going to contemplate her involvement in these bad policies and decision making (considering she had a high position and worked for Facebook for seven years). Unfortunately, she doesn't. There is a detail towards the end, after she is fired, about how she got stung by a bunch of wasps, that made me think of the (fabricated) story that Jameela Jamil espoused about a swarm of bees that made me think, hmm, maybe Wynn-Williams isn't being fully truthful and honest about everything. 3/5
]]> Bibliophobia 212806663 Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners��.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.]]> 240 Sarah Chihaya 059359472X Chad 2 3.67 2025 Bibliophobia

author: Sarah Chihaya
name: Chad
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
On paper, this should have been a slam dunk (and many of my GR friends have similarly raved about this book) but somehow, the execution and the focus did not excite or move me. A memoir is always difficult to critique, but Chihaya's approach and analysis lacked a lot of purpose and insight for this reader. 2.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways]]> 182484308 An eye-opening investigation into how our ever-expanding urban highways��accelerated��inequality and fractured communities—and a call for a more just, sustainable path forward

Every major American city has a highway tearing through its center. Seventy years ago, planners sold these highways as progress, essential to our future prosperity. The automobile promised freedom, and highways were going to take us there. Instead, they divided cities, displaced people from their homes, chained us to our cars, and locked us into a high-emissions future. And the more highways we built, the worse traffic got. Nowhere is this more visible than in Texas. In Houston, Dallas, and Austin, residents and activists are fighting against massive, multi-billion-dollar highway expansions that will claim thousands of homes and businesses, entrenching segregation and sprawl.

In City Limits, journalist Megan Kimble weaves together the origins of urban highways with the stories of ordinary people impacted by our failed transportation system. In Austin, hundreds of families will lose childcare if a preschool is demolished to make way for Interstate 35. In Houston, a young Black woman will lose her brand-new home for a new lane on Interstate 10—just blocks away from where a seventy-four-year-old nurse lost her home in the 1960s when that same highway was built. And in Dallas, an urban planner has improbably found himself at the center of a national conversation about highway removal. What if, instead of building our aging roads wider and higher, we removed those highways altogether? It’s been done before, first in San Francisco, and more recently, in Rochester, where Kimble traces how highway removal has brought new life to a divided city.

With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, City Limits exposes the enormous social and environmental costs wrought by our allegiance to a life of increasing speed and dispersion, and brings to light the people who are fighting for a more sustainable, connected future.]]> 368 Megan Kimble 0593443780 Chad 4 4.14 2024 City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

author: Megan Kimble
name: Chad
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
Really worthwhile read for those interested in urban planning/transportation non-fiction, especially if you live or have lived with the growing specter of Texas highways and interstate expansions. Loved the portraits of the everyday people who found themselves in places they never imagined (joining in solidarity with neighbors and activists to pressure state transportation departments to stop expansions and/or remove highways) and Kimble ends the book with a lovely coda to pull her thesis together. A better life can be possible! 4/5
]]> Gliff 203164415 From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0593701569 Chad 3 3.91 2024 Gliff

author: Ali Smith
name: Chad
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
Similar in tone and feel and yet a somewhat different approach (a bit more plot than her usual books, and a larger cast) for Smith. Made me want to pick up Brave New World, a book I read as a teenager in high school and have zero memory of, as she frequently references Huxley's novel. Will be eager to see how the sequel compares when it is published. 3.5/5.
]]> By Night in Chile 230216511
A hypnotic deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei, poetry, and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. As through a crack in the wall, Urrutia’s nightlong rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of those strange Chilean bedfellows: Church and State.]]> 130 Roberto Bolaño 0811215474 Chad 4 spain-and-latin-america 4.09 2000 By Night in Chile

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Chad
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/24
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: spain-and-latin-america
review:
My first Bolaño novel, after appreciating his two short story collections, and it is impeccably written and structured. Subtle, yet horrifying (I could feel my heartbeat raise as I approached the ending). By Night in Chile is one of those rare books that I immediately want to reread so that I can pick up on all the breadcrumbs that are tossed throughout this slim novella. A fascinating look at Chile’s troubled history and how the individual is powerless and left alone to decipher what has happened to his country past the point of no return. 4.5/5
]]> Milk Fed 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]> 304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Chad 4 I love Melissa Broder. 4.5/5 3.56 2021 Milk Fed

author: Melissa Broder
name: Chad
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves:
review:
I love Melissa Broder. 4.5/5
]]> Family Lexicon 22856213 Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],�� Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”]]> 224 Natalia Ginzburg 1590178386 Chad 3 nyrb-classics 3.91 1963 Family Lexicon

author: Natalia Ginzburg
name: Chad
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: nyrb-classics
review:
My interest waned as the book went on, sadly. Putting this down for the time being, maybe I’ll pick up again one day. 3/5
]]> The List (Slough House, #2.5) 26236899 112 Mick Herron 161695745X Chad 3 3.85 2015

author: Mick Herron
name: Chad
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
A solid novella, introducing some new characters to the universe (who I have to assume will come into focus in later books). Fun ending! 3.5/5
]]> Dead Lions (Slough House, #2) 61677576
Now the slow horses have a chance at redemption. An old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford, far from his usual haunts. The despicable, irascible Jackson Lamb is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?

]]> 347 Mick Herron 1616953675 Chad 4 4.08 2013 Dead Lions (Slough House, #2)

author: Mick Herron
name: Chad
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:
A nice continuation of this fun and funny series. The cast of characters is what really pulls me in. There are some newbies at Slough House, and a surprising death. The plot details got a bit convoluted for me and weren't the most compelling aspect of the book for me, but overall, it's a good time. Will continue on to book 3. Audio narrator is aces. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)]]> 56534999 Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses.

London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,�� as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?]]> 334 Mick Herron 1641292970 Chad 4 4.04 2010 Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)

author: Mick Herron
name: Chad
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:
Finally got around to watching the first season of Slow Horses and loved it. Decided to pick up the book, and it’s probably one of the most faithful adaptations I’ve ever seen. Really fun, a great cast of characters, and great twists. Lowkey obsessed. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture]]> 134120233 A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.�� Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.]]> 304 Kyle Chayka 0385548281 Chad 0
However, Chayka does diverge from his original thesis a bit here. It wasn't that much of a bother to me, as I appreciated the more details and writing about internet history and how curation can lead to better enjoyment and results, but the point Chayka is trying to make gets made again, and again, and again. Still a very worthwhile and important read on a topic that a lot of folks will likely appreciate. 4/5.]]> 3.54 2024 Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

author: Kyle Chayka
name: Chad
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:
Really good analysis of what it's like to be 'online' in a world in which a few players have dominated our attention via social media. Chayka makes a good argument for how and why the all mighty algorithm has flattened culture, and it's really compelling. Since he is roughly the same age as me, I connected to his touchstones and memories of growing up during the internet boom and being an early adapter to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.

However, Chayka does diverge from his original thesis a bit here. It wasn't that much of a bother to me, as I appreciated the more details and writing about internet history and how curation can lead to better enjoyment and results, but the point Chayka is trying to make gets made again, and again, and again. Still a very worthwhile and important read on a topic that a lot of folks will likely appreciate. 4/5.
]]> <![CDATA[The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph]]> 18668059 “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.�� Marcus Aurelius

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.

These men and women were not exceptionally brilliant, lucky, or gifted. Their success came from timeless philosophical principles laid down by a Roman emperor who struggled to articulate a method for excellence in any and all situations.

This book reveals that formula for the first time—and shows us how we can turn our own adversity into advantage.]]> 201 Ryan Holiday 1591846358 Chad 4 4.12 2014 The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

author: Ryan Holiday
name: Chad
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves:
review:
Wonderful nuggets of wisdom. A book to revisit again and again. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Goodby People (McNally Editions)]]> 59441857
"The bisexual draft dodger living on the skids, the glamorous young widow in search of enlightenment, the skinny gamine from out of town who wants to make it in the movies . . ."* These are the people who inhabit Gavin Lambert's mordant portrait of Southern California at the end of the 1960 forever swapping addresses, lovers, and dreams. They live in extraordinary, suffocating wealth; or else flirting with a Mansonesque cult; or else in a fantasy where golden-age actresses make ghostly visitations to comment on their daily life. All that binds them together is their common sense of aimlessness--and the clear, judgment-free eye of a British author trying his best to be a friend to each.

Cool, incisive, yet essentially kind, and very much ahead of its time, The Goodby People unfolds "in the yawning chasm between real life in Los Angeles and the fantasies manufactured by its dominant business" (*Gary Indiana), and stands as Gavin Lambert's masterpiece.]]> 217 Gavin Lambert 1946022446 Chad 3 3.85 1971 The Goodby People (McNally Editions)

author: Gavin Lambert
name: Chad
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:
Some really striking scenes here; I liked the first two vignettes more than the third, but maybe I just got tired by the end? I've now read a handful of McNally Editions and have yet to be wowed...anyone else? 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[Health and Safety: A Breakdown]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”��New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Chad 2 3.49 2024 Health and Safety: A Breakdown

author: Emily Witt
name: Chad
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves:
review:
A loose memoir from the perspective of an incredibly annoying, wannabe poser, elitist New Yorker. These types of books make the publishing industry more of a joke than it already is. Yuck. 2/5
]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Chad 3 3.84 2024 Intermezzo

author: Sally Rooney
name: Chad
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
I thought I would give Rooney another chance after not enjoying her first two novels, especially once I found out that this one focused on brothers. And it started off pretty well, I was almost ready to atone for my anti-Rooney sentiments but the book just kept going on and on and I found myself not interested in Peter, or his love triangle, and wanted more Ivan and Margaret. The whole thing has some nice moments but my god…I truly do not understand the hype (still). 3/5
]]> Acts of Service 58678518
If sex is a truth-teller, Eve--a young, queer woman in Brooklyn--is looking for answers. On an evening when she is feeling particularly impulsive, she posts some nude photos of herself online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan--and soon the three begin a relationship that disturbs Eve as much as it delights her. As each act of the affair unfolds, Eve is left to ask: to whom is she responsible? And to what extent do our desires determine who we are?

In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find--or lose--ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.]]> 240 Lillian Fishman 0593243765 Chad 2 3.08 2022 Acts of Service

author: Lillian Fishman
name: Chad
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
Who is excited by this type of faux-intelligentsia regarding “queerness��? I can’t bear another word. Opening chapter is promising, but this book never goes anywhere. 2/5
]]> Godwin 198563648
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the UK, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, the novel is both a tale of family and migration and an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.]]> 288 Joseph O'Neill 0593701321 Chad 3 3.53 2024 Godwin

author: Joseph O'Neill
name: Chad
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
Some good writing, and I appreciated how the end came together, but there’s not enough cohesion for me. Lots of digressions that didn’t have a satisfying enough payoff. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)]]> 228381
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."]]> 361 Philip Roth 0375726349 Chad 5 3.84 2000 The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)

The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)

author: Philip Roth
name: Chad
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
His best book. The Human Stain succeeds as both an engaging and thought-provoking story, and is written with such skill and layering (the satire and irony on display is incredible) that makes this nearly impossible to put down. Prescient, haunting, and with a fantastic ending. 5/5
]]> <![CDATA[Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church]]> 195791354
“The revolution I wanted to be part of was in the church.��

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. Many search for more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus.

Circle of Hope tells of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers�� in Philadelphia, dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Circle grows for forty years, plants four congregations, and then finds itself in crisis.

Immersive, explosive, and tender-hearted, Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold offers an American allegory full of urgent How do we commit to one another and our better selves in a fracturing world? Where does power live? Can it be shared? How do we make “the least of these�� welcome?

Building on years of deep reporting, Griswold chronicles Circle’s journey as its devoted pastors and members strive toward change that might help the church survive. Through generational rifts, an increasingly politicized religious landscape, a pandemic that prevents gathering in worship, and a rise in foundation-shaking activism, Circle of Hope tells a propulsive, layered story of what we do to stay true to our beliefs. It is a soaring, searing examination of what it means for a community to love, to grow, and to disagree.]]> 352 Eliza Griswold 0374601682 Chad 4 3.97 2024 Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

author: Eliza Griswold
name: Chad
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:
Tremendous reportage. Griswold gives these people a fully realized rendering, and refuses to pick sides. As someone who grew up going to church, but has not attended for many years, this was a fascinating look at how institutions can crumble under the weight of selfish leaders and attempts at doing the “right thing�� during fraught social climates. Very well done. 4.5/5
]]> Pure Colour 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 Chad 1 Insufferable 3.45 2022 Pure Colour

author: Sheila Heti
name: Chad
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves:
review:
Insufferable
]]> <![CDATA[Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV]]> 203020280 Cue The Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation—game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows—that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators—from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World—along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade—like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal�� and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue The Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.

Through broad-ranging reporting, Nussbaum examines seven tumultuous decades, exploring the celebreality boom, reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, and the dark truth behind The Apprentice. A shrewd observer who cares about television, she is the ideal voice for the first substantive cultural history of the genre that has, for better or worse, made America what it is today.]]> 464 Emily Nussbaum 0525508996 Chad 3 3.93 2024 Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV

author: Emily Nussbaum
name: Chad
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves:
review:
Lacks depth and introspection on how reality TV has impacted our culture and society, which is a bummer. It’s mostly a lot of behind the scenes trivia and an over reliance on random producers/crew members that bounced around the industry. 3/5
]]> Death Valley 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Chad 5
'You transform and transform again. And tell me: What about life? Does that keep going?'
'It keeps going,' I say. 'And also, it will end.'
'And also...' says the rose.
'That's just it! What's so frightening about existing. It keeps going and also it will end. If I could define my terror--of life and dying and loving and all of it--if I could say, this is what it is, I would say it keeps going. It keeps going and also it will end.']]> 3.46 2023 Death Valley

author: Melissa Broder
name: Chad
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves:
review:
Loved this so much. This has been a hard year, with a lot of personal grief and loss, and this charming, existential, and yet still humorous little gem of a book was a wonderful read that helped make me feel less alone. 5/5

'You transform and transform again. And tell me: What about life? Does that keep going?'
'It keeps going,' I say. 'And also, it will end.'
'And also...' says the rose.
'That's just it! What's so frightening about existing. It keeps going and also it will end. If I could define my terror--of life and dying and loving and all of it--if I could say, this is what it is, I would say it keeps going. It keeps going and also it will end.'
]]> In Between Days 16041806
The Hardings are teetering on the brink. Elson—once one of Houston’s most promising architects, who never quite lived up to expectations—is recently divorced from his wife of thirty years, Cadence. Their grown son, Richard, is still living at driving his mother’s minivan, working at a local coffee shop, resisting the career as a writer that beckons him. But when Chloe Harding gets kicked out of her East Coast college, for reasons she can’t explain to either her parents or her older brother, the Hardings�� lives start to unravel. Chloe returns to Houston, but the dangers set in motion back at school prove inescapable. Told with piercing insight, taut psychological suspense, and the wisdom of a true master of character, this is a novel about the vagaries of love and family, about betrayal and forgiveness, about the possibility and impossibility of coming home.]]> 338 Andrew Porter 0307475182 Chad 3 4.20 2012 In Between Days

author: Andrew Porter
name: Chad
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
review:
Porter is a good writer, but the plotting here leaves a lot to be desired. I almost wish the story had started where he leaves the reader. Appreciated reading a book set mostly in Houston, but even that felt oddly limited and not representative of the city I know and love--there is more to the city than Montrose! 3/5
]]> Catalina 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Chad 3 3.56 2024 Catalina

author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Chad
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves:
review:
The voice is compelling, but parts of this felt very young adult in an odd way that felt incongruous with most of the pithy, observational writing. 3/5
]]> Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg 55411615 A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.

Frida Kahlo was an amputee in the last part of her life, and long before that her right leg was forever compromised by a childhood bout with polio. Since adolescence, Emily Rapp, herself an amputee since the age of four, felt that there were many things she had in common with Frida Kahlo. From the first sight of Kahlo's painting of the devastating bus crash that almost killed her, Rapp felt a sense of kinship with the artist. They both endured numerous operations; both alternately hid and revealed their altered bodies; and both found a way to live and create despite physical and emotional pain.

In this riveting read, Rapp gets to the essence of Frida Kahlo through her art, her letters and her diaries. She tells her own story of losing a child to Tay-Sachs; finding love, and becoming pregnant with her daughter; and of how Kahlo's life and work helped her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.

Containing several full colour images of Kahlo's art and clothing, Rapp offers a unique perspective on the artist and the challenges she faced.

"I want to know and remember what it was like to walk as Frida once walked: before polio at six years old shrunk her right leg; before the infamous bus crash on September 17, 1925 when the pole pierced her pelvis; then the casts, the saws, the stitches woven into the skin and then carefully twisted out, the scars gone white and silent and sealed. I am one-legged, like Frida, but I am also unlike her, and there in our essential difference is where my fascination lies, and there lies also my devotion, my despair, my revulsion, my resentment, my desire." --Emily Rapp]]> 160 Emily Rapp Black 1912559269 Chad 5 4.27 2021 Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

author: Emily Rapp Black
name: Chad
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves:
review:
Heartbreaking and powerful blend of memoir and essay. The sentence level writing is gorgeous. Really spoke to me and where I'm at in life. 5/5
]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Chad 2 3.33 2024

author: Rachel Kushner
name: Chad
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:
What the hell was that. Some cool and unique ideas at the start, but Kushner never digs deeper into anything worthy of connection to the present action. It's a lot of gobbledygook! 2/5
]]> Where I'm Calling From 23267869 526 Raymond Carver Chad 4 3.97 1988

author: Raymond Carver
name: Chad
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves:
review:
Probably the best American short story writer from the last century. Loved this collection; Carver is a great example of the idea that the specific is universal. 4.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.�� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con�� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk�� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals�� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 420 John Ganz 0374605440 Chad 4
All of this shit really came to the fore in the early 90s, and this book charts that rise to its current iteration. Thankfully, Ganz writes this book without judgment, just letting these events and small histories stand for themself. And the book ends with a real bang. Ganz is surely one of the most talented, young political writers we have 4.5/5]]> 4.07 2024 When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

author: John Ganz
name: Chad
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves:
review:
Fantastic. If you’ve paid any attention to politics lately and thought to yourself “how did we get here?��, then you should read When the Clock Broke. John Ganz does a great job of analyzing the sentiment of a growing number of disenchanted Americans while examining a collection of people, such as David Duke, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and events like Ruby Ridge and the John Gotti trial and how they ultimately helped pave the way for this seemingly small and unorganized minority of people to snowball into the grievance politics and culture war bullshit that has manifested itself into the last ten years of Donald Trump’s shtick.

All of this shit really came to the fore in the early 90s, and this book charts that rise to its current iteration. Thankfully, Ganz writes this book without judgment, just letting these events and small histories stand for themself. And the book ends with a real bang. Ganz is surely one of the most talented, young political writers we have 4.5/5
]]> Rebel Love 40141624 In Rebel Love, Dr. Chris Donaghue, PhD (The Amber Rose Show with Dr. Chris ), reveals how traditional dating "rules" are toxic, why everything you've learned about dating and relationships is wrong, and how to have the best sex of your life.

Dr. Chris is the sex expert you've been waiting for. He refuses to pathologize those whose sexuality doesn't fit in a neat little box and he doesn't just pay lip service to the pro-sex, feminist, and body-positive mores of the day -- he demands them.

Rebel Love welcomes all sexualities and identities no matter where you fall on the spectrum and empowers people to be authentically who they are both in and out of the bedroom. Dr. Chris's prescription for hotter, healthier sex -- the two go hand in hand -- encourages you to stop participating in patriarchal stereotypes, broaden your sexual horizons, and have amazing sex. Best of all, he shows you how with real-world examples and inspirational case studies.
]]> 223 Chris Donaghue 0762465336 Chad 3 4.11 2019 Rebel Love

author: Chris Donaghue
name: Chad
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves:
review:
I have a strange aversion to “self help�� books but this one was really good, for those interested in the subject.
]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Chad 3 3.85 2024

author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Chad
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves:
review:
Bold writing, yes; boundary pushing stories, sure; doesn’t work altogether for me. I like how much Tulathimutte plays with storytelling methods here but it’s like reading the same voice in every story. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Third Realm (Morgenstjernen, #3)]]> 204640602 From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us

Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands, and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams—the star is back. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star, and The Wolves of Eternity portrayed the intimate experiences of two estranged half-siblings decades before the star rises. In The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.

With this next novel, the limitless scale and ambition of Knausgaard’s new universe are clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.]]> 512 Karl Ove Knausgård 0593655214 Chad 0 to-read 4.30 2022 The Third Realm (Morgenstjernen, #3)

author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Chad
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wolves of Eternity (Morgenstjernen, #2)]]> 75293514
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.

Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.]]> 800 Karl Ove Knausgård 0593490835 Chad 4 4.12 2021 The Wolves of Eternity (Morgenstjernen, #2)

The Wolves of Eternity (Morgenstjernen, #2)

author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Chad
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves:
review:
Karl Ove is proving to be one of few indispensable writers of our time. Really loved this, despite being the loosest sequel to Morning Star you can imagine (if you can help it, do not read the jacket summary, as it tells you all the major plot points of this very long novel). Some lovely images here, and quiet moments that hold their own type of power and clarity. The essay “Wolves of Eternity�� was almost too much for me (I was getting impatient) but then I found the connection (or perhaps preoccupation) that Knausgaard was pulling at, and it clicked. Great ending, and I’m grateful that The Third Realm is now available in English! 4.5/5
]]> Glamorama 9913 “Impeccable . . . cold and pitiless and modern.�� The Village Voice

“Compelling and scary. A political thriller bursting with conspiracies, double agents and international terrorism. Glamorama is like a Semtex attack on our superficialities.�� The Face

The author of American Psycho continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis delivers a gripping and brilliant dissection of our celebrity-obsessed culture.

Victor Ward, a twenty-something model in fashion- and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan, is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers—back on the other, familiar side—that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.]]> 546 Bret Easton Ellis 0375703845 Chad 0 to-read 3.55 1998 Glamorama

author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Chad
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)]]> 86524
The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.

We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible�� goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam�� Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . .

Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection�� in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.

We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness�� of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.

Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.]]> 882 Robert A. Caro 0679729453 Chad 5 4.39 1982 The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)

author: Robert A. Caro
name: Chad
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
Meticulously crafted and marvelously written, I’m so happy to have finally read this one. The biographical nuggets about LBJ’s early years are fascinating, as are the depictions of political power and how it can be wielded—much of which still feels highly relevant to our current system in Washington. I really appreciated reading all the details and anecdotes about Texas life in the early 20th century as someone who has lived there for much of my life. Oh, and the audio narration is superb, to boot. Lucky for me, I already have volume two on my shelf. 5/5
]]> State of Paradise 195790688 A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly, from a reality-warping storyteller.

Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern—something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.

During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 037461220X Chad 2 3.40 2024 State of Paradise

author: Laura van den Berg
name: Chad
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:
Mindless rambling in fragments with no discernible point of view still gets you a book deal, I guess? 2.5/5
]]> The Devil's Grip 210688353
A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he’s the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.

It’s not long before the lying starts. Other women have begun to notice him, and she spirals into paranoia. Soon they’re both cheating and lashing out, and she becomes more and more convinced he’s not merely a violent man: there’s a demon inside him, and inside her too. Their grip on each other is so strong, it might be impossible to break, even after she puts an ocean between them, following another man to New Orleans.

Heady, unsettling, and shockingly funny with its dead-on descriptions of codependent and abusive relationships, The Devil’s Grip takes us on a breathless journey with the shadow selves we can’t escape.]]> 288 Lina Wolff Chad 4 3.56 2022 The Devil's Grip

author: Lina Wolff
name: Chad
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
review:
I’m going to need A24 to make this into an indie horror film stat. Totally bonkers, The Devil’s Grip is utterly thrilling and full of vivid scenes. Lina Wolff has a sensibility that is very distinctive in the contemporary publishing scene. This was a hoot! 4.5/5
]]> Any Person Is the Only Self 195790626
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.]]> 240 Elisa Gabbert 0374605890 Chad 3 3.76 2024

author: Elisa Gabbert
name: Chad
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:
Very hit or miss collection, which is a bummer after the incredible Unreality of Memory. Gabbert's essays here don't feel revelatory or interesting, often falling to simple or surface level ideas and thoughts on art. There are a few that I found worthwhile, but this was a disappointment for me. 3/5
]]> 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 Chad 4 3.77 2024

author: Oisín McKenna
name: Chad
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
This book has a wonderfully big human heart, it’s hard not to be charmed by the whole thing. Very much like watching Love Actually but make it 2019 London with a young, queer group of friends growing up and making tough decisions about life. McKenna has a lot of talent. 4/5
]]> The Winner 198123575
In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.]]> 320 Teddy Wayne 0063353598 Chad 3 3.09 2024 The Winner

author: Teddy Wayne
name: Chad
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/23
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves:
review:
Not as good as Apartment and Loner, but this was still a juicy, fun summer read. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.�� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,�� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith Chad 3 3.95 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)

author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Chad
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1955
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:
For a book that's nearly 70 years old, The Talented Mr. Ripley reads very contemporary. Credit to Highsmith for writing, and concocting a plot that has been often imitated by her successors. Tom Ripley is one of those fascinating characters, whose moral bleakness is mixed with real human pathos and empathy. The 1999 film adaptation is one of my very favorites, and it's difficult to not compare this book with the movie--the book does deviate in a few ways, and still found a way to keep me questioning what was really going to happen at the end. Only real fault is my own, I simply found it too difficult to not picture Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow while reading, and knowing the story from the movie, a lot of the tension was removed. I am curious to check out the sequels, since the plot for those has not been spoiled for me. 3.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Murderer (McNally Editions)]]> 59441853
Quiet, reserved, painfully shy, Galton Flood arrives in the Guyanese township of Linden haunted by the death of his domineering mother. There he meets Gemma Burrowes, a vibrant young woman eager to escape the confines of her father’s boarding house. They marry and make a home in the anonymous sprawl of Georgetown, Galton’s native city, where Gemma starts to realize that there is something very wrong with this match, and with Galton himself.

On its first publication in 1978, The Murderer was greeted as a landmark in Caribbean literature, acclaimed both for its subtle portrayal of a disturbed anti-hero and for revealing with “uncanny precision . . . the discrepancy between the personal power of a woman within the family and her lack of influence outside it�� (Homi Bhabha, Times Literary Supplement ).]]> 256 Roy A.K. Heath 1946022292 Chad 2 3.59 1978 The Murderer (McNally Editions)

author: Roy A.K. Heath
name: Chad
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1978
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
review:
There are some good elements here, but ultimately, it never quite amounts to anything that piques my interest as a reader. I thought Heath's choice to rotate to different POVs was a nice touch, and helped color in some details, but nothing really happens here? It's very much a vibes book, and surprisingly subtle given the title and jacket copy. 2.5/5
]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Chad 4
One thing readers of the Neapolitan novels will immediately recognize upon starting The Lost Daughter is the presence of a doll, and the importance it holds for the women in this story.

Leda is a divorcee in her late forties who heads to a coastal Italian town in the summer for some time to unwind, prepare some work and class materials for the upcoming term (she's a professor of English literature). She rents a tiny apartment and spends most days on the beach. She notices a beautiful young mother and her daughter along the beach and watches them, especially the daughter, Elena (a name that will hold significance to fans of the Neapolitan novels), and her doll. One day something happens to Elena and her doll and the story takes off from there.

Ferrante's writing here is superb. It is blunt, sharp, direct. She is able to draw characters and their psychologies so skillfully, and is able to make the reader feel the vibrancy of this world. I loved the flashbacks scenes and Leda's slow reveal of her complicated relationship to motherhood.

Again, leave it to Ferrante to pull the rug out from under me at the end and leave me speechless. And I mean the very end. I might end up bumping this to a 5-star rating, but for now I'll leave it at 4.5/5. Please read Ferrante, she is unlike any other contemporary writer I have come across.]]> 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter

author: Elena Ferrante
name: Chad
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2016/04/23
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
This book is alive. You can feel the passion, the interior life of Leda, the narrator of The Lost Daughter. I have now read all but one of Elena Ferrante's books and this one surprised me. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how powerful this slim 140 page novella hit me.

One thing readers of the Neapolitan novels will immediately recognize upon starting The Lost Daughter is the presence of a doll, and the importance it holds for the women in this story.

Leda is a divorcee in her late forties who heads to a coastal Italian town in the summer for some time to unwind, prepare some work and class materials for the upcoming term (she's a professor of English literature). She rents a tiny apartment and spends most days on the beach. She notices a beautiful young mother and her daughter along the beach and watches them, especially the daughter, Elena (a name that will hold significance to fans of the Neapolitan novels), and her doll. One day something happens to Elena and her doll and the story takes off from there.

Ferrante's writing here is superb. It is blunt, sharp, direct. She is able to draw characters and their psychologies so skillfully, and is able to make the reader feel the vibrancy of this world. I loved the flashbacks scenes and Leda's slow reveal of her complicated relationship to motherhood.

Again, leave it to Ferrante to pull the rug out from under me at the end and leave me speechless. And I mean the very end. I might end up bumping this to a 5-star rating, but for now I'll leave it at 4.5/5. Please read Ferrante, she is unlike any other contemporary writer I have come across.
]]> Exalted 59521748 Emily Forrest runs the hottest astrology account on Instagram, @Exalted, but astrology is on the outs, and her finances are dwindling. Emily doesn't even really believe in astrology, despite her gift for deciphering the moons and signs, until she comes across a birth-chart that could potentially change her mind. Beau Rubidoux’s chart has all the planets in their right places—it is exalted.

She decides that Beau could potentially be the love of her life and begins following him around Los Angeles in hopes of getting close to him and catching his eye.

Meanwhile, in Riverside, CA, Dawn Webster has been dumped once again. At 48, she is forced to return to the diner where she started waiting tables at 18. With no girlfriend, no career, and her only son gone to Hollywood, the once-vivacious Dawn is aimless and alone. Persona non-grata at the local lesbian bar, she guzzles cheap champagne and peruses @Exalted to feel seen. When Dawn spots her son's estranged father one day during a work break, she decides to track him down and reshape the flailing course of her life.

Told from Emily and Dawn's alternating points of view, Exalted is a deliciously dark novel that explores desire, the projection of love, and what we're really searching for when we keep scrolling. Anna Dorn's signature wit and biting social commentary takes readers across Southern California until Emily and Dawn's shocking connection is finally revealed.]]> 293 Anna Dorn 1951213483 Chad 3 3.76 2022 Exalted

author: Anna Dorn
name: Chad
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves:
review:
Really fun read. I caught the “twist�� early which tempered my enjoyment, but this was still enjoyable and funny. 3.5/5
]]> Ways and Means 98653715 In Daniel Lefferts’s searing debut novel Ways and Means, a striving finance student confronts the line between ambition and greed, and the disordered politics of his era.

Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him and he’s mired in student debt. In his desperation, he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than any Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and now he’s on the run.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire, which forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, hitches his wagon to an artist-provocateur engaged on a project that makes the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.

Propulsive, exuberant, and profoundly observed, Ways and Means is an indelible, deeply moving investigation of class and ambition, sex and art, and politics and power in 21st century America.]]> 400 Daniel Lefferts 1419768190 Chad 4 3.76 2024

author: Daniel Lefferts
name: Chad
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves:
review:
An assured, strong debut about money, what it means to try and make the “right�� moves in order to “get ahead in life��, messy gays, New York City, sexual politics and an evil billionaire. For fans of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Bret Easton Ellis novels, with a sprinkling of Talented Mr Ripley vibes. Really excited to see what Daniel Lefferts does next. 4.5/5
]]> Into the Wild 60869516 Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

"Terrifying... Eloquent... A heart-rending drama of human yearning." —New York Times

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

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless.

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.]]> 217 Jon Krakauer Chad 3 4.12 1996

author: Jon Krakauer
name: Chad
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
review:
Krakauer is such a good writer, if this was told by just about anyone else, it wouldn’t work like this does. Is it as compelling as Into Thin Air? No. But he takes a story and mines it and mixes the personal into the narrative in a way that felt helpful. It’s a shame Krakauer is retired and no longer working on these worthwhile feats of investigative journalism! 3.5/5
]]> Private Citizens 25817440 Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut��This Side of Paradise for a new era.

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts,��Private Citizens��embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch��for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends��stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.��

A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.]]> 372 Tony Tulathimutte 0062399101 Chad 3 3.40 2016

author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Chad
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
review:
The writing is so much, I was both spellbound and exhausted by the end. Very David Foster Wallace. The observations are so specific and speak to a time and place that is fun to revisit (early 2000s in Bay Area). The group of friends that we follow are all highly stylized but human (okay maybe just Cory and Henrik, who had interesting arcs). I am very eager to read Tulathimutte’s upcoming book, despite not necessarily loving Private Citizens. 3.5/5
]]> Bad Mormon: A Memoir 59345245
Drinking and Tweeting meets Unorthodox in this vulnerable memoir about The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star’s departure from the Mormon Church, and her unforeseen success in business, television, and single motherhood.

Straight off the slopes and into the spotlight, Heather Gay is famous for speaking the gospel truth. Whether as a businesswoman, mother, or television personality, she is unafraid to blaze a new trail, even if it means losing family, friends, and her community.

Born and bred to be devout, Heather based her life around her faith. She attended Brigham Young University, served a mission in France, and married into Mormon royalty in the temple. But her life as a good Mormon abruptly ended when she lost the marriage and faith that she had once believed would last forever.

With writing that is beautiful, sad, funny, and true, Heather recounts the difficult discovery of the darkness and damage that often exists behind a picture-perfect life, while examining the nuanced relationship between duty to self and duty to God. Exposing secrets she once held sacred, Bad Mormon is an unfiltered look at the religion that broke her heart.

A revealing and ultimately hopeful memoir, Bad Mormon is a captivating read in the vein of Untamed , Educated , and Me Talk Pretty One Day .]]> 304 Heather Gay 1982199539 Chad 3 3.48 2023 Bad Mormon: A Memoir

author: Heather Gay
name: Chad
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves:
review:
A pretty paint-by-numbers memoir, but I appreciated the insight into Heather Gay's childhood and background. Quick, breezy, great for summer. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)]]> 386378
For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American postural and Ito the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.
—from the back cover]]> 423 Philip Roth Chad 4 3.89 1997 American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)

American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)

author: Philip Roth
name: Chad
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/07
date added: 2024/06/07
shelves:
review:
An overlong masterpiece. Roth gathers up all his writerly might and makes an impressive piece of work, tackling the fallout of the post-WWII American dream. I've got Operation Shylock on deck next. 4.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories]]> 111126 Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.]]> 323 Alice Munro 0375727434 Chad 3 4.08 2001

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

author: Alice Munro
name: Chad
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves:
review:
My third Munro collection, and I think I’ve come to the realization that I respect her as a writer more than I enjoy her fiction. The stories are hit or miss for me, but they are all finely composed. RIP to a real legend of 20th century literature. 3/5
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Chad 2 3.49 2024 All Fours

author: Miranda July
name: Chad
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves:
review:
Not for me. It has some of the sparkle that made The First Bad Man so beguiling, but in All Fours it feels painful for the reader to witness. 2/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight]]> 121561903
�� The Country of the Blind is about seeing—but also about marriage and family and the moral and emotional challenge of accommodating the parts of ourselves that scare us. A warm, profound, and unforgettable meditation on how we adjust to new ways of being in the world.�� —Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves

We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left.

Full of apprehension but also dogged curiosity, Leland embarks on a sweeping exploration of the state of being that awaits not only the physical experience of blindness but also its language, politics, and customs. He negotiates his changing relationships with his wife and son, and with his own sense of self, as he moves from his mainstream, “typical�� life to one with a disability. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland’s determination not to merely survive this transition but to grow from it—to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening.

Thought-provoking and brimming with warmth and humor, The Country of the Blind is a deeply personal and intellectually exhilarating tour of a way of being that most of us have never paused to consider—and from which we have much to learn.]]> 368 Andrew Leland 1984881426 Chad 4 4.09 2023 The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

author: Andrew Leland
name: Chad
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves:
review:
The last few weeks have been very hectic and unpredictable in my personal life, with my time and focus on reading being very limited, but whenever I had a spare moment, I was always happy to turn back to this book. I loved the mix of memoir, social history, and individual profiles of the blind and the various communities therein. Leland is able to juggle all these elements together with a writer's deftness and skill. Really glad to have read this book; he has such an important perspective on what it means to be 'disabled' and the struggles (internal and external) of daily life. 4/5
]]> The Names 408 The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.

"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, an original world of its own is created."--Chicago Sun-Times

"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement

"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world, to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times]]> 339 Don DeLillo 0679722955 Chad 0 to-read 3.64 1982 The Names

author: Don DeLillo
name: Chad
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Black Wings Has My Angel 25489208
When Tim Sunblade escapes from prison, his sole possession is an infallible plan for the ultimate heist. Trouble is it’s a two-person job. So when he meets Virginia, a curiously well-spoken “ten-dollar tramp,�� and discovers that the only thing she cares for is “drifts of money, lumps of it,�� he knows he’s met his partner. What he doesn’t suspect is that this lavender-eyed angel might just prove to be his match.��

Black Wings Has My Angel careens through a landscape of desperate passion and wild reversals. It is a journey you will never forget.]]> 209 Elliott Chaze 1590179161 Chad 4 nyrb-classics 4.15 1953

author: Elliott Chaze
name: Chad
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/27
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves: nyrb-classics
review:
Terrific mid-century noir. The writing is punchy, direct and mixes with the story and tone masterfully. Another NYRB banger. 4.5/5
]]> Go, Went, Gone 34390247 Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation�� (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes. Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.]]> 286 Jenny Erpenbeck 0811225941 Chad 2 4.04 2015

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Chad
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves:
review:
I simply could not bring myself to read another page. On paper, this sounded right up my alley, but the execution is both hackneyed and myopic. In other words, this felt like a book that was generated by artificial intelligence in order to win literary prizes. Deeply boring and lacking anything to compel the reader. I'm still curious to read Kairos, though...2/5
]]> This Is Salvaged: Stories 77264992
A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged , unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.]]> 208 Vauhini Vara Chad 2 3.64 2023 This Is Salvaged: Stories

author: Vauhini Vara
name: Chad
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/04/23
shelves:
review:
First two stories are really solid; the rest is fairly forgettable. I have Vara's novel The Immortal King Rao on my shelves, so I hope I enjoy that one more than this collection. It mostly felt rushed, like the author was trying to fulfill a contract. 2.5/5
]]> American Spirits 75305025
A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.

Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.]]> 240 Russell Banks 0593536770 Chad 4 3.81 2024 American Spirits

author: Russell Banks
name: Chad
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves:
review:
My first experience with Russell Banks, who sadly passed away last year. American Spirits is a collection of loosely connected stories (almost novella in length) focusing on the residents of a fictionalized town in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. All stories are told in retrospect, and have tragic endings, but Banks' language and depiction of these townspeople ring true. A very accomplished book, I am looking forward to discovering more of Banks' backlist. 4/5
]]> Tomás Nevinson: A novel 62920767 From Spain's most acclaimed writer, a novel about a charismatic half-Spanish, half-English man who is recruited by British intelligence.

Thou shalt not kill. But, as our narrator admits, Killing is not so extreme or so difficult or unjust if you know who you are killing, what crimes he has committed or announced he is going to commit, how many evils you would save people from, how many innocent lives would be preserved in exchange . . .

The British Embassy, Madrid, 1997. Against his better judgment, Tom�s Nevinson re-enters the Secret Service and is sent to a small town to identify a suspect behind several deadly terrorist attacks carried out by the IRA and ETA. Nevinson must decide which of three women is the mastermind and kill her before it's too late. The assignment smacks of his former boss Bertram Tupra and his questionable methods--but Nevinson can't see a way out.

Tom�s Nevinson is the story of a man who has stretched the limits of what a person can bear, but then is asked to go beyond them. At once a gripping spy narrative and a profound reflection on evil and morality and doubt, it is a chilling, labyrinthine novel that expands Javier Mar�as's fascinating fictional universe.]]> 656 Javier Marías 0593534581 Chad 4 spain-and-latin-america
This one is a companion to Berta Isla, this time the title character is sent to a small Spanish town seeking to uncover the identity of a supposed ex-IRA member who was responsible for acts of violence and death. Much is considered, the state of humanity pondered over, and we get many well-placed literary references to keep things bound together. Marvelous. 4/5]]> 4.07 2021 Tomás Nevinson: A novel

author: Javier Marías
name: Chad
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/15
shelves: spain-and-latin-america
review:
A gorgeously considered novel from one of the greats. Such a shame there won’t be another Marías novel to look forward to; his voice is so distinct and his style perfected that I will simply have to discover more of his backlist.

This one is a companion to Berta Isla, this time the title character is sent to a small Spanish town seeking to uncover the identity of a supposed ex-IRA member who was responsible for acts of violence and death. Much is considered, the state of humanity pondered over, and we get many well-placed literary references to keep things bound together. Marvelous. 4/5
]]> No Judgment: Essays 148273407 288 Lauren Oyler Chad 1
It felt like Oyler was forced against her will to write these essays, and she responded but putting together these half baked missives��

Much of the time I was reading this I actually started second-guessing the enjoyment I got out of her novel, Fake Accounts. Is this seriously the same writer? Don’t waste your hard-earned $30 on this one! Read Ann Manov’s excellent critique in Bookforum and you’ll get a better idea of what I’m trying to say! 1/5]]> 2.54 2024 No Judgment: Essays

author: Lauren Oyler
name: Chad
average rating: 2.54
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves:
review:
Deeply disappointing and continuously full of bad, lazy writing and thinking and bad, lazy arguments. There is a visceral contempt for the reader in these essays, that is not only off-putting but incredibly annoying; Oyler attempts to mine topics like autofiction, expatriation, vulnerability, anxiety, but seems to purposefully lack a distinct point of view or opinion so she can avoid having to do an actual interrogation of her beliefs. Even when she gets personal and talks about her neuroses and health concerns, she takes equal glee in pointing out how she hasn’t seen a therapist because…she’s lazy? Doesn’t think she needs to see one? She’s lived in Berlin for 12 years and brags about not knowing German. She voices her anger against “the tyranny of vulnerability�� in modern life.

It felt like Oyler was forced against her will to write these essays, and she responded but putting together these half baked missives��

Much of the time I was reading this I actually started second-guessing the enjoyment I got out of her novel, Fake Accounts. Is this seriously the same writer? Don’t waste your hard-earned $30 on this one! Read Ann Manov’s excellent critique in Bookforum and you’ll get a better idea of what I’m trying to say! 1/5
]]> <![CDATA[Farthest South & Other Stories]]> 55649759 196 Ethan Rutherford 1646050487 Chad 2 3.93

author: Ethan Rutherford
name: Chad
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/07
shelves:
review:
Competently written stories but I wanted more story! Too same-y with too many subtleties. 2.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)]]> 873884 569 Dan Brown 1416529365 Chad 3 3.82 2000

author: Dan Brown
name: Chad
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Malice (Detective Kaga, #1) 20613611
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.

Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend from years ago when they were both teachers. Kaga joined the police force while Nonoguchi became a writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. When Kaga suspects something is a little bit off with Nonoguchi's statement, he investigates further, searching Nonoguchi's apartment. There he finds evidence that shows that the two writers' relationship was very different than the two claimed...

In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the writer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. Which one of the two writers was ultimately guilty of malice?]]> 288 Keigo Higashino 1250035600 Chad 3 4.02 1996 Malice (Detective Kaga, #1)

author: Keigo Higashino
name: Chad
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves:
review:
Solid murder mystery; I liked how Higashino focused more on the ‘why�� instead of the ‘who��. Fun twist on the genre plot points. 3.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[Brother & Sister Enter the Forest]]> 61342030
After years of severed communication, Justin appears on his sister’s doorstep needing a place to stay. The home he's made for himself has collapsed, as has everything else in his life. When they were children, Willa played the role of her brother’s protector, but now, afraid of the chaos he might bring, she’s reluctant to let him in.

Willa lives a carefully ordered life working as a nurse and making ornate dioramas in her spare time. As Justin tries to connect with the people she’s closest to—her landlord, her boyfriend, their mother—she begins to feel exposed. Willa and Justin’s relationship has always been strained yet loving, frustrating and close. But it hits a new breaking point when Justin spirals out of control, unable to manage his sobriety and the sustained effects of a brain injury.

Years earlier, in high school, desperate to escape his home life and his disapproving, troubled mother, Justin falls into the hands of his first lover, a slightly older boy living on his own who offers Justin some semblance of intimacy and refuge. When Justin’s boyfriend commits a terrifying act of violence, the two flee on a doomed road trip, a journey that will damage Justin and change his and his family’s lives forever.

Weaving together these two timelines, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest unravels the thread of a young man’s trauma and the love waiting for him on the other side.]]> 288 Richard Mirabella 1646221176 Chad 5 3.53 2023

author: Richard Mirabella
name: Chad
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves:
review:
Gorgeous, haunting, riveting. A beautiful debut about family and trauma and the harsh love we dole out to each other and ourselves. 5/5
]]> The House of Hidden Meanings 181109983
A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity,�� The House of Hidden Meanings ��is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. Central to RuPaul’s success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul.

Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known. Stripping away all artifice, RuPaul recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.

Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living—a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly. If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.��]]> 256 RuPaul 0063263904 Chad 2 3.78 2024 The House of Hidden Meanings

author: RuPaul
name: Chad
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves:
review:
This felt very calculated, I don't know how else to put it. Far from me to criticize another's life story, but given the enormous platform and impact that RuPaul has garnered over the decades, I was underwhelmed. I appreciated some of the insights into Ru's childhood and adolescence, but so many of these anecdotes and recollections harken back to stories previously told in talk show interviews, podcasts, and even episodes of Drag Race. There didn't feel like much new-ness was being unearthed. So much of the focus is on 'becoming famous' and the drive to make a name for RuPaul, which didn't hold much interest for me. And as other reviewers have already stated, the book ends rather abruptly, when Ru is only in her 30s (well before she would go on to create arguably the biggest TV show in gay history). Who knows, maybe there will be a part two, but this was just okay. 2.5/5
]]> Whites 27609 160 Norman Rush 0679738169 Chad 3 3.81 1986 Whites

author: Norman Rush
name: Chad
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1986
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves:
review:
These stories are about, yes, white people in Botswana but they all seem to revolve around unsuspecting people being confronted by something (people, animals, love/loss) that challenges their belief and standing in the world. I enjoyed seeing how Rush would carefully construct these circumstances and often upend everything with an emphatic ending. I do think some of the stories probably hit differently upon initial release (this collection was published in the early 80’s) but the juice is worth the squeeze. He’s a gifted stylist, as evidenced by Mating, which he would go on to write after. 3.5/5
]]> Breaking and Entering 834582
Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.]]> 288 Joy Williams 0394757734 Chad 4 4.11 1988 Breaking and Entering

author: Joy Williams
name: Chad
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/03/12
shelves:
review:
No one can pen a sentence like Joy Williams. The first half of this novel is truly sensational; full of uncanny scenes of ne'er-do-well Floridians that are rendered with such beauty and heart but yet, irreverent and striking. I think I need to re-read Book 2, as there were some pieces that didn't quite register with me, but this is a really fabulous work. Going to be thinking about Liberty for a while. 4/5
]]> São Bernardo 45688228 192 Graciliano Ramos 1681373858 Chad 0 to-read, nyrb-classics 3.83 1934

author: Graciliano Ramos
name: Chad
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/04
shelves: to-read, nyrb-classics
review:

]]> The Invisibility Cloak 28588169 An NYRB Classics Original

The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don’t ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins?

This provocative and seriously funny exercise in the social fantastic by the brilliantly original Ge Fei, one of China’s finest living writers, is among the most original works of fiction to come out of China in recent years. It is sure to appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and other fabulists of contemporary irreality.]]> 126 Ge Fei 1681370204 Chad 3 nyrb-classics 3.81 2012 The Invisibility Cloak

author: Ge Fei
name: Chad
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/02
date added: 2024/03/04
shelves: nyrb-classics
review:
Pacing didn’t quite work for me, but the ending pulls it together nicely. Nice to see NYRB put out some contemporary Chinese lit! 3/5
]]> Cathedral 9468704
It was morning in America when Raymond Carver's Cathedral came out in 1983, but the characters in this dry collection of short stories from the forgotten corners of land of opportunity didn't receive much sunlight. Nothing much happens to the subjects of Carver's fiction, which is precisely why they are so harrowing: nothingness is a daunting presence to overcome. And rarely do they prevail, but the loneliness and quiet struggle the characters endure provide fertile ground for literary triumph, particularly in the hands of Carver, who was perhaps in his best form with this effort.]]> 228 Raymond Carver Chad 4 4.28 1983 Cathedral

author: Raymond Carver
name: Chad
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves:
review:
Without a doubt, some of the best short stories I've ever read in my life. A Small, Good Thing and Cathedral in particular are really moving, wise, and smart. I totally get the hype for Carver. Hope to read more of his work soon. 4.5/5
]]> The Duke in His Domain 36436074
This mesmerizing profile of an insecure, vulnerable young Marlon Brando, brooding in a Kyoto hotel during a break from filming, is a peerless piece of journalism.

Penguin fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 50 Truman Capote 0241339146 Chad 0 to-read 3.79 1957 The Duke in His Domain

author: Truman Capote
name: Chad
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Chad 3 4.17 2001 Erasure

author: Percival Everett
name: Chad
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/18
shelves:
review:
Good satire! Not sure I found it as utterly important and smart as others but glad to have read some Percival Everett. 3.5/5
]]> The Deluge 60806778 From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.]]> 896 Stephen Markley 1982123095 Chad 4
Not a perfect novel; there are a couple of areas that didn't land with me, but there is a lot of earned pathos and gripping, thriller-like quality that kept the many plot threads at the front of my brain, even when I wasn't reading it. Very much worth your time, for those who are interested in this subject. 4.5/5 ]]> 4.20 2023 The Deluge

author: Stephen Markley
name: Chad
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/11
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves:
review:
Wow. What an achievement. This is a very long book (880 pages) but what makes it special is just how nimble Markley's writing and structure is at navigating between many different characters and having them cross paths in unexpected ways. The Deluge is probably the most terrifying book I've ever read, simply because it feels so close to our current present, with the way in which our government is so entirely inept and incapable of enacting meaningful change to protect the Earth and its inhabitants.

Not a perfect novel; there are a couple of areas that didn't land with me, but there is a lot of earned pathos and gripping, thriller-like quality that kept the many plot threads at the front of my brain, even when I wasn't reading it. Very much worth your time, for those who are interested in this subject. 4.5/5
]]> The Juniper Tree 34637930 The Juniper Tree. Will Bella’s hard-won restoration to life and love come at the cost of the happiness of others?]]> 177 Barbara Comyns 1681371316 Chad 4 nyrb-classics 4.00 1985

author: Barbara Comyns
name: Chad
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves: nyrb-classics
review:
A story about class, and the confinements of marriage. My first Comyns, I really liked her tone--it's very matter of fact, which suits this Grimm's fairy tale retelling really well by keeping the reader on their toes. Will have to check out more from her. 4/5
]]> 10:04 20613582 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.]]> 256 Ben Lerner 0865478104 Chad 4 3.78 2014 10:04

author: Ben Lerner
name: Chad
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:
This book really shouldn’t work, but it does simply due to Lerner innate skills as a writer. There are several moving pieces and plots rotating around this novel, which similarly to Leaving the Atocha Station, is auto fiction about our narrators�� personal triumphs and tragedies while playing with structure, style and motif. There’s a chapter set in Marfa, Texas that I personally enjoyed as someone who has visited that quirky art town in the desert a few times. This is a book that will likely befuddle most readers, but the themes of health crises, strained relationships that don’t fit categorization, and the meta nature of this book and the comments on the publishing ecosystem landed with me. I’m now quite eager to pick up The Topeka School to see what else Ben Lerner has in store. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin]]> 9938498
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.]]> 448 Erik Larson 0307408841 Chad 2 3.87 2011 In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

author: Erik Larson
name: Chad
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/10
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves:
review:
I learned a bit more about the daily life of Berliners in 1933, and how the US government was unwilling to make any big moves during Hitler's ascent, but the focus in this book on the Dodd family was deeply boring. Larson is a good storyteller (as evidenced by The Devil in the White City) but this one didn't make me that excited to read more of his work. 2/5
]]> Toño the Infallible 60534032
I was alone when someone pounded on my door. Who could it be?

So begins Toño the Infallible, Evelio Rosero’s gripping novel about an intense relationship between a writer and a sociopath. Visited by his friend (a kind of Colombian Rasputin) seemingly at the verge of death, the writer, Eri, looks back on the arc of both of their lives. Unique in both its tone and its structure, the novel takes us from their student days (school fights, playground revelations, and an unforgettable trip to the seaside) into their adult years, involving rumors of a hippie cult and a bizarre raucous theater exhibit of history’s most violent crimes. Toño uses his charm and wealth—as well as reputed magical powers—to manipulate others, but it isn’t until the end of the book that the devastating truth is revealed—and how true is it? Reminiscent of the fiction of Roberto Bolaño and the films of Alfonso Cuarón, this brilliant novel takes us into the heart of his country’s darkness, creating an unforgettable portrait of a society where humanity still endures, despite its brutality.]]> 224 Evelio Rosero 0811228819 Chad 3 spain-and-latin-america 3.46 2017 Toño the Infallible

author: Evelio Rosero
name: Chad
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: spain-and-latin-america
review:
The first section is rendered so vividly, I was hooked; the second section I found the writing too intentionally dark and off-putting. By the last coda, I was just waiting for the book to be over. A bit of a shame, as I think the structure of this book could have been rearranged to greater effect (there's a framing device that could have used a second look). Still glad to have read this, as it had been on my shelf for a while and I have a great fondness for Latin American writers; this one just slightly missed the mark for me. 3/5.
]]> <![CDATA[Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals]]> 27904911 Ill Nature, she implicates every First Worlder in creation for causing the death of the natural world, the victim of our material urges. She writes that the thousands of new digital television towers being erected today, for example, are responsible for the deaths of millions of songbirds that unwittingly slam into them or their guylines in midflight; by extension, anyone who owns a digital TV set is partly to blame for this unforeseen episode in the larger ecological crisis, no matter how well-intentioned those viewers may be.

Turning a sharp eye on ecotourists, zoogoers, hunters, politicians, developers, expectant mothers, carnivores, conservatives, liberals, and just about anyone else who crosses her path, Williams decries the rapid loss of the wild, which in her eyes is no mere abstraction. Sometimes hyperbolic, but more often right on target, she argues that it will take more than a few cosmetic fixes to mend all the wounds that the environment has sustained. Dystopian to the last (as she writes, "You are increasingly looking at and living in proxy environments created by substitution and simulation," and not the real world at all), Williams brings plenty of heat to the page--and plenty of light, too. --Gregory McNamee

]]> 228 Joy Williams 1461745586 Chad 4 4.00 2001 Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals

author: Joy Williams
name: Chad
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves:
review:
Pretty great collection of essays here. I came to this after adoring Williams�� collected short stories, The Visiting Privilege, last year, and this has only solidified my admiration of her writing and voice (despite these being quite different from her fiction). The essay “Hawk�� on her dog and the one about her plot of land in the Florida Keys are true standouts. Lucky for me, I have more Joy Williams on my shelf for next year. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution]]> 127283004 Semafor's Best Political Book of 2023

A riveting insider account of the progressive movement in Congress centering A.O.C., Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar—their rise, their efforts to set an ambitious agenda for the country, and their struggle to find their footing within the Democratic party.

The Squad is the definitive, must-read book about the most exciting figures defining our new era. The story is urgent, and the stakes are high—for the country and the world—and Grim, an experienced political reporter who covered the Squad before they were the Squad, is uniquely qualified to tell it.

When Bernie Sanders, an obscure Vermont senator, launched his quixotic 2016 presidential campaign, few could have seen just how radically the Democratic Party would transform in just a few short years—or that such a transformation could be led by a Bronx bartender volunteering for Bernie in her spare time. The world as it was when that campaign began is almost unrecognizable today, and the Squad has both shaped and been shaped by the seismic social, cultural, and political changes underway.

Referred to informally as the Squad, led by the preternaturally politically savvy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group laid down a marker for an aggressive left-wing agenda. Grim takes you behind the scenes as that new energy makes impact with Washington, and the Squad spends as much time fending off assaults from Donald Trump—who regularly singled them out and led chants of “send them back�� at rallies—as they did battling their own party’s sclerotic leadership. As they’ve grown in office, they’ve had to contend with the eternal question that confronts outsiders who power their way into the inside: Are they still radical organizers willing and able to lead a political revolution?]]> 336 Ryan Grim 1250869072 Chad 3 4.00 The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution

The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution

author: Ryan Grim
name: Chad
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves:
review:
Some interesting insights into AOC as candidate, representative, and now, in a tough place politically as she is seen by some as “part of the Dem establishment�� but still treated as an outsider/threatening presence by some colleagues. Overall, the book is mostly a summary of Washington politics from the last five years, which is fine, but I was hoping for some more examination and analysis from Ryan Grim—who is otherwise a really good journalist and unafraid of pointing out inconvenient truths. 3/5
]]> <![CDATA[Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia]]> 75596597 A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, and their fellow victors, the questions of justice seemed clear: Japan’s leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against citizens in China, the Philippines, Korea, and elsewhere; rampant abuses of POWs. For the Allied Forces, the trial was an opportunity to achieve justice against the defendants, but also to create a legal framework for the prosecution of war crimes and to prohibit the use of aggressive war, and to create the kind of liberal international order that would prevail in Europe. For the Japanese leaders facing trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the US and Europe. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to destabilize the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought division and complexity; these tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded, from China’s descent into civil war to India’s independence and partition to Japan’s first successful democratic elections and the rewriting of a new, liberal constitution.

Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.]]> 800 Gary J. Bass 1101947101 Chad 0 to-read 4.26 2023 Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

author: Gary J. Bass
name: Chad
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Touch of Jen 61237047
"Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer."��—Emily Temple, Literary Hub

Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure�� service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.

Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt.

As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies.�� Is this what “self-actualization�� looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 031670427X Chad 4 3.17 2021

author: Beth Morgan
name: Chad
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves:
review:
Wonderfully bold and bonkers, this is a great entry into the ‘millennial malaise�� sub-genre. Reminds me of the film, “Ingrid Goes West�� and the tone of the show “Search Party”—this debut goes places I was not expecting and it’s a really fun ride. Looking forward to Morgan’s next output. 4.5/5
]]> Parade 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Chad 0 to-read 3.54 2024 Parade

author: Rachel Cusk
name: Chad
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Woman in Me 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Chad 4 3.82 2023 The Woman in Me

author: Britney Spears
name: Chad
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves:
review:
Surprisingly great. Nothing earth shattering, but hearing Britney’s voice come through and tell her story on her terms is powerful. 4/5
]]> The Book of Ayn 60416508 An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death

After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse.

Things look better in Hollywood—until the money starts running out, and with it Anna’s faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother’s house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna’s odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom �� communal love, communal toilets �� and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself.

"A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.]]> 256 Lexi Freiman 1646221923 Chad 3 3.15 2023 The Book of Ayn

author: Lexi Freiman
name: Chad
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/14
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves:
review:
Read this in three sittings; pool-side with a cocktail in hand. It’s an oddly compelling book, full of hilarious one-liners about our current age of ‘cancellations�� and also what it means to be a person and exist in the same space as others. Not sure it’ll remain in my brain for too long but it’s quick and entertaining enough. 3/5
]]> Ride a Cockhorse 12988333 �� Brimming with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity, Ride a Cockhorse is a rollicking cautionary tale of small-town demagoguery that might be seen to prefigure both America’s current financial woes and the rise of Sarah Palin. Frances is in any case a beautiful monster of an antiheroine—resist her at your peril!]]> 307 Raymond Kennedy 1590174895 Chad 4 nyrb-classics 3.53 1991 Ride a Cockhorse

author: Raymond Kennedy
name: Chad
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: nyrb-classics
review:
Excellent satirical story of the consolidation of power and the rise of fascism at a local bank in a sleepy New England town in the late 1980s. Frankie Fitzsimmons is a terrifying force of nature, one of the nastiest and funniest characters I’ve read recently. It’s an over the top comic tale, but Kennedy is such a skilled wordsmith, you’ll be glued to the page to see what happens next. A late in the year surprise. 4.5/5
]]> Black Swans 36470362 Black Swans is a collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s—decades of dreams, drink, and stoned youth turning Republican. Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all.

Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: sex, rage, the Château Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans. This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.]]> 225 Eve Babitz 1640090509 Chad 4 3.90 1993

author: Eve Babitz
name: Chad
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:
At this point, I know what I'm getting when I pick up some Eve Babitz. These stories are again pulled from her personal experiences with men, art, and Los Angeles. It was interesting seeing the distance here from the collected stories in Eve's Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company, as Eve is now older (but not always wiser). As some other reviewers note, some of her reactions to the politics of this era (1980s and 90s) lacks some tact but again, this is Eve and she's just giving the reader her unfiltered thoughts. The last two stories, Black Swans in particular, is quite possibly one of the best things I've read from her. 4/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Chad 3 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

author: David Grann
name: Chad
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves:
review:
For me, a step up from Killers of the Flower Moon, but I think my main criticism of Grann is that he is able to hook the reader early with fascinating characters and/or history but ultimately his books just kind of stall out to a finish. Same story here, once you reach the climax of the mutiny, the momentum lags and limps to a conclusion that while still good and worthwhile, feels uneven. This review makes this seem harsher than it is! I still really enjoyed The Wager, but am left slightly unsatisfied. 3.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 (A Must-Read Collection of Essays)]]> 58438560
�� The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.�� —Taylor Antrim, Vogue

From a writer celebrated for her “chops, ambition, and killer instinct�� (John Powers, Fresh Air ), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.

Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today�� ( The Millions ) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd , she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.

In twenty razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.

These pieces, new and old, are electric, vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. “Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor,�� said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly , and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal : “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.”]]> 288 Rachel Kushner 1982157704 Chad 3 4.11 2021 The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 (A Must-Read Collection of Essays)

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 (A Must-Read Collection of Essays)

author: Rachel Kushner
name: Chad
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves:
review:
The personal essays here really shine; I enjoyed some of the profiles on other writers too. Kushner has lived quite the life, and its clear how much that influences her fiction. Having only read The Mars Room before, I'm more likely to pick up The Flamethrowers now. 3.5/5
]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.��Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.��]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Chad 5 3.97 2023 Wellness

author: Nathan Hill
name: Chad
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/24
date added: 2023/11/29
shelves:
review:
This book hit me like a ton of bricks. It really is about the stories we tell ourselves, what we choose to believe in, what we will do to keep the dream going. As someone who has been in a decade long relationship, all of the observations, nuances and quirks of Jack and Elizabeth were spot on. The satire on wellness culture (and the placebo effect!!) was great. Loved the way the book moved backwards and forwards in time; really helped paint the entire picture of Jack and Elizabeth and how their families shaped them. The chapter written from the point of view of an algorithm is superb and the type of post-modernist thing that I adore. The descriptions of Kansas and the Flint Hills is aces. The book is the funniest thing I've read in ages (at times, without trying to be funny) and emotionally got to me, too. Nathan Hill has become an essential American writer, for this reader. Surely one of the best books released in 2023. 5/5
]]> Margery Kempe 52287072 192 Robert Glück 1681374315 Chad 4 3.56 1994

author: Robert Glück
name: Chad
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/10
date added: 2023/11/10
shelves:
review:
Formally ambitious, depraved, artful, challenging, elegiac. I can confidentially say I’ve never read a book like this one before. I certainly missed some of the connections, but I hope to revisit this novel again someday. 4/5
]]> The Insufferable Gaucho 16241797 176 Roberto Bolaño 0811219062 Chad 0 to-read 4.09 2003

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Chad
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet]]> 63251778 ��
The Heat Will Kill You First�� is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing.��It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event�� one that culls out the most vulnerable people.�� But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.��
��
As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it.�� Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
��]]> 400 Jeff Goodell 0316497576 Chad 4 4.25 2023 The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

author: Jeff Goodell
name: Chad
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2023/11/07
shelves:
review:
Bleak? Yes. Fascinating? Also, yes. The Heat Will Kill You First is a good holistic look at climate change, how heat works, and how it will affect everything that surrounds us--our cities, the natural world, energy consumption, as our planet continues to warm up. Really appreciated the anecdotes that populate many of the chapters, and also Goodell's ability to simplify scientific processes into a digestible way. My only real critique is that this book is too long (there are two chapters that are about the author traveling to Antarctica for...no real reason? And another chapter about hiking in Canada and encountering bears in the wild). Not sure what that was about, but it felt very self-centered, this need to include these long chapters that veer away from the main thesis of the book. Very much worth your while, for those interested in the subject. 4/5
]]> Political Fictions 534629
Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.]]> 352 Joan Didion 0375413383 Chad 3
Also, I’m sure this wasn’t Didion’s intention, but it’s worth mentioning how surreal it is to read so many of the same names—not just the politicians, but the media journalists, commentators, etc who are still, after all these years, the gate keepers for much of the discourse on national politics in 2023. Very distressing and makes Didion’s point that Washington is an exclusive club that is further and further removed from the everyday American. 3/5]]> 3.71 2001 Political Fictions

author: Joan Didion
name: Chad
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/03
date added: 2023/11/03
shelves:
review:
I’ll be honest; I’m still not completely sold on Joan Didion. These essays, collected from the 1980s to 2000 rotate around the political games and elections that tend to dominate (in some, but not all circles, as Didion quickly points out) the public consciousness and news media in the US. The introduction here is probably the best thing in the book, where Didion is laying out her prejudices and point of view—a refreshing take that helps guide the reader, but so many of these essays seemed to go on and on with no end in sight, and not nearly enough of a critical assessment as I was hoping for. I have an inclination to reading about political power and the craven figures who populate Washington, but I still felt at a distance when reading Didion’s takes on some of these figures.

Also, I’m sure this wasn’t Didion’s intention, but it’s worth mentioning how surreal it is to read so many of the same names—not just the politicians, but the media journalists, commentators, etc who are still, after all these years, the gate keepers for much of the discourse on national politics in 2023. Very distressing and makes Didion’s point that Washington is an exclusive club that is further and further removed from the everyday American. 3/5
]]> Do Everything in the Dark 61193149
First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.

Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.]]> 296 Gary Indiana 1635901863 Chad 0 to-read 4.00 2003 Do Everything in the Dark

author: Gary Indiana
name: Chad
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>