en-US Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:11:03 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 50898145
Film for Her is a story book of people, places, and memories captured on film. Through photographs, poetry, prose, and a short story, Orion Carloto invites readers to remember the forgotten and reach into the past, find comfort in the present, and make sense of the intangible future. Film photography isn’t just eye candy; it’s timeless and romantic—the ideal complement to Carloto’s writing. In Film for Her , much like a visual diary, word and image are intertwined in a book perfect for both gift and self-purchase.]]> 192 Orion Carloto 1524853771 ada 0 books-i-own coffee table book 3.77 2020
author: Orion Carloto
name: ada
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/01
date added: 2025/06/02
shelves: books-i-own
review:
coffee table book
]]> 2767052
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins 0439023483 ada 5 favorites, books-i-own 4.34 2008
author: Suzanne Collins
name: ada
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/30
date added: 2025/05/30
shelves: favorites, books-i-own
review:

]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 ada 5 favorites 4.56 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: ada
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves: favorites
review:
suzanne collins, you never miss. i have no further notes.
]]> 1885 Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268]]> 279 Jane Austen 1441341706 ada 0 to-read 4.28 1813
author: Jane Austen
name: ada
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf ada 0 to-read 3.81 1927
author: Virginia Woolf
name: ada
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43317482 251 Carmen Maria Machado 1644450038 ada 0 to-read 4.41 2019
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: ada
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18966806
Finally, the time has come.

But devotion to honor and hunger for vengeance run deep on both sides. Darrow and his comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are some Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire those shackled in darkness to break their chains, unmake the world their cruel masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied—and too glorious to surrender.]]> 525 Pierce Brown 0345539842 ada 0 to-read 4.52 2016
author: Pierce Brown
name: ada
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18966819
A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow finds friendship, respect, and even love—but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind’s destiny, Darrow must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution—and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead is fraught with danger and deceit, Darrow must choose to follow Eo’s principles of love and justice to free his people.

He must live for more.]]> 466 Pierce Brown 0345539826 ada 0 currently-reading 4.48 2015
author: Pierce Brown
name: ada
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 15839976 "I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.

Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.]]> 382 Pierce Brown 0345539788 ada 4 4.26 2014
author: Pierce Brown
name: ada
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
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review:

]]> 1772910 82 Fyodor Dostoevsky ada 3
3.65/5]]> 4.15 1848
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: ada
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1848
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
nice guys finish last even in the 19th century

3.65/5
]]> 34445212 The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died.

After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals—increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as Jeannie plumbs her childhood awareness of her dead half-sibling and hunts for clues into the mysterious circumstances of her death. It becomes a puzzle Jeannie feels she must solve to better understand herself and her father.

Jeannie Vanasco pulls us into her unraveling with such intimacy that her insanity becomes palpable, even logical. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, The Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.]]> 270 Jeannie Vanasco 1941040772 ada 0 to-read 3.96 2017
author: Jeannie Vanasco
name: ada
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52867387 A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no-one will fall in love. Really.]]> 400 Emily Henry 1984806734 ada 3
mind you there was no reading on a beach until the very last chapter

3.5/5]]> 3.98 2020
author: Emily Henry
name: ada
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
not about people on vacation reading on a beach. must’ve gotten it confused with another emily henry book.

mind you there was no reading on a beach until the very last chapter

3.5/5
]]> 60473073 Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.]]> 271 Elliot Page ada 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Elliot Page
name: ada
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 101124639
The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]> 384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 ada 0 to-read 3.99 2023
author: Jessica Knoll
name: ada
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett 0385550367 ada 0 to-read 4.45 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: ada
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh ada 3 this book reeks. 3.3/5 3.53 2022
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: ada
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
review:
this book reeks. 3.3/5
]]> 211642122 A stunning, standalone romantic fantasy filled with dangerous secrets, forbidden magic, and passion, of a young ruler who fights to protect her kingdom, from bestselling author Sue Lynn Tan and set in the breathtaking world of Daughter of the Moon Goddess.

“What the gods did not give us, I would take.�

As the heir to Tianxia, Liyen knows she must ascend the throne and renew her kingdom’s pledge to serve the immortals who once protected them from a vicious enemy. But when she is poisoned, Liyen’s grandfather steals an enchanted lotus to save her life. Enraged at his betrayal, the immortal queen commands the powerful God of War to attack Tianxia.

Upon her grandfather’s death, Liyen ascends a precarious throne, vowing to end her kingdom’s obligation to the immortals. When she is summoned to the Immortal Realm, she seizes the opportunity to learn their secrets and to form a tenuous alliance to safeguard her people, all with the one she should fear and mistrust the most: the ruthless God of War. As they are drawn together, a treacherous attraction ignites between them—one she has to resist, to not endanger all she is fighting for.

But with darker forces closing in around them, and her kingdom plunged into peril, Liyen must risk everything to save her people from an unspeakable fate, even if it means forging a dangerous bond with the immortal� even if it means losing her heart.]]> 464 Sue Lynn Tan 0063267616 ada 0 to-read 3.87 2025
author: Sue Lynn Tan
name: ada
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219301810 A hitmaking songwriter and a bitter musician share a startling and inexplicable connection that they’ll do anything to shake, in the next sparkling, magical book from Ashley Poston.

Joni Lark is living the dream. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA…and she can’t seem to write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it.

When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark her inspiration. But when she gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is avoiding her, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing.

How can she think about writing her next song when everything is changing without her?

Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and half-formed, and an alluring and addictive voice to go with it—belonging, apparently, to a wry musician with hangups of his own.

Surely, he’s a figment of her overworked imagination.

But then the very real man attached to the voice shows up in Vienna Shores. He’s aggravating and gruff on the outside—nothing like the sweet, funny voice in Joni’s head—and he has a plan:

They’ll finish the song haunting them both, break their connection, and hope they don’t risk their hearts in the process.

Because that song stuck in their heads? Maybe it’s there for a reason.]]> 378 Ashley Poston 0593641019 ada 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Ashley Poston
name: ada
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 ada 0 to-read 3.48 2017
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: ada
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 ada 4 :�) 3.66 2015
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: ada
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
:�)
]]> 475853
Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their 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.]]> 256 Eve Babitz 051714445X ada 3
all the new york slander and for what. i happen to prefer east over west coast

3.5/5]]> 3.86 1993
author: Eve Babitz
name: ada
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
read this while la was on fire and ironically la was also somewhat on fire in this book. made me nostalgic for something ive never experienced before (la gave me covid last time i went)

all the new york slander and for what. i happen to prefer east over west coast

3.5/5
]]> 52878453
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body". Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to area, having moved her from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she's a little shaky even on best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one - one that strikes closer to home.

A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, 'Death in Her Hands' asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.]]> 259 Ottessa Moshfegh 1984879359 ada 0 to-read 3.25 2020
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: ada
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 ada 0 to-read 3.46 2021
author: Rachel Yoder
name: ada
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60741808 An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.]]> 304 Daisy Alpert Florin 1250857031 ada 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Daisy Alpert Florin
name: ada
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34992929 448 Tahereh Mafi 0062676369 ada 3
3.5]]> 4.14 2018
author: Tahereh Mafi
name: ada
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:
some series should just stay trilogies

3.5
]]> 49455 Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.]]> 136 Fyodor Dostoevsky 067973452X ada 0 to-read 4.21 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: ada
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1864
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1462282 22 Fyodor Dostoevsky 141911042X ada 0 3.34 1873
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: ada
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1873
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world � suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, � but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai ada 0 to-read 3.99 1948
author: Osamu Dazai
name: ada
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky ada 0 to-read 4.26 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: ada
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1866
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209891170 A cat a day keeps the doctor away�.

Discover this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats in the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation.

Tucked away on the fifth floor of an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found only by people who are struggling in their lives and who genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take� their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, and occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout these pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a hardened handbag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha learns to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients grapple with their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.]]> 297 Syou Ishida 0593818741 ada 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: Syou Ishida
name: ada
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 ada 0 to-read 4.21 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: ada
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 68783
Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.]]> 169 Susanna Kaysen 0679746048 ada 4 books-i-own
i dont usually like to rate and review memoirs, but i think why i love the “women going insane� category of books so much is bc i feel so seen. i get it. and its comforting in a really morbid way bc it makes me feel like im not alone but at the same time the common denominator is mental illness and suicidal tendencies]]> 3.95 1993
author: Susanna Kaysen
name: ada
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: books-i-own
review:
i hope to god i never get locked up

i dont usually like to rate and review memoirs, but i think why i love the “women going insane� category of books so much is bc i feel so seen. i get it. and its comforting in a really morbid way bc it makes me feel like im not alone but at the same time the common denominator is mental illness and suicidal tendencies
]]> 18521 A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.]]> 112 Virginia Woolf ada 0 to-read 4.22 1929
author: Virginia Woolf
name: ada
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> 14942 194 Virginia Woolf 0151009988 ada 0 to-read 3.80 1925
author: Virginia Woolf
name: ada
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 ada 4 favorites
also - not sure why ppl are so shocked about the ending, i was expecting it since like halfway into the book

4.25/5]]> 3.62 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: ada
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: favorites
review:
this is exactly what i was aspiring for during that period of deep depression in college where i badly wanted to be in a coma so i would take four melatonin and two benadryl on the weekends and hope for the best. this protagonist is so me fr which is quite unfortunate since she’s literally so unlikable � if you don’t relate to this book at all then consider yourself extremely lucky

also - not sure why ppl are so shocked about the ending, i was expecting it since like halfway into the book

4.25/5
]]> 57118988
Under Brick Callan’s mile-wide chest beats a loyal heart with a few cracks in it. He’s the steadfast, overprotective type. Especially when it comes to the one woman he can never have. It’s a long, complicated history punctuated by fights, friendship, family, and an attraction that strains his iron willpower.

When Remi Ford returns to Mackinac Island in the dead of winter with a secret, Brick makes it his mission to find out what put the shadows in those green eyes. Even if it means breaking down the walls he’s built between them. Even if it means falling for the one girl he’ll never get over.

The free-spirited artist just needs to lay low for a few weeks so she can figure a way out of this nightmare. She’s definitely not staying. Not when the man who broke her teenage heart into splinters keeps showing up at her parents� dinner table. Remi doesn’t need broody, bearded Brick riding to her rescue…again. Not when it will put them both in danger, costing them much more than their hearts.

Author’s Note: Frenemies-to-lovers. Opposites attract. Slow burn. Girl in danger. Glorious, glorious banter. Fighting as foreplay. Small-town shenanigans. Big, grumpy, pining, overprotective hero. Wild-child, trouble-finding heroine who keeps on pushing the hero’s buttons. Steam Level: Lava. Suspense: Nail-biting. Feels: Big time.]]> 588 Lucy Score ada 1 3.98 2021
author: Lucy Score
name: ada
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:
why was this book so long. put the pen DOWN woman
]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 ada 4
the bleak narration does such a perfect job of capturing nihilism and depression i dont have exact words for how i feel about this book but im feeling something

the longer i sit on my review the more appreciation i have for this book but at the same time it’s such a hard read when you’re also mentally ill and insane]]> 3.94 1970
author: Joan Didion
name: ada
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:
i have never been more infuriated at a man in a book than i have with carter i need him to die so bad

the bleak narration does such a perfect job of capturing nihilism and depression i dont have exact words for how i feel about this book but im feeling something

the longer i sit on my review the more appreciation i have for this book but at the same time it’s such a hard read when you’re also mentally ill and insane
]]> 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 ada 0 to-read 3.85 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: ada
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 17334064
The immortal Magnus Bane is making the most of his time in the Roaring Twenties: He's settled into New York society and is thriving among the fashionable jazz set. And there is nowhere better to see and be seen than the glamorous Hotel Dumort, a glittering new addition to the Manhattan landscape. But a different type of glamour may be at play...]]> 61 Cassandra Clare 144249560X ada 0 3.79
author: Cassandra Clare
name: ada
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 ada 0 to-read 3.34 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: ada
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207293782 Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?� —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock n� rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.]]> 352 Lili Anolik 1668065487 ada 0 to-read 3.21 2024
author: Lili Anolik
name: ada
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43263680
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs� are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.]]> 461 Leigh Bardugo 1250313074 ada 3
hmmmmm. super slow and confusing start and i didnt really start caring until the last third of the book when it went from 0 to 100 in about 20 pages. i think the sexual assault parts were also a bit unnecessary. i enjoyed the concept and genre but i don’t think i particularly enjoy bardugo’s writing as shadow and bone also put me in a bit of a reading slump. tbd on if i will read hell bent or not]]> 4.00 2019
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: ada
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves:
review:
3.6

hmmmmm. super slow and confusing start and i didnt really start caring until the last third of the book when it went from 0 to 100 in about 20 pages. i think the sexual assault parts were also a bit unnecessary. i enjoyed the concept and genre but i don’t think i particularly enjoy bardugo’s writing as shadow and bone also put me in a bit of a reading slump. tbd on if i will read hell bent or not
]]> 23437156 Alternate cover of ISBN 9781627792127

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.]]> 480 Leigh Bardugo 1627792120 ada 0 to-read 4.47 2015
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: ada
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 ada 0 to-read 3.70 2010
author: Jennifer Egan
name: ada
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 ada 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: ada
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 676555 The Beatles Anthology. Through painstaking compilation of sources worldwide, John Lennon's words are equally represented in this remarkable volume. Furthermore, The Beatles have opened their personal and management archives specifically for this project, allowing the unprecedented release of photographs which they took along their ride to fame, as well as fascinating documents and memorabilia from their homes and offices. What a book The Beatles Anthology is! Each page is brimming with personal stories and rare vintage images. Snapshots from their family collections take us back to the days when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey were just boys growing up in Liverpool. They talk in turn about those early years and how they came to join the band that would make them known around the world as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Then, weaving back and forth, they tell the astonishing story of life as The Beatles: the first rough gigs, the phenomenon of their rise to fame, the musical and social change of their heyday, all the way through to their breakup. From the time Ringo tried to take this drum kit home on the bus to their much anticipated audience with Elvis, from the making of the Sgt. Pepper album to their last photo session together at John's house, The Beatles Anthology is a once-in-a-lifetime collection of The Beatles' own memories.

Interwoven with these are the recollections of such associates as road manager Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin and spokesman Derek Taylor. And included in the vast array of photographs are materials from both Apple and EMI, who also opened their archives for this project. This, indeed, is the inside story, providing a wealth of previously unpublished material in both word and image.

Created with their full cooperation, The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles' autobiography. Like their music has been a part of so many of our lives, it's warm, frank, funny, poignant and bold. At last, here is The Beatles' own story.]]> 368 The Beatles 0811826848 ada 0 to-read 4.38 2000
author: The Beatles
name: ada
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 99126 266 Aaron Copland 0451528670 ada 0 to-read 3.95 1939
author: Aaron Copland
name: ada
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 206318521 Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.]]> 262 Patti Smith 006621131X ada 0 to-read 4.25 2010
author: Patti Smith
name: ada
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13188676
With Omega Point destroyed, Juliette doesn't know if the rebels, her friends, or even Adam are alive. But that won't keep her from trying to take down The Reestablishment once and for all. Now she must rely on Warner, the handsome commander of Sector 45. The one person she never thought she could trust. The same person who saved her life. He promises to help Juliette master her powers and save their dying world . . . but that's not all he wants with her.

The Shatter Me series is perfect for fans who crave action-packed young adult novels with tantalizing romance like Divergent by Veronica Roth, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Legend by Marie Lu. Tahereh Mafi has created a captivating and original story that combines the best of dystopian and paranormal and was praised by Publishers Weekly as "a gripping read from an author who's not afraid to take risks."

Don’t miss Restore Me, the electrifying fourth installment of this New York Times bestselling series, available now!]]> 408 Tahereh Mafi 006208559X ada 3 4.45 2014
author: Tahereh Mafi
name: ada
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/24
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
3.5 - got a better at the end but idk i didnt love the pace of it ? i didnt feel satisfied at the end but i guess ill keep reading the rest of the series � kenji has my heart tho
]]> 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank's life is full of all the excesses Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could've predicted.

Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 368 Coco Mellors 1635576814 ada 0 to-read 3.70 2022
author: Coco Mellors
name: ada
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50196744
Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words. It was the perfect case, in many ways–there were eyewitnesses, Turner ran away, physical evidence was immediately secured. But her struggles with isolation and shame during the aftermath and the trial reveal the oppression victims face in even the best-case scenarios. Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.]]> 384 Chanel Miller 0735223718 ada 0 to-read 4.69 2019
author: Chanel Miller
name: ada
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127280062 Torn apart by war. Reunited by love?

Two weeks have passed since Iris returned home bruised and heartbroken from the front, but the war is far from over.

Roman is missing, lost behind enemy lines, with no memory of his past, or Iris. Hoping his memories return, he begins to write again � but this time for the enemy.

When a strange letter arrives through his wardrobe door, he strikes up a correspondence with a penpal who seems at once mysterious� and strangely familiar.

As their connection deepens, the two of them will risk their very hearts and futures to change the tides of the war.]]> 420 Rebecca Ross 1250857457 ada 3 rtc 3.98 2023
author: Rebecca Ross
name: ada
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/04
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
rtc
]]> 40748777 Can you keep a secret?

�I grew up sick.��

Let me clarify.��I grew up believing that real love stories include a martyr or demand great sacrifice to be worthy.�� Because of that, I believed it, because I made myself believe it, and I bred the most masochistic of romantic hearts, which resulted in my illness.��

When I lived this story, my own twisted fairy tale, it was unbeknownst to me at the time because I was young and naïve. I gave into temptation and fed the beating beast, which grew thirstier with every slash, every strike, every blow.�� Triple Falls wasn’t at all what it seemed, nor were the men that swept me under their wing. But in order to keep them, I had to be in on their secrets.�� Secrets that cost us everything to keep.

��That’s the novelty of fiction versus reality. You can’t re-live your own love story, because by the time you’ve realized you’re living it, it’s over. At least that was the case for me and the men I trusted my foolish heart to.�� Looking back, I’m convinced I willed my story into existence due to my illness.�� And all were punished.]]> 354 Kate Stewart ada 1
they really just publish anything these days huh]]> 4.05 2020
author: Kate Stewart
name: ada
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
this book could’ve been an email and it would’ve been sent to my spam folder.

they really just publish anything these days huh
]]> 48642680
Those words changed my life, and not for the better.

They were wrong, of course. I wasn’t dead. But I was set up.

After being charged with a string of offences--and made an example of by my political minded father--I’m eventually released back into Shadow Grove with one thing on my mind.

Hate.

Someone is going to pay for derailing my carefully laid out future. Someone is going to catch the full force of my hate. How very convenient that someone just moved into the bedroom down the hall from me.

Archer D’Ath and his boys messed with the wrong chick and they’re about to learn just how cold Madison Kate’s hate can run.


HATE is a full length mature college/new adult romance with enemies-to-lovers/love-hate themes. This is a reverse harem novel, meaning the main character has more than one love]]> 418 Tate James ada 1 4.19 2020
author: Tate James
name: ada
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
angsty, aspiring 2014 wattpad author coded, but with 2020s tiktok vernacular. written by a woman who has never interacted with a guy irl and just discovered swear words for the first time. and yes, she put her hot pink hair in a messy bun. also nothing happens in this book.
]]> 6514 294 Sylvia Plath 0571268862 ada 3
3.1/5]]> 4.05 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: ada
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
one of my favorite genres as of late has been “books about women going insane� because i am a narcissist and i love to read about myself. however this book brought back some demons for me and will be getting a few points docked off for the unprovoked racism randomly sprinkled throughout � i’ll agree that slyvia plath was ahead of her time in ways aside from that factor �

3.1/5
]]> 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 ada 0 to-read 3.92 2024
author: Coco Mellors
name: ada
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 ada 0 to-read 4.13 2023
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: ada
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50623864
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.]]> 448 V.E. Schwab 0765387565 ada 4 books-i-own
4.25/5]]> 4.16 2020
author: V.E. Schwab
name: ada
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: books-i-own
review:
object permanence trope>>>

4.25/5
]]> 14061957 Alternative Cover Edition #1

The capital has fallen.

The Darkling rules Ravka from his shadow throne.

Now the nation's fate rests with a broken Sun Summoner, a disgraced tracker, and the shattered remnants of a once-great magical army.

Deep in an ancient network of tunnels and caverns, a weakened Alina must submit to the dubious protection of the Apparat and the zealots who worship her as a Saint. Yet her plans lie elsewhere, with the hunt for the elusive firebird and the hope that an outlaw prince still survives.

Alina will have to forge new alliances and put aside old rivalries as she and Mal race to find the last of Morozova's amplifiers. But as she begins to unravel the Darkling's secrets, she reveals a past that will forever alter her understanding of the bond they share and the power she wields. The firebird is the one thing that stands between Ravka and destruction—and claiming it could cost Alina the very future she’s fighting for.]]> 432 Leigh Bardugo ada 3
i finally did it ! should i still read six of crows]]> 3.97 2014
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: ada
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:
3.35 (not a typo, this feels right to me)

i finally did it ! should i still read six of crows
]]> 123183412
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain . With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural her parents� volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist�; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece� in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.]]> 318 Julia Fox 1668011506 ada 0 to-read 4.38 2023
author: Julia Fox
name: ada
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12507661
When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.]]> 0 Banana Yoshimoto ada 0 to-read 4.06 1988
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: ada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 135479 Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...]]> 306 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ada 0 to-read 4.17 1963
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: ada
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13456414
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.]]> 104 Steven L. Peck 098374842X ada 0 to-read 4.16 2011
author: Steven L. Peck
name: ada
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 68428 What if the whole world were a dead, blasted wasteland?

Mistborn
For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison. Kelsier "snapped" and found in himself the powers of a Mistborn. A brilliant thief and natural leader, he turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler himself as the mark.

Kelsier recruited the underworld's elite, the smartest and most trustworthy allomancers, each of whom shares one of his many powers, and all of whom relish a high-stakes challenge. Then Kelsier reveals his ultimate dream, not just the greatest heist in history, but the downfall of the divine despot.

But even with the best criminal crew ever assembled, Kel's plan looks more like the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into his life. Like him, she's a half-Skaa orphan, but she's lived a much harsher life. Vin has learned to expect betrayal from everyone she meets. She will have to learn trust if Kel is to help her master powers of which she never dreamed.

Brandon Sanderson, fantasy's newest master tale-spinner and author of the acclaimed debut Elantris, dares to turn a genre on its head by asking a simple question: What if the prophesied hero failed to defeat the Dark Lord? The answer will be found in the Mistborn Trilogy, a saga of surprises that begins with the book in your hands. Fantasy will never be the same again.]]> 541 Brandon Sanderson ada 0 to-read 4.48 2006
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: ada
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 ada 0 3.94 2005
author: Joan Didion
name: ada
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves:
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]]> 59344312
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of what really happened the day her daughter died.

Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents would devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue to love her.]]> 336 Colleen Hoover 153872474X ada 0 4.29 2018
author: Colleen Hoover
name: ada
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/05/12
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 88455 128 Patrick Skene Catling 0688161332 ada 0 3.82 1952
author: Patrick Skene Catling
name: ada
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 333316
It's an Easter Egg-stravaganza! With over 50 million books in print, Barbara Park’s New York Times bestselling chapter book series, Junie B. Jones, is a classroom favorite and has been keeping kids laughing—and reading—for over 20 years! In the 27th Junie B. Jones book, Lucille is having an Easter Egg Hunt at her rich expensive mansion! And guess what? The winner gets a play date to swim in Lucille's heated indoor swimming pool! Only, here is the problem. How did Junie B. get stuck wearing a big dumb bunny suit? And how can she possibly find eggs when she keeps tripping over her huge big rabbit feet? Being a dumb bunny is definitely not as easy as it looks. Will Junie B. end up with egg on her face? Or will the day deliver some very uneggspected results?

USA TODAY :
"Junie B. is the darling of the young-reader set."

Publisher's Weekly :
"Park convinces beginning readers that Junie B.—and reading—are lots of fun."

Kirkus Reviews :
"Junie's swarms of young fans will continue to delight in her unique take on the world�.A hilarious, first-rate read-aloud."

Time Magazine :
"Junie B. Jones is a feisty six-year-old with an endearing penchant for honesty."


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 119 Barbara Park 0739338692 ada 0 4.11 2007
author: Barbara Park
name: ada
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
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]]> 153540 The Little House, a poignant story of a cute country cottage that becomes engulfed by the city that grows up around it. The house has an expressive face of windows and doors, and even the feelings of a person, so she’s sad when she’s surrounded by the dirty, noisy city’s hustle and bustle: “She missed the field of daisies / and the apple trees dancing in the moonlight.� Fortunately, there’s a happy ending, as the house is taken back to the country where she belongs.]]> 40 Virginia Lee Burton 0395181569 ada 0 4.30 1942
author: Virginia Lee Burton
name: ada
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 357664
Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship—and forgiveness—can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm.

Kate DiCamillo's beloved, best-selling debut novel is now available in a paperback digest edition.

Kate DiCamillo's first published novel, like Winn-Dixie himself, immediately proved to be a keeper—a New York Times bestseller, a Newbery Honor winner, the inspiration for a popular film, and most especially, a cherished classic that touches the hearts of readers of all ages. It's now available in a paperback digest format certain to bring this tale's magic to an even wider circle of fans.]]> 182 Kate DiCamillo 0763616052 ada 0 4.09 2000
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: ada
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 8296 And so Laura Ingalls Wilder's adventure as a little pioneer girl ends, and her new life as a pioneer wife and mother begins. The nine Little House books have been cherished by generations of readers as both a unique glimpse into America's frontier past and a heartwarming, unforgettable story.]]> 160 Laura Ingalls Wilder 0060885459 ada 0 3.89 1971
author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
name: ada
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 77770
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts]]> 289 Laura Ingalls Wilder 0060264802 ada 0 4.20 1943
author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
name: ada
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 244338 208 Beverly Cleary ada 0 4.01 1953
author: Beverly Cleary
name: ada
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> 89551 This is a previously published edition of edition of ISBN 9780380709526. An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Ramona Quimby is no longer seven, but not quite eight. She's "seven and a half right now," if you ask her! Not allowed to stay home alone, yet old enough to watch pesky Willa Jean, Ramona wonders when her mother will treat her like her older, more mature sister, Beezus.

But with her parents' unsettling quarrels and some spelling trouble at school, Ramona wonders if growing up is all it's cracked up to be. No matter what, she'll always be her mother's little girl…right? This warm-hearted story of a mother's love for her spirited young daughter is told beautifully by Newbery Medal winning author Beverly Cleary.]]> 224 Beverly Cleary ada 0 4.10 1979
author: Beverly Cleary
name: ada
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 2537363 Unfortunately, he’s only made of cardboard and rides a skate board. Grace is determined though to prove to her parents that she is responsible and dependable enough to get a real dog.
Things you learn in this
1. Sometimes it is okay to be sneaky if you don’t get caught.
2. How to do flashlight Morse code.
3. What happened at school that was nothing.
4. How it feels to walk into your class after going to the principal’s office!
5. Many other things, but most important, how to convince your parents to MAYBE let you get a dog. A real one, not one made of cardboard.]]> 176 Charise Mericle Harper 0618959734 ada 0 4.05 2008
author: Charise Mericle Harper
name: ada
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2012/04/04
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]> 311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X ada 4 books-i-own 4.15 1985
author: Margaret Atwood
name: ada
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/16
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: books-i-own
review:

]]> 37683751
After seventeen years—and countless broken bones and broken promises—she knows her window to compete in figure skating is coming to a close.

But when the offer of a lifetime comes in from an arrogant idiot she’s spent the last decade dreaming about pushing in the way of a moving bus, Jasmine might have to reconsider everything.

Including Ivan Lukov.]]> 493 Mariana Zapata ada 1 4.19 2018
author: Mariana Zapata
name: ada
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
you will never be tessa and scott
]]> 55817097 He has a heart of ice...but for her, he'd burn the world.

Alex Volkov is a devil blessed with the face of an angel and cursed with a past he can’t escape.

Driven by a tragedy that has haunted him for most of his life, his ruthless pursuits for success and vengeance leave little room for matters of the heart.

But when he’s forced to look after his best friend’s sister, he starts to feel something in his chest:

A crack.
A melt.
A fire that could end his world as he knew it.

***

Ava Chen is a free spirit trapped by nightmares of a childhood she can’t remember.

But despite her broken past, she’s never stopped seeing the beauty in the world…including the heart beneath the icy exterior of a man she shouldn’t want.

Her brother’s best friend.
Her neighbor.
Her savior and her downfall.

Theirs is a love that was never supposed to happen—but when it does, it unleashes secrets that could destroy them both…and everything they hold dear.

Twisted Love is a brother’s best friend/opposites attract romance with a hint of suspense. It's book one in the Twisted series but can be read as a standalone.

WARNING: This book contains a possessive, morally gray alphahole; explicit sexual content, and profanity. No cheating or menage, but if you're looking for a traditionally sweet, loveable hero, this is not the book for you. Recommended for 18+. ]]> 360 Ana Huang ada 2 3.74 2021
author: Ana Huang
name: ada
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
2.5 stars - it kept me engaged but i feel like it moved too fast and it was a bit all over the place. also extremely predictable
]]> 90202302 “The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.� —Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders� capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 ada 3

3.75 stars - definitely liked fourth wing better but i need the next book like yesterday after that ending � probably would’ve been better if the publishing wasnt so rushed, i feel like the book was dragged on too much and it felt like it was never going to end, there was so much going on and new stuff being introduced from every direction. however i have developed an attachment to the characters now and somehow couldn’t stop reading after each chapter ]]> 4.33 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: ada
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/29
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
hey what the fuck


3.75 stars - definitely liked fourth wing better but i need the next book like yesterday after that ending � probably would’ve been better if the publishing wasnt so rushed, i feel like the book was dragged on too much and it felt like it was never going to end, there was so much going on and new stuff being introduced from every direction. however i have developed an attachment to the characters now and somehow couldn’t stop reading after each chapter
]]> 13235689
Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).

Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.]]> 345 David Byrne 1936365537 ada 0 to-read 4.00 2014
author: David Byrne
name: ada
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199261152 A professor of literature finds herself caught up in a work of fiction� literally.

Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily-ever-after. The fictional kind, anyway. Because at least imaginary men don’t leave you at the altar. She feels safe in a book. At home. Which might be why she’s so set on going to her annual book club retreat this year—she needs good friends, cheap wine, and grand romantic gestures—no matter what.

But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel�

Because it is.

This place can’t be real, and yet� she’s here, in Eloraton, the town of her favorite romance series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It feels like home. It’s perfect—and perfectly frozen, trapped in the late author’s last unfinished story.

Elsy is sure that’s why she must be here: to help bring the town to its storybook ending.

Except there is a character in Eloraton that she can’t place—a grumpy bookstore owner with mint-green eyes, an irritatingly sexy mouth and impeccable taste in novels. And he does not want her finishing this book.

Which is a problem because Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily-ever-after might just be intertwined with her own.]]> 368 Ashley Poston 0593640977 ada 3
a cute quick read but it didn’t tug at the heartstrings for me the way seven year slip or dead romantics did. pacing felt too fast and had a lot more of the cringey millennial humor that i try to avoid - overall a fun lighthearted read though]]> 3.62 2024
author: Ashley Poston
name: ada
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
3.5/5

a cute quick read but it didn’t tug at the heartstrings for me the way seven year slip or dead romantics did. pacing felt too fast and had a lot more of the cringey millennial humor that i try to avoid - overall a fun lighthearted read though
]]> 2687519 Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of  vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland� is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is. ]]> 296 Eve Babitz 0440023394 ada 0 to-read 3.92 1974
author: Eve Babitz
name: ada
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 206318561 178 Eve Babitz 0394409841 ada 0 to-read 4.07 1977
author: Eve Babitz
name: ada
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58545703 From USA Today bestselling author Emily McIntire comes a dark and delicious fractured fairy tale reimagining of Peter Pan.

He wants revenge, but he wants her more�

James has always had one agenda: destroy his enemy, Peter Michaels. When Peter’s twenty-year-old daughter Wendy shows up in James’s bar, he sees his way in. Seduce the girl and use her for his revenge. It’s the perfect plan, until things in James’s organization begin to crumble. Suddenly, he has to find the traitor in his midst, and his plan for revenge gets murkier as James starts to see Wendy as more than just a pawn in his game.

Wendy has been cloistered away most of her life by her wealthy cold father, but a spontaneous night out with friends turns into an intense and addictive love affair with the dark and brooding James. As much as she knows James is dangerous, Wendy can’t seem to shake her desire for him. But as their relationship grows more heated and she learns more about the world he moves in, she finds herself unsure if she’s falling for the man known as James or the monster known as Hook.

Hooked is a dark contemporary romance and the first complete standalone in the Never After Series: A collection of fractured fairy tales where the villains get the happy ever after. It is not a literal retelling and not fantasy. Hooked features mature themes and content that may not be suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is advised. For all content warnings, check the author's website. ]]> 312 Emily McIntire 173750832X ada 1
enough with the borderline incest tropes and ending every romance book with the fmc getting married and/or pregnant i stg

too predictable, somehow still better than haunting adeline though so i’ll give it that but it probably wouldve been a dnf if i hadn’t read so much of it on my flight]]> 3.78 2021
author: Emily McIntire
name: ada
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2024/02/18
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves:
review:
i cannot stand booktok anymore plz give me a break � wanting to fuck her on her father’s bloody corpse is not “dark romance� thats just purely fucked up bro

enough with the borderline incest tropes and ending every romance book with the fmc getting married and/or pregnant i stg

too predictable, somehow still better than haunting adeline though so i’ll give it that but it probably wouldve been a dnf if i hadn’t read so much of it on my flight
]]> 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 ada 3
i don’t get all the hype for this book but i also don’t see why it’s gotten all the hate that it has. it’s a very mundane book. not exhilarating but not entirely boring. very character driven and not plot driven. didn’t love the lack of resolution though. took a minute to get used to the writing style.]]> 3.81 2018
author: Sally Rooney
name: ada
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves:
review:
3.5/5

i don’t get all the hype for this book but i also don’t see why it’s gotten all the hate that it has. it’s a very mundane book. not exhilarating but not entirely boring. very character driven and not plot driven. didn’t love the lack of resolution though. took a minute to get used to the writing style.
]]> 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else� realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones� Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 ada 0 to-read 3.97 2018
author: Dolly Alderton
name: ada
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58132544
As Jack and Adaira reluctantly work together, they find they make better allies than rivals as their partnership turns into something more. But with each passing song, it becomes apparent the trouble with the spirits is far more sinister than they first expected, and an older, darker secret about Cadence lurks beneath the surface, threatening to undo them all.]]> 480 Rebecca Ross 0063055988 ada 0 to-read 4.06 2022
author: Rebecca Ross
name: ada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24019191 355 Jeffrey Eugenides 1250074819 ada 0 to-read 3.88 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: ada
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention�

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 ada 0 to-read 3.74 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: ada
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

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

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 ada 0 to-read 3.74 2017
author: Sally Rooney
name: ada
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36739755 Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura.

Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,� she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal� person excellently, more or less. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action�

A brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures we all feel to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata 0802128254 ada 0 to-read 3.65 2016
author: Sayaka Murata
name: ada
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58885776 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593336489.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.

When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.

For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.

Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.

Romance is most certainly dead... but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.

A disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who, quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, has to find her way back home in this sparkling adult debut from national bestselling author Ashley Poston.]]> 368 Ashley Poston ada 4
she has a bit of a predictable formula in her books and this one had a fewww too many cringey millennial wattpad lines but i’ll let it slide just this one time given the quality of the story …]]> 3.90 2022
author: Ashley Poston
name: ada
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:
ashley poston really has a way with love stories that makes even a romance cynic like me wanting to come back for more, giving me an inkling of hope in this era of fast fashion booktok publishing.

she has a bit of a predictable formula in her books and this one had a fewww too many cringey millennial wattpad lines but i’ll let it slide just this one time given the quality of the story �
]]> 62926938 An overworked book publicist with a perfectly planned future hits a snag when she falls in love with her temporary roommate…only to discover he lives seven years in the past, in this witty and wise new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Dead Romantics.

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.

So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it.

And then she finds a strange man standing in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. A man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies. The kind of man that, before it all, she would’ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.

Except, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.

Her aunt always said the apartment was a pinch in time, a place where moments blended together like watercolors. And Clementine knows that if she lets her heart fall, she’ll be doomed.

After all, love is never a matter of time—but a matter of timing.]]> 336 Ashley Poston ada 5 favorites
i was a bit hesitant going into this book because contemporaries haven’t been my cup of tea lately, but i was delightfully surprised. i finished this book in a day - i couldn’t put it down and i kept coming back for more. i loved that this book wasn’t centered wholly on romance, but also navigating grief and the journey of discovering oneself. the science brain in me couldn’t wrap my head around the lack of the butterfly effect and the whole “changing the past will affect the future� concept, but maybe that’s the magic of it all.

beautifully written and dare i say almost a 5 star book for me �..]]> 4.17 2023
author: Ashley Poston
name: ada
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: favorites
review:
4.75/5

i was a bit hesitant going into this book because contemporaries haven’t been my cup of tea lately, but i was delightfully surprised. i finished this book in a day - i couldn’t put it down and i kept coming back for more. i loved that this book wasn’t centered wholly on romance, but also navigating grief and the journey of discovering oneself. the science brain in me couldn’t wrap my head around the lack of the butterfly effect and the whole “changing the past will affect the future� concept, but maybe that’s the magic of it all.

beautifully written and dare i say almost a 5 star book for me �..
]]> 6294 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl's castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there's far more to Howl—and herself—than first meets the eye.]]> 329 Diana Wynne Jones 006441034X ada 0 to-read 4.30 1986
author: Diana Wynne Jones
name: ada
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6493208
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored� ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia � a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo � to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality� until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family � past and present � is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.]]> 370 Rebecca Skloot 1400052173 ada 3 4.12 2010
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: ada
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves:
review:
surprisingly enjoyed reading this, learning the story of the woman behind the cells of one of the most important contributions to science to date
]]> 54860443
But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a magical, sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.]]> 418 Casey McQuiston 1250244498 ada 0 to-read 3.89 2021
author: Casey McQuiston
name: ada
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62022 258 Walter Tevis 1400030609 ada 0 to-read 4.15 1983
author: Walter Tevis
name: ada
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 ada 0 to-read 3.76 2023
author: Justin Torres
name: ada
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25903320

Cassandra Jean's evocative visuals once again work seamlessly with Hollow City's vintage photographs and Ransom Rigg's twisting fantasy narrative to make for a wholly immersive reading experience for fans of the original novels, fans graphic novels, and fans of reading great stories alike!]]> 272 Ransom Riggs 0316306797 ada 0 4.19
author: Ransom Riggs
name: ada
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> 30079724 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.

But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Bettering myself --
Mr. Wu --
Malibu --
The weirdos --
A dark and winding road --
No place for good people --
Slumming --
An honest woman --
The beach boy --
Nothing ever happens here --
Dancing in the moonlight --
The surrogate --
The locked room --
A better place]]> 294 Ottessa Moshfegh 0399562885 ada 0 to-read 3.63 2017
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: ada
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>