Alyssa's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 10 May 2025 11:43:37 -0700 60 Alyssa's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch]]> 248
Big Sur is the portrait of a place one of the most colorful in the U.S. and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable.

Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

]]> 400 Henry Miller 0811201074 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.04 1957 Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
author: Henry Miller
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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]]> Pageboy 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 Alyssa 0 currently-reading 3.72 2023 Pageboy
author: Elliot Page
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/03
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]]> The Hours 11899 The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that became a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.]]> 230 Michael Cunningham 0312305060 Alyssa 0 currently-reading 3.95 1998 The Hours
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
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]]> Life on Mars: Poems 9639765 Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love� and “illness� now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.]]> 75 Tracy K. Smith 1555975844 Alyssa 4 favorites 4.10 2011 Life on Mars: Poems
author: Tracy K. Smith
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver]]> 34272476
“No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.� —The Washington Post

“It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.� —Chicago Tribune

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.

Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.]]> 456 Mary Oliver 0399563245 Alyssa 5 favorites 4.58 2017 Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
author: Mary Oliver
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/12
date added: 2025/05/03
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]]> Song of Solomon 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Alyssa 5 favorites 4.15 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/05/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Morning Meditations: Simple Practices to Begin Your Day with Joy, Energy, and Intention]]> 60220751 This beautiful collection of morning rituals makes it easy to begin each day with inspiration, energy, and intention.

Greet each day with uplifting and energizing rituals such as rejuvenating mindfulness meditations, empowering affirmations, and breathing exercises to encourage energy and focus. Bonus sidebars offer simple remedies and rituals to start the morning feeling refreshed and inspired¬, including tea recipes, aromatherapy, and more.

Brimming with joyful, nature-inspired artwork and more than 20 enriching morning practices, this gorgeous package is a cheerful bedside companion for yoga and mindfulness enthusiasts, self-care seekers, and anyone who wants to begin each day with inspiration, positivity, and intention.

EASY TO Written with warmth and encouragement, the easy-to-follow practices are designed for a wide audience, from seasoned meditators to meditation newbies who want to start each day on the right note.

VALUABLE Mindfulness and meditation are scientifically proven to help people release stress and find peace. This book offers valuable practices in an accessible, low-investment format that features everything readers need to infuse their mornings with joy, intention, and calm to greet the day ahead.

BEAUTIFUL TO GIFT AND Bright, nature-inspired package filled with uplifting artwork, Morning Meditations is a lovely gift for wellness enthusiasts, meditators, and anyone who wants to incorporate mindfulness techniques into everyday life.

Perfect

� Yoga practitioners
� Meditators
� People who use the Calm and Headspace meditation apps
� Fans of Two Minute Mornings, Calm The Chaos, and Mindfulness Cards]]> 162 Danielle North 1797215132 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.24 Morning Meditations: Simple Practices to Begin Your Day with Joy, Energy, and Intention
author: Danielle North
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average rating: 4.24
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]]> The Black Flamingo 41020406 360 Dean Atta 144494858X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.33 2019 The Black Flamingo
author: Dean Atta
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto]]> 60382737
From the founder and creator of The Nap Ministry,Rest Is Resistanceis a battle cry, a guidebook, a map for a movement, and a field guide for the weary and hopeful. It is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art,Rest Is Resistanceis a call to action and manifesto for those who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.]]> 224 Tricia Hersey 0316365211 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.06 2022 Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto
author: Tricia Hersey
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
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]]> Martyr! 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 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.22
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]]> Life and Fate 88432 Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.

Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

Librarian's Note: This is an alternative cover edition of ISBN13: 9780099506164]]> 864 Vasily Grossman Alyssa 0 to-read 4.42 1960 Life and Fate
author: Vasily Grossman
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1960
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]]> Breath, Eyes, Memory 5186
At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.]]> 234 Edwidge Danticat 037570504X Alyssa 0 to-read 3.90 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory
author: Edwidge Danticat
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Paris Review Issue 250 (The Paris Review, #250)]]> 223590503
Hanif Kureishi on the Art of Fiction: “When I was in hospital in Rome, having the experience of being a paralyzed man nearly dead, my only excitement was in the thought that I could write some of this shit down.�

Gerald Murnane on the Art of Fiction: “A fatal question—what are people reading these days? Never mind what people are reading these days. What should I be writing about is the fundamental question.�

Prose by Dan Bevacqua, Caoilinn Hughes, Silas Jones, Alec Niedenthal, Adania Shibli, and Abdulah Sidran.

Poetry by Sargon Boulus, Egill Skallagrímsson, Rachel Mannheimer, Simone White, and Hua Xi.

Art by Ann Craven, Ala Ebtekar, and Josh Smith; cover by Seth Becker.]]> 242 Emily Stokes Alyssa 4 3.40 The Paris Review Issue 250 (The Paris Review, #250)
author: Emily Stokes
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.40
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rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> Saving Face: A Memoir 201775712 This author goes where no other might dare.� Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright

What's in a smile? Or the absent smile? Saving Face is Effy Redman's thought-provoking answer.

Born with a rare condition of facial paralysis called Moebius Syndrome, Redman's grit and eye for beauty help her survive childhood bullying and adolescent doldrums. Her physical transformation at age thirteen via plastic surgery eviscerates her concept of image, just in time for her and her family to immigrate from hardscrabble Manchester, England to America's disorientingly scenic upstate New York. Not until diagnosis in young adulthood with bipolar disorder does Redman come out of the closet as a lesbian, finally claiming her most inherent identity.

Saving Face is a searing personal tribute to anybody who has ever felt like an outsider. This memoir honors the grace of a face that stands out in a crowd, defying societal beauty norms. Disability meets transcendence, suffering becomes hope, and the individual expands into community. The inability to smile, in Redman’s book, lights a window onto the human capacity for redemption.]]> 296 Effy Redman 3988320498 Alyssa 5 4.53 Saving Face: A Memoir
author: Effy Redman
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.53
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rating: 5
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]]> Women: A Novella 200307455
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a short­cut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her.

A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.

With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloe Caldwell writes the story of a love in of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the feverish obsession of addictive love, and asks the what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?

In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women is an incandescent novella that brands the heart and sears the soul.]]> 160 Chloé Caldwell 0063387077 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.01 2014 Women: A Novella
author: Chloé Caldwell
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> <![CDATA[In Love and Trust: Letters from a Zen Master]]> 205438882 Experience Thich Nhat Hanh’s deep and direct expressions of love, connection, and wisdom through a new collection of the Zen master’s personal letters.Widely recognized for his deep and accessible teachings on the art of mindful living, Thich Nhat Hanh lived a rich life dedicated to fostering community and connection within and outside of the monastery walls. In Love and Trust offers a striking look at Thich Nhat Hanh as seen through his intimate letters to monastics, lay practitioners, allies in the peace movement, and other friends on the path. Through these touching pieces of correspondence, we see Thich Nhat Hanh at his warmest and most inspirational, at his most candid and direct. These personal messages of love and trust demonstrate the deeply human origins of Thay’s teachings—and Thay’s own deeply human expression of them.In Love and Trust is composed primarily of newly translated letters, presented here in English for the first time. The book features archival photos and Thich Nhat Hanh’s own handwriting throughout.]]> 304 Thich Nhat Hanh 1952692822 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.38 In Love and Trust: Letters from a Zen Master
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.38
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]]> The Sun My Heart 974773 142 Thich Nhat Hanh 0938077120 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.25 1988 The Sun My Heart
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall]]> 198385724 576 Christophe Lebold 1770417443 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.42 Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall
author: Christophe Lebold
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average rating: 4.42
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]]> <![CDATA[I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots]]> 214152014 The eternal singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is seen anew, portrayed through a witty and comprehensive exploration of anecdotes, quotes, and lyrics by Henry Alford, “the most graceful of humorists� (Vanity Fair) and a writer for The New Yorker.

Joni Mitchell’s life, psyche, and evolving legacy are explored here in vivid technicolor—from her childhood in Saskatoon, Canada, to her arrival in Laurel Canyon that turned her into, as Alford puts it, “the bard of heartbreak and longing.� Each period of Mitchell’s life is observed via the artists, friends, family, and lovers she encountered along the way, including James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Georgia O’Keefe, Prince, and, most significantly, Kilauren, the daughter Mitchell gave up for adoption at birth but then reconnected with decades later.

Presented in the impressionistic vein of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, I Dream of Joni explores in fifty-three essays, with the author’s trademark wit and verve, the life of the legendary singer-songwriter.]]> 352 Henry Alford 1668019507 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.13 2025 I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots
author: Henry Alford
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.13
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]]> <![CDATA[Creep: Accusations and Confessions]]> 101161160 A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.]]> 331 Myriam Gurba 198218647X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.32 2023 Creep: Accusations and Confessions
author: Myriam Gurba
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
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]]> In the Presence of Absence 10796910 The Village Voice

By one of the most transcendent poets of this generation, a remarkable collection of prose poems that explores themes of love, pain, isolation, and connection. In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish's life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.


]]> 171 Mahmoud Darwish 1935744011 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.52 2006 In the Presence of Absence
author: Mahmoud Darwish
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2006
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]]> The Flowers of Evil 536387 of the seamy side of urban life. Including the French texts and comprehensive explanatory notes to the poems, this extraordinary body of love poems restores the six poems originally banned in 1857, revealing the richness and variety of the collection.]]> 464 Charles Baudelaire 0192835459 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.17 1857 The Flowers of Evil
author: Charles Baudelaire
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1857
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.06 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
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]]> Deep Cuts 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.74 2025 Deep Cuts
author: Holly Brickley
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
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]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
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]]> The Well of Loneliness 129223
Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents—a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions.

The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.]]> 448 Radclyffe Hall Alyssa 0 to-read 3.74 1928 The Well of Loneliness
author: Radclyffe Hall
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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]]> Nobody's Empire 199531954 One of the great lyricists of our time, the lead singer and songwriter for the iconic Glasgow-based band Belle and Sebastian, pens a sensitive and intimate account—his debut novel based on his own youthful experiences—of dark days leading to light and a coming of age through music.

It’s the early 1990s in Glasgow, Scotland, and Stephen has emerged from a lengthy hospital stay. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood disease that has robbed him of any prospects of work, friends, or independent living, he moves slowly toward new goals and meets others like him, including Richard, a friend from school, and Carrie, a young woman bedridden for five years. Feeling isolated and alone, they form their own support group, and try to get by with as little money and pain as possible. Since he’s been ill, Stephen never feels warm, inspiring Carrie to affectionately call him “The World’s Coldest Boy.� As the world seems to care less for them, the trio start to care less about fitting in with the world.

Stephen soon discovers he has a talent for writing songs. He awakens to the possibility of a spiritual life that transcends the everyday, and feels a calling for a place that might as well be on the other end of the universe let alone the world. Buoyed by tentative hope, he and Richard leave Glasgow in search of a cure in the mythic warmth and sun of California. As they float between hostels, sofas, and park benches, they discover the trip is life-changing in ways neither expected, and Stephen embraces a new-world reinvention that will change his life forever.
Melodic and captivating, filled with graceful notes, melancholic chords, and witty, thoughtful riffs on life's infinite possibilities and curiosities, Nobody’s Empire is a warm and wonderful coming-of-age novel, imbued with Stuart Murdoch's magical lyricism.]]> 384 Stuart Murdoch 0063383454 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.83 2025 Nobody's Empire
author: Stuart Murdoch
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.83
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]]> We Do Not Part 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.86 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
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]]> The Remains of the Day 28921 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 0571225381 here.

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.]]> 258 Kazuo Ishiguro Alyssa 0 to-read 4.14 1989 The Remains of the Day
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> Never Let Me Go 6334 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Alyssa 4 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource]]> 217869789 An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.� �New York Times

“Brilliant book� Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens� Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.� The Sirens� Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 336 Christopher L. Hayes 0593653114 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.04 2025 The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
author: Christopher L. Hayes
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.04
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]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Twelve Years a Slave 18478222 363 Solomon Northup 0989794806 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.21 1853 Twelve Years a Slave
author: Solomon Northup
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1853
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Khalifa Brothers, #1)]]> 4835 Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. In this captivating novel, Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.]]> 224 Salman Rushdie 0670886580 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.99 1990 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Khalifa Brothers, #1)
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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review:

]]> A Thousand Splendid Suns 128029
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a portrait of a wounded country and a story of family and friendship, of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond, and an indestructible love.]]> 372 Khaled Hosseini 1594489505 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.44 2007 A Thousand Splendid Suns
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> The Kite Runner 17165596 The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.

The 10th anniversary edition of the New York Times bestseller and international classic loved by millions of readers.

]]> 371 Khaled Hosseini Alyssa 0 to-read 4.46 2003 The Kite Runner
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> Midnight’s Children 14836 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,� all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight� s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.]]> 647 Salman Rushdie 0099578514 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.98 1981 Midnight’s Children
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane]]> 35259553 Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, "a genius on the level of Beckett" (Teju Cole)

Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories--originally published from 1985 to 2012--offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians.

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to "The Interior of Gaaldine," which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.

No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how--and why--we read.

Contents:
When the mice failed to arrive --
Stream system --
Land deal --
The only Adam --
Stone quarry --
Precious bane --
Cotters come no more --
There were some countries --
Finger web --
First love --
Velvet waters --
The white cattle of Uppington --
In far fields --
Pink lining --
Boy blue --
Emerald blue --
The interior of Gaaldine --
Invisible yet enduring lilacs --
As it were a letter --
The boy's name was David --
Last letter to a niece.]]> 560 Gerald Murnane 0374126003 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.11 2018 Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane
author: Gerald Murnane
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> Landscape with Landscape 1457415
Another man searches in the hills around Melbourne for twenty years for a landscape and a woman that no artist can paint.

These stories and four others make up Landscape with Landscape. Read together they make up an elaborate and unforgettable pattern of dreams and reality.

'Landscape with Landscape is a work of extraordinary power and vision, one which will surely be an outstanding novel of the decade.' Helen Daniel, Age]]> 267 Gerald Murnane 0140097511 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.18 1987 Landscape with Landscape
author: Gerald Murnane
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> Tamarisk Row 5131898 [Back-cover blurb]]]> 188 Gerald Murnane 0207160236 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.07 1974 Tamarisk Row
author: Gerald Murnane
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> The Plains 1593668
Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.]]> 111 Gerald Murnane 1930974280 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.78 1982 The Plains
author: Gerald Murnane
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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]]> Failing This 8128485 23 Alec Niedenthal Alyssa 0 to-read 4.33 2010 Failing This
author: Alec Niedenthal
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> Necessary Errors 16171304 An exquisite debut novel that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague

It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow.He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself.

Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.]]> 480 Caleb Crain 014312241X Alyssa 0 to-read 3.28 2013 Necessary Errors
author: Caleb Crain
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> Manywhere: Stories 57693666 Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

Wonderful stories. Impressive range. Delightfully, compellingly queer. -Roxane Gay
Sparkling, imaginative, and inventive. -Karen Thompson Walker
The vision of a singular and exciting artist. -Torrey Peters.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.]]> 209 Morgan Thomas 0374602484 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.80 2022 Manywhere: Stories
author: Morgan Thomas
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
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]]> <![CDATA[Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts]]> 205363955 Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life � one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves.

Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, it offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls ‘imperfectionism�. How can we embrace our non-negotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? What if purposeful productivity were often about letting things happen, not making them happen?

Reflecting on ideas drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores practical tools and shifts in perspective. The result is a bracing challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.

To be read either as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind� or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.]]> 208 Oliver Burkeman 0374611998 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.26 2024 Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
author: Oliver Burkeman
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
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]]> Shattered 199793444
While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed � a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.

As Hanif wrote, early on: ‘A few days ago, a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends.�

This book takes these hospital dispatches � edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing � and charts both a shattering and a a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings � of gratitude, humility and love.]]> 336 Hanif Kureishi 0063360500 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.99 2025 Shattered
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> The Black Album 535239 288 Hanif Kureishi 0684825406 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.48 1995 The Black Album
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> The Buddha of Suburbia 302998 The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years.]]> 288 Hanif Kureishi 014013168X Alyssa 0 to-read 3.77 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Paris Review, Issue 249 (Paris Review, #249)]]> 221517805
Javier Cercas on the Art of Fiction: “Hell, to me, is a literary party.�

James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.�

Prose by Josephine Baker, Caleb Crain, Marlene Morgan, Morgan Thomas, and Fumio Yamamoto.

Poetry by Hannah Arendt, Matt Broaddus, Sara Gilmore, Benjamin Krusling, Mark Leidner, James Richardson, and Margaret Ross.

Art by Ayé Aton and Ron Veasey, and cover by Sterling Ruby.]]> 259 Emily Stokes Alyssa 4 3.84 The Paris Review, Issue 249 (Paris Review, #249)
author: Emily Stokes
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/05
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]]> Fearless and Free: A Memoir 215593875 This is Josephine Baker in her own words.

Josephine Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and Picasso admired her; Shirley Bassey adored 'I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer'. It was told she strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah who wore a diamond collar.

Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance, her celebrity working as her cover. She was awarded the Légion d'Honneur for military service. After the war she became increasingly interested in civil rights. In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl born in Missouri to a poor single black woman and a white father she did not know.

Flirtatious, funny, candid and this memoir gives us the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker telling her own story. Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage, over a period of more than twenty years, this book offers an entertaining insight into one of the most interesting and beguiling figures of the twentieth century.]]> 304 Josephine Baker 0593853695 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.50 1949 Fearless and Free: A Memoir
author: Josephine Baker
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> The Dilemmas of Working Women 216527054 The lost Japanese bestseller - a darkly funny and relatable book about five women in modern Japan, published in English for the very first time.

Izumi is divorced and unemployed, but is the alternative really so much better?
Haruka has recovered from her cancer and everyone else thinks she should just forget all about it.
ō is invisible to her children and her husband, but at work at the convenience, no one will leave her alone.
Mito can't decide whether to accept her boyfriend's marriage proposal, especially as she's been cheating on him for months.
Sumie just needs somewhere to live.]]> Fumio Yamamoto 0349019207 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.75 2000 The Dilemmas of Working Women
author: Fumio Yamamoto
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Paris Review, Issue 248, Summer 2024 (Paris Review, #248)]]> 215817090
Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.�

Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.

Poetry by Mosab Abu Toha, Diana Garza Islas, Homer, Douglas Kearney, Kim Hyesoon, Masaoka Shiki, Patty Nash, and Jana Prikryl.

Art by Lauren Halsey and G. Peter Jemison.

Cover: Jeremy Frey, Radiance, 2024, black ash, sweetgrass, and synthetic dye, 22 x 12 in.]]> 240 Emily Stokes Alyssa 3 3.48 The Paris Review, Issue 248, Summer 2024 (Paris Review, #248)
author: Emily Stokes
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.48
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 2666 63032 1128 Roberto Bolaño 843396867X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.22 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha]]> 241899
Retold in Thich Nhat Hanh’s inimitably beautiful style, this book traces the Buddha’s life over the course of 80 years—partly through the eyes of Svasti, the buffalo boy, and partly through the eyes of the Buddha himself. Old Path White Clouds is a classic of religious literature.

“I have not avoided including the various difficulties the Buddha encountered, both from his own disciples and in relation to the wider society. If the Buddha appears in this book as a man close to us, it is partly due to recounting such difficulties.�
—Thich Nhah Hanh, from the Afterword]]> 600 Thich Nhat Hanh 0938077260 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.35 1991 Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Little House in the Big Woods (Little House, #1)]]> 8337
Little House in the Big Woods takes place in 1871 and introduces us to four-year-old Laura, who lives in a log cabin on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin. She shares the cabin with her Pa, her Ma, her sisters Mary and Carrie, and their lovable dog, Jack.

Pioneer life isn’t easy for the Ingalls family, since they must grow or catch all their own food as they get ready for the cold winter. But they make the best of every tough situation. They celebrate Christmas with homemade toys and treats, do their spring planting, bring in the harvest in the fall, and make their first trip into town. And every night, safe and warm in their little house, the sound of Pa’s fiddle lulls Laura and her sisters into sleep.

The nine books in the timeless Little House series tell the story of Laura’s real childhood as an American pioneer, and are cherished by readers of all generations. They offer a unique glimpse into life on the American frontier, and tell the heartwarming, unforgettable story of a loving family.]]> 224 Laura Ingalls Wilder 0060885378 Alyssa 3 4.21 1932 Little House in the Big Woods (Little House, #1)
author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu (Buddha #1)]]> 209577
Tezuka himself was a humanist rather than a Buddhist, and his magnum opus is not an attempt at propaganda. Hermann Hesse's novel or Bertolucci's film is comparable in this regard; in fact, Tezuka's approach is slightly irreverent in that it incorporates something that Western commentators often eschew, namely, humor.]]> 400 Osamu Tezuka 193223456X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.18 1972 Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu (Buddha #1)
author: Osamu Tezuka
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Vineland 59721
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.

Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.]]> 480 Thomas Pynchon 3499136287 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.75 1990 Vineland
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Ducks, Newburyport 43412920
A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It’s also very, very funny.]]> 1022 Lucy Ellmann 191029697X Alyssa 0 to-read 3.90 2019 Ducks, Newburyport
author: Lucy Ellmann
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Alyssa 5 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
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]]> <![CDATA[A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail]]> 9791 A Walk in the Woods will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).]]> 397 Bill Bryson 0307279464 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.07 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
author: Bill Bryson
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> October Sky (Coalwood #1) 124862
So begins Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia - a hard-scrabble little mining company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football and where the future was regarded with more fear than hope.

Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams.

In 1957 a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik shoot across the Appalachian sky and soon found his future in the stars. 'Sonny' and a handful of his friends, Roy Lee Cook, Sherman O'Dell and Quentin Wilson were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives forever.

Step by step, with the help (and occasional hindrance) of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learn not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that fly miles into the sky, but how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by.

A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother's love and a father's fears, Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys proves, like Angela's Ashes and Russell Baker's Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers' hearts and enchant their souls.

A uniquely endearing book with universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is evocative, vivid storytelling at its most magical.

In 1999, Rocket Boys was made into a Hollywood movie named October Sky starring Chris Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal and Laura Dern. October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys. It is also used in a period radio broadcast describing Sputnik 1 as it crossed the 'October sky'. Homer Hickam stated that "Universal Studios marketing people got involved and they just had to change the title because, according to their research, women over thirty would never see a movie titled Rocket Boys" so Universal Pictures changed the title to be more inviting to a wider audience. The book was later re-released with the name October Sky in order to capitalize on interest in the movie.]]> 428 Homer Hickam 0440235502 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.14 1998 October Sky (Coalwood #1)
author: Homer Hickam
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> 'Salem's Lot 5413 Also contains: One For the Road, Jerusalem's Lot. For standalone novel see ISBN 9780450031069.

Stephen King's second novel, the classic vampire bestseller 'Salem's Lot, tells the story of evil in small-town America. For the first time in a major trade edition, this terrifying novel is accompanied by previously unpublished material from King's archive, two short stories, and eerie photographs that bring King's fictional darkness and evil to vivid life.

When Stephen King’s classic thriller 'Salem's Lot hit the stands in 1975, it thrilled and terrified millions of readers with tales of demonic evil in small-town America. Now, thirty years later and still scaring readers witless, 'Salem's Lot reemerges in a brilliant new edition, complete with photographs, fifty pages of deleted and alternate scenes, and two short stories related to the events of the novel.

While the original edition of 'Salem's Lot will forever be a premier horror classic, 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition, with the inclusion of material from King’s archive, is destined to become a classic in its own right and a must-have for all Stephen King fans. In this edition, the hair-raising story of Jerusalem’s Lot, a small town in Maine whose inhabitants succumb to the evil allure of a new resident, is told as the author envisioned it, complete with fifty pages of alternate and deleted scenes. With a new introduction by the author, two short stories related to the events and residents of Jerusalem’s Lot, the lavishly creepy photographs of Jerry Uelsmann, and a stunning new page design, this edition brings the story to life in words and pictures as never before.

No library will be complete without this ideal collector’s item for any King aficionado, the definitive illustrated edition of the great 'Salem's Lot.]]> 594 Stephen King 0385516487 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.28 1975 'Salem's Lot
author: Stephen King
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again]]> 1757749
That’s why poetry is dangerous. It gives voice to our unspoken dreams; it is a mirror to our own deepest joys, desires, and sorrows. It can tip us over into a new life, into a new way of seeing and being, that a moment ago we might even have had no words for.

In this new volume of his Ten Poems series, Roger Housden takes ten great poems and in personal, intimate essays shows how they led him, and can also lead us, into a more deeply lived and examined life. Housden says, “Every one of the poems in this book has struck me a blow, a direct hit, each of them, into the heart of hearts. Every one of them, in its own way, has opened a door for me to go deeper into my own experience, my own longings, my own sorrows and joys, and into the silence that surrounds all of this, all of us, always.”]]> 160 Roger Housden 0307405192 Alyssa 4 4.11 2007 Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again
author: Roger Housden
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQ+ Places and Stories]]> 59894088 Queer Spaces recognises LGBTQIA+ life past and present as strong, vibrant, vigorous, and worthy of its own place in history. Looking forward, it suggests visions of what form these spaces may take in the future to continue uplifting queer lives. Featured spaces include:

Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, London Category Is Books, Glasgow Christopher Street, New York Coppelia, Havana New Sazae, Tokyo ONE Institute for Homophile Studies, Los Angeles Pop-Up spaces, Dhaka Queer House Party, Online Santiago Apóstol Cathedral, Managua Trans Memory Archive, Buenos Aires Victorian Pride Centre, Melbourne]]> 240 Adam Nathaniel Furman 1914124219 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.38 Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQ+ Places and Stories
author: Adam Nathaniel Furman
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.38
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories]]> 24885533
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary� (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware� (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves� (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species� (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors� (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King� (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie� (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.]]> 450 Ken Liu 1481442546 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.36 2016 The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
author: Ken Liu
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Loving and Leaving the Good Life (Good Life Series)]]> 339227 224 Helen Nearing 0930031636 Alyssa 2 4.10 1992 Loving and Leaving the Good Life (Good Life Series)
author: Helen Nearing
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Me Talk Pretty One Day 4137 272 David Sedaris 0349113912 Alyssa 3 4.01 2000 Me Talk Pretty One Day
author: David Sedaris
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Woolgathering 788586 Woolgathering tells of a youngster finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me. She discovers often at night, often in nature the pleasures of rescuing a fleeting thought. Deeply moving, Woolgathering calls up our own memories, as the child glimpses and gleans, piecing together a crazy quilt of truths. Smith introduces us to her tribe, a race of cloud dwellers, and to the fierce, vital pleasures of cloud watching and stargazing and wandering.

A radiant new autobiographical piece, Two Worlds (which was not in the original 1992 Hanuman edition of Woolgathering), and the author's photographs and illustrations are also included.

Woolgathering celebrates the sacred nature of creation with Smith's beautiful style, acclaimed as glorious (NPR), spellbinding (Booklist), rare and ferocious (Salon), and shockingly beautiful (New York Magazine).]]> 80 Patti Smith 0937815470 Alyssa 4 3.94 1992 Woolgathering
author: Patti Smith
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Jesus for the Non-Religious 80202
Spong challenges much of the traditional understanding that has for so long surrounded the Jesus of history, from the tale of his miraculous birth to a virgin, to the account of his cosmic ascension into the sky at the end of his life. Spong questions the historicity of the ideas that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, that he had twelve disciples, and that the miracle stories were meant to be descriptions of supernatural events. He also speaks directly to those contemporary critics of Christianity who call God a "delusion" and who write letters to a "Christian nation" and describe how Christianity has become evil and destructive.

Spong invites his readers to look at Jesus through the lens of both the Jewish scriptures and the liturgical life of the first-century synagogue. Dismissing the dispute about Jesus' nature that consumed the church's leadership for the first 500 years of Christian history as irrelevant, Spong proposes a new way of understanding the divinity of Christ: as the ultimate dimension of a fulfilled humanity. Traditional Christians who still cling to dated concepts of the past will not be comfortable with this book; however, skeptics of the twenty-first century will not be quite so certain that dismissing Jesus is the correct pathway to walk. Jesus for the Non-Religious may be the book that finally brings the pious and the secular into a meaningful dialogue, opening the door to a living Christianity in the post-Christian world.]]> 316 John Shelby Spong 0060762071 Alyssa 3 4.06 2007 Jesus for the Non-Religious
author: John Shelby Spong
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/16
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass]]> 24213
When Alice sees a white rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat pocket she decides to follow it, and a sequence of most unusual events is set in motion. This mini book contains the entire topsy-turvy stories of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, accompanied by practical notes and Martina Pelouso's memorable full-colour illustrations.]]> 239 Lewis Carroll Alyssa 4 4.07 1871 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
author: Lewis Carroll
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1871
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Last Night at the Telegraph Club]]> 35224992 A story of love and duty set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the Red Scare.

“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.� And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?�

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.]]> 409 Malinda Lo 0525555250 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.21 2021 Last Night at the Telegraph Club
author: Malinda Lo
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
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]]> News of the World 25817493 Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.� Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.

]]> 209 Paulette Jiles 0062409204 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.02 2016 News of the World
author: Paulette Jiles
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> I’m Glad My Mom Died 59366244
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

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

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 304 Jennette McCurdy 1982185821 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.42 2022 I’m Glad My Mom Died
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> A Piece of Cake 196764
Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. At just 16 she stumbled into the terrifying world of the gangsta, dealing drugs, hustling and only just surviving a drive-by shooting. Ironically, it was Cupcake's rapid descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine addiction that finally saved her. After one four-day crack binge she woke up behind a dumpster. Half-dressed and half-dead, she finally realized she had to change her life or die on the streets - another trash-can addict, another sad statistic.

Astonishingly, Cupcake turned her life around and this is her brutally frank, startlingly funny story. Unlike any memoir you will ever read, A Piece of Cake is a redemptive, gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it. It is also the most genuinely affecting rollercoaster ride through hell and back that you will ever take.]]> 472 Cupcake Brown 1400052297 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.24 2006 A Piece of Cake
author: Cupcake Brown
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 193388249
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And this was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.]]> 338 David Grann 0593470834 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> Holidays on Ice 4136 Us and Them); the difficulties of explaining the Easter Bunny to the French (Jesus Shaves); what to do when you've been locked out in a snowstorm (Let It Snow); the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations (Six to Eight Black Men); what Halloween at the medical examiner's looks like (The Monster Mash); and a barnyard secret Santa scheme gone awry (Cow and Turkey).]]> 176 David Sedaris 0316191299 Alyssa 2 3.92 1997 Holidays on Ice
author: David Sedaris
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> Sonny Boy 209499400 From one of the most iconic actors in the history of film, an astonishingly revelatory account of a creative life in full. To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force. But Pacino was in his mid-thirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe. Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions—the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.]]> 384 Al Pacino 0593655117 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.98 2024 Sonny Boy
author: Al Pacino
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Ten Poems to Set You Free 699039
This volume brings together the voices of Thomas Merton, David Whyte, the Basque poet Miguel de Unamuno, Anna Swir from Poland, Stanley Kunitz, the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, and Jane Hirshfield, as well as three of Housden’s favorites, Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye. His luminous essays on the poems show us how to integrate the poets� truth into our own lives.

Roger Housden’s love of poetry and life leaps from every page—so much so that his readers feel they have found a guide and mentor through the extraordinary Ten Poems series. He has opened the eyes and hearts of many, not just to the power of poetry, but to the truth and beauty of the life of the soul. What more can one ask?]]> 144 Roger Housden 1400051126 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.26 2003 Ten Poems to Set You Free
author: Roger Housden
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life]]> 357464 Writing Down The Bones, teaches a methodof writing that can take you beyond craft to thetrue source of creative power: The mind that is"raw, full of energy, alive andhungry."



Here is compassionate, practical, and oftenhumorous advice about how to find time to write,how to discover your personal style, how to makesentences come alive, and how to overcomeprocrastination and writer's block -- including more thanthirty provocative "Try this" exercises toget your pen moving.



And here alsois a larger vision of the writer's task:balancing daily responsibilities with a commitment towriting; knowing when to take risks as a writer and ahuman being; coming to terms with success andfailure and loss; and learning self-acceptance -- bothin life and art.



WildMind will change your way of writing. Itmay also change your life.]]> 238 Natalie Goldberg 0553347756 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.13 1990 Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir]]> 1968797 309 Natalie Goldberg 1416535020 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.18 2002 Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within]]> 44905 336 Natalie Goldberg 1590303164 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.21 1986 Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[A Responsibility to Awe: Poems (Oxford Poets)]]> 1912586 159 Rebecca Elson 1903039541 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.30 2001 A Responsibility to Awe: Poems (Oxford Poets)
author: Rebecca Elson
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End]]> 25733900 From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.

In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of five great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.�

Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.

The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?� By bringing these great writers� final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.]]> 320 Katie Roiphe 0385343590 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.68 2016 The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
author: Katie Roiphe
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> A Ghost in the Throat 51498568 326 Doireann Ní Ghríofa 1916434266 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.04 2020 A Ghost in the Throat
author: Doireann Ní Ghríofa
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Brave In-Between: Notes from the Last Room]]> 199739313
Amy Low resides in a room that is her last—her medical team is clear-eyed with there is no cure for Stage IV metastatic colon cancer, and the odds of long-term survival are scant. Miraculously, she’s lived four years with her diagnosis, and that life between life has changed her.

Through the swirl of prolonged trauma and unbearable grief, a vantage point emerged—a window that showed her the way to relish life and be kinder to herself and others while living through the inevitable loss and heartbreak that crosses everyone’s paths. Instead of viewing joy and sorrow as opposites, she saw how both exist in harmony, full of mystery and surprise. Instead of seeing days as succeeding or failing, and physical selves as healthy or unwell, she’s learned to carry both achievements and afflictions in stride. And instead of bitterness and betrayal, forgiveness—toward her body, toward others, toward herself—became her wisest light.

Mapping her experiences to the words that St. Paul wrote in his own last room , The Brave In-Between is a sacred invitation to explore that space between triumph and tragedy. We all have a heart to marvel at miracles, a lightness to spot the absurdity, and an imagination to pause and extend empathy for others—even when tragedy strikes. Sometimes we just need a guide.]]> 240 Amy Low 0306831791 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.05 The Brave In-Between: Notes from the Last Room
author: Amy Low
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.05
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date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> Dig 40714769
"Because we want them to thrive," Marla always says.

What does thriving look like? Like carrying a snow shovel everywhere. Like selling pot at the Arby's drive-thru window. Like a first class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea-circus in a doublewide. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest.

As the rot just beneath the surface of the Hemmings precious white suburban respectability begins to spread, the far flung grand children gradually find their ways back to each other, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.]]> 394 A.S. King 1101994916 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.16 2019 Dig
author: A.S. King
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants]]> 17465709 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.]]> 408 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1571313354 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.52 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
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]]> Siddhartha 52036 152 Hermann Hesse Alyssa 5 favorites 4.07 1922 Siddhartha
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: favorites
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]]> Year of the Monkey 44776548 Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs–including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.� For Smith–inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing–the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.]]> 171 Patti Smith 0525657681 Alyssa 3 3.81 2019 Year of the Monkey
author: Patti Smith
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
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]]> The Rolling Thunder Logbook 265167 192 Sam Shepard 0306813718 Alyssa 0 to-read 3.96 1977 The Rolling Thunder Logbook
author: Sam Shepard
name: Alyssa
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cave in the Snow 387439 At the age of 20, Diane Perry, looking to fill a void in her life, entered a monastery in India--the only woman amongst hundreds of monks---and began her battle against the prejudice that had excluded women from enlightenment for thousands of years.

Thirteen years later, Diane Perry a.k.a. Tenzin Palmo secluded herself in a remote cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, where she stayed for twelve years. In her mountain retreat, she face unimaginable cold, wild animals, floods, snow and rockfalls, grew her own food and slept in a traditional wooden meditation box, three feet square. She never lay down.

Tenzin emerged from the cave with a determination to build a convent in northern India to revive the Togdenma lineage, a long-forgotten female spiritual elite. She has traveled around the world to find support for her cause, meeting with spiritual leaders from the Pope to Desmond Tutu. She agreed to tell her story only to Vicky Mackenzie and a portion of the royalties from this book will help towards the completion of her convent.]]> 256 Vicki Mackenzie 1582340455 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.26 1998 Cave in the Snow
author: Vicki Mackenzie
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart]]> 209194444 Buddhist teachings and heart-centered practices from the “feminine paradigm� to embrace receptivity and bring more balance to your life, relationships, and the world.

With deeply thoughtful, lyrical prose, this book invites readers to engage with the world from a unique perspective that encourages feeling, intuitive understanding, embodiment, interdependence, and sacredness. Weaving together classical Theravada Buddhist teachings and mindfulness practices, the book teaches us when and how to channel our receptive and active orientations—sometimes called the feminine and masculine paradigms—to feel more at home in ourselves and the world.

Rebecca Bradshaw, a respected Buddhist teacher in the Insight Meditation community, offers teachings that are simple yet require us to explore aspects of ourselves that go against much of our social conditioning that values goal-oriented busyness, productivity, independence, outgoing energy, and other “active� qualities. When overemphasized, this orientation can cause destructive emotions and behaviors, but we can counter them by embracing more receptive qualities. The receptive or feminine paradigm takes us deeper into the heart of the classical Buddhist teachings, leading to openness and freedom of the heart-mind.

Bradshaw illustrates her own resistance to letting go of her strong active orientation with relatable stories, like her efforts to be a perfect meditator. Drawing on our connectedness to nature, she offers guidance for grounded practices,

useless gazing,getting lost,sense-based reality,practicing in the wildness,accepting uncertainty, and more.
These Buddhist teachings are as comforting as they are thought-provoking. Bradshaw’s debut book helps us let go and nurture our ability to receive, listen, embrace vulnerability, and just be. We learn to heal the imbalances within ourselves and in our relationships to all beings and the natural world.]]> 304 Rebecca Bradshaw 164547321X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.75 Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart
author: Rebecca Bradshaw
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.75
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date added: 2024/10/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra]]> 53092375
Jan Willis was among the first Westerners to encounter exiled Tibetan teachers abroad in the late sixties, instantly finding her spiritual and academic home. TIME Magazine named her one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium,� both for her considerable academic accomplishments and for her cultural relevance. Her writing engages head-on with issues current to Buddhist practitioners in America, including dual-faith practitioners and those from marginalized groups.

This collection of eighteen scholarly and popular essays spans a lifetime of reflection and teaching by Willis. Grouped in four sections—Women and Buddhism, Buddhism and Race, Tantric Buddhism and Saints� Lives, and Buddhist-Christian Reflections—the essays provide timeless wisdom for all who are interested in contemporary Buddhism and its interface with ancient tradition.

“This collection of essays by Jan Willis, penned over thirty years of study, teaching, and practice, is destined to become an authoritative resource in Buddhist scholarship and thought. Willis challenges many of our preconceptions, but asks no more and no less than what the Buddha asked: come, see, and experience for yourselves.�
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“From Birmingham to Bodhgaya, Jan bridges worlds like no other. Her essays are treasures of wisdom born from a remarkable life richly lived.�
—Matthew T. Kapstein, author of Reason’s Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought

“This book is a blessing for us all—across cultures, across genders, across traditions.�
—Larry Yang, author of Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community]]> 384 Jan Willis 1614295689 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.00 Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra
author: Jan Willis
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist--One Woman's Spiritual Journey]]> 3071259 384 Jan Willis 0861715489 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.31 2008 Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist--One Woman's Spiritual Journey
author: Jan Willis
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women]]> 151415565 The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts women into the Order, but specific and controversial conditions are attached. Sasson invites us to think about who these first Buddhist women might have been, what they might have hoped to achieve, and what these conditions might have meant to them thereafter. By shaping her research into a story, Sasson invites readers to imagine a world that continues to inspire and complicate Buddhist narrative to this day.]]> 224 Vanessa R. Sasson 1800503407 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.22 The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women
author: Vanessa R. Sasson
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> Yasodhara and the Buddha 56961590 287 Vanessa R. Sasson 135016318X Alyssa 0 to-read 4.26 Yasodhara and the Buddha
author: Vanessa R. Sasson
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.26
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date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Experience of Insight: A Simple & Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation (Shambhala Dragon Editions)]]> 520436
This modern spiritual classic, presented as a thirty-day meditation retreat taught by Joseph Goldstein, offers timeless practical instructions and real-world advice for practicing meditation—whether walking or sitting in formal practice or engaging in everyday life. Goldstein—a beloved and respected meditation teacher who studied for many years under the guidance of eminent Buddhist teachers from India, Tibet, and Burma—uses the retreat format to explain various basic Buddhist teachings including karma, selflessness, and the four noble truths, while also drawing connections to many different spiritual traditions.

Full of clear and practical instruction, The Experience of Insight is the perfect companion for both experienced practitioners and those looking to get into meditation for the first time.]]> 169 Joseph Goldstein 0877732264 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.25 1976 The Experience of Insight: A Simple & Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation (Shambhala Dragon Editions)
author: Joseph Goldstein
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Path of Insight Meditation (Shambhala Pocket Library)]]> 36442343
Insight meditation is a Buddhist practice that can lead to understanding our lives, to clearly seeing the true nature of our existence, and to opening our hearts to ourselves and others. This book is a pocket-sized summary of the practices taught in the authors' meditation retreats around the world. It includes exercises for strengthening mindfulness, cultivating compassion, and learning to live by the precepts.]]> 144 Jack Kornfield 1611805813 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.25 The Path of Insight Meditation (Shambhala Pocket Library)
author: Jack Kornfield
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.25
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> <![CDATA[One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps]]> 411998 The author, a Buddhist meditation teacher and longtime Twelve Step practitioner, weaves his personal story of recovery with traditional Buddhist teachings. The book takes us on a journey through the Steps, examining critical Twelve Step ideas like Powerlessness, Higher Power, and Moral Inventory through the lens of Buddhism. One Breath at a Time presents potent ancient techniques for finding calm and clarity and offers a vision of a Higher Power not tied to traditional Western Judeo-Christian concepts. One Breath at a Time , describes the convergence of two vital traditions, one ancient, the other contemporary, and shows how they are working together to create a rich spiritual path for our times.

Certain to resonate with both meditators and those whose mantra is "One day at a time," One Breath at a Time should find a large, welcoming audience.]]> 256 Kevin Griffin 1579549055 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.29 2004 One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps
author: Kevin Griffin
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path]]> 341631
But even after achieving such realization � after the ecstasy � we are faced with the day-to-day task of translating that freedom into our imperfect lives. We are faced with the laundry.

Drawing on the experiences and insights of leaders and practitioners within the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Sufi traditions, this book offers a uniquely intimate and honest understanding of how the modern spiritual journey unfolds � and how we can prepare our hearts for awakening.

Through moving personal stories and traditional tales, we learn how the enlightened heart navigates the real world of family relationships, emotional pain, earning a living, sickness, loss, and death.]]> 336 Jack Kornfield 0553378295 Alyssa 0 to-read 4.10 2000 After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path
author: Jack Kornfield
name: Alyssa
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: to-read
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