en-US Wed, 07 May 2025 08:03:12 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 212808262 An engrossing work of autobiographical fiction about the relationship between an actress daughter and her larger-than-life father—the astonishingly assured debut novel of Sonya Walger, actress on Lost, For All Mankind, and more.

Lion, as his friends call him, is an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter’s life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina’s greatest earthquake, Lion is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.

“It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child,� his daughter writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos, her, by turns, loving, maddening, and magnetic father. 

Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.

Sonya Walger’s stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.]]> 176 Sonya Walger 1681379031 Alex 0 to-read 4.44 2025
author: Sonya Walger
name: Alex
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 Alex 0 to-read 4.01 2024
author: Griffin Dunne
name: Alex
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 23942 160 William S. Burroughs 0330300164 Alex 0 to-read 3.56 1985
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Alex
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15766600 360 Kier-la Janisse Alex 5 4.47 2012
author: Kier-la Janisse
name: Alex
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 208580597 The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory�, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.]]> 384 Johanna Hedva 163893116X Alex 0 to-read 3.86
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Alex 0 to-read 3.90 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Alex
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 252941 208 Rebecca Godfrey 0060094850 Alex 0 to-read 3.47 2001
author: Rebecca Godfrey
name: Alex
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> 199897944 A “razor-sharp, perfectly plotted� (The Sunday Times) tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.

A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is “a brave and thrilling debut about facing up to the truth of history, and to one’s own desires� (The Guardian).]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034360 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.25 2024
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Alex
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 149196 Eva Luna: a lover, a writer, a revolutionary, and above all a storyteller—available for the first time in ebook.

Eva Luna is the daughter of a professor’s assistant and a snake-bitten gardener—born poor, orphaned at an early age, and working as a servant. Eva is a naturally gifted and imaginative storyteller who meets people from all stations and walks of life. Though she has no wealth, she trades her stories like currency with people who are kind to her. In this novel, she shares the story of her own life and introduces readers to a diverse and eccentric cast of characters including the Lebanese émigré who befriends her and takes her in; her unfortunate godmother, whose brain is addled by rum and who believes in all the Catholic saints and a few of her own invention; a street urchin who grows into a petty criminal and, later, a leader in the guerrilla struggle; a celebrated transsexual entertainer who instructs her in the ways of the adult world; and a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will prove crucial to Eva's fate.

As Eva tells her story, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex South American nation—the rich, the poor, the simple, and the sophisticated—in a novel replete with character and incident, with drama and comedy and history, with battles and passions, rebellions and reunions, a novel that celebrates the power of imagination to create a better world.]]> 307 Isabel Allende 0553280589 Alex 0 to-read 4.02 1987
author: Isabel Allende
name: Alex
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> 16527
As we follow her spirited heroine on a perilous journey north in the hold of a ship to the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco and northern California, we enter a world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. A society of single men and prostitutes among whom Eliza moves--with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien--California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean. Her search for the elusive JoaquĂ­n gradually turns into another kind of journey that transforms her over time, and what began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom.]]> 432 Isabel Allende 0061120251 Alex 0 to-read 3.93 1998
author: Isabel Allende
name: Alex
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 24790 432 Isabel Allende 849759388X Alex 0 to-read 4.21 1994
author: Isabel Allende
name: Alex
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9328
The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.]]> 448 Isabel Allende 0553383809 Alex 0 to-read 4.26 1982
author: Isabel Allende
name: Alex
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218659638
Maggie Dale lives a secret life in her small Idaho town. On the outside, she’s shy and reserved, hiding behind the walls of her dead-end office cubicle, stuck with how to talk to anyone. On the inside, she’s full of wild dreams, and her favorite singer, Savannah Grace, embodies all of them.

When Maggie gets two chance-of-a-lifetime tickets to Savannah’s stadium show, it turns quickly into a crisis. Making it to the show means an eleven hour drive through the desert, to the most stressful city on earth: Las Vegas. Even worse, fate sends her a terrifying ultimatum: ask August - her epically unrequited office crush - on a weekend road-trip to Vegas with her or miss the show altogether.

What would you do, if you had two tickets?

A standalone, sapphic romance, prequel novella to Falls From Grace.

The Grace Notes trilogy features interconnected sapphic romance stories in the orbit of country music star, Savannah Grace.]]> Ruby Landers 0648640213 Alex 0 4.32
author: Ruby Landers
name: Alex
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> 205478835
Acid rainstorms have transformed New York City into a toxic wasteland. Thousands have died and thousands more have been left stranded inside the five self-contained boroughs under military control. In one apartment building, an unlikely family of humans and ghosts survives. Mira reels from a devastating breakup with her partner Mal who is lost in the faraway expanse of Queens. A second generation Chinese American now back at home with her mother, Mira calls out to the empty airwaves with her HAM radio in the hopes of reconnecting with Mal, or connecting with anyone at all. Across the hall, Shin, a ghost cockroach, replays his lost life, and a headless man named Sad falls in love. Mira’s mother is plagued by furious dreams alongside Grandpa Why, now a rambunctious ghost. As the world around them worsens, each character must learn to redefine what it means to live, die, and love at the end of the world.]]> 272 Muriel Leung 1324076186 Alex 0 to-read 3.58 2024
author: Muriel Leung
name: Alex
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> 54174032
Sea Queens probes world history, nautical lore, and the queer imaginary to revive the fay and fanciful passengers who boarded the RMS Titanic on Wednesday, April 10, 1912 for her first—and final—journey.]]> 132 Sarah Fonseca Alex 0 to-read 5.00 2020
author: Sarah Fonseca
name: Alex
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Alex 0 to-read 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alex
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> 62601701
FINALIST FOR THE FALLON BOOK CLUB SELECTION

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.]]> 218 Megan Nolan 1787332500 Alex 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Megan Nolan
name: Alex
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> 206175482
Brynn Marshall is a little lost. Dropping out of med school made her the black sheep of the family and now she’s floating around LA trying to find a sense of purpose. When she falls down on her luck, her best friend - indie musician Noah Lyman - refuses to let her wallow. After all, he’s just got his big break, co-writing with a megastar!

When Savannah enlists Noah to help her break out of country music and make a name for herself for once and for all, what better way to do it than to spend the winter in her secluded vacation home in the woods of Vermont? And what better way for Noah to help out a friend than to pretend he’s bringing along his wife?

After all, what could possibly go wrong?

If you would appreciate any content warnings please check my website]]> 438 Ruby Landers 0648640205 Alex 4 4.44
author: Ruby Landers
name: Alex
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/23
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Savannah is very Taylor and the album is very reputation tv if we ever get it
]]> 211022256
When twenty-six year old Kinsey moved to Nashville, it was in the hopes of finding a creative partner and making it big. When she meets Cassidy Carver, musical sparks fly. It’s a chance meeting with a beautiful older woman however, that truly knocks her off her feet.

Rosalie’s gorgeous - and there’s no denying the intense chemistry between them - but she refuses to consider even a single date with a young musician. Besides, Rosalie’s already given up on love, so what would be the point?

Fighting this level of temptation is always a losing battle, but after one red hot minute they go their separate ways. It’s just lucky there’s no connection between their different worlds and no way they’ll ever cross paths again�

Book three in The Grace Notes trilogy is an age-gap, contemporary sapphic romance.

If you would appreciate any content warnings please check my website]]> 594 Ruby Landers 0648640264 Alex 4 4.63
author: Ruby Landers
name: Alex
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
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4.5! My favourite of the three, and that final line about Rachel had me gagged. Sorry if everyone saw it coming, I didn’t
]]> 57355050 Before she can focus on her impressive research, deeply closeted Nadia has a personal project: getting her inconvenient attraction to women out of her system. She picks a stranger online for a one-night stand.
Ashley Rylan, the chief of Nadia’s department, is her polar opposite—sweet, agreeable, and soft-spoken—and the stranger Nadia unwittingly chooses.
The two women’s meeting is a hostile disaster and they would love nothing more than to never see each other again. However, their paths keep colliding as Nadia embarks on an ambitious experiment that could lead to a historic medical breakthrough.
Despite warring egos and the secrets they keep, their connection is powerful and growing. Maybe having sex would help them get over their distraction at work? Or would that just ruin everything?
A lesbian medical romance about the powerful breakthroughs we can’t always see.
Tags: ice queen romance, medical romance, opposites-attract romance
100,000 words]]> 320 Faith Prize 396324545X Alex 2 4.12
author: Faith Prize
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/23
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not my thing but did fill the void left by The Pitt
]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk Alex 0 to-read 3.93 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Alex
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Alex 0 to-read 3.79 2004
author: Dennis Cooper
name: Alex
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 214152164 Coworkers at a legendary but troubled New York City museum struggle with issues large and small over the course of one extraordinary day in this whip-smart “marvel� (Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny) of a novel in the vein of The White Lotus.

When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four hour roller-coaster ride.

Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart her enigmatic and tireless personal assistant, Chris; the museum’s trusty head of security, Shay; and its general counsel, Henry—a man whose ability to weasel his way out of a jam is matched only by his capacity to avoid learning anything from the experience.

Orbiting Diane is a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or among them a line cook staring down a huge opportunity he’s not sure he wants; a costume curator stuck in an inescapable rut; and the ambivalent curator of the museum’s film program, whose first day on the job might very well be his last.

On this day of the museum’s annual gala, every plate that Diane has kept spinning will fall and by daybreak, someone will be dead.

Wise, surprising, and darkly funny, Friends of the Museum is a kaleidoscopic tragicomedy that surges along to the unstoppable tick of the clock, leaving you on the edge of your seat until the final second.]]> 496 Heather McGowan 1668031272 Alex 0 to-read 3.11 2025
author: Heather McGowan
name: Alex
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 214151534 A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,� Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.]]> 256 Sophie Kemp 1668057034 Alex 0 to-read 3.90
author: Sophie Kemp
name: Alex
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> 212806605 A gorgeous visual homage to Black-owned bookstores around the country along with profiles and essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, featuring a foreword by Nikki Giovanni.

For decades, Black-owned bookstores have been a source of joy and refuge for the Black community. They are the keepers and preservers of Black literary tradition; hubs for activism and movement-making; sites for inspiration, knowledge, and creativity; and, above all, essential sanctuaries for a community whose lives and stories are often pushed to the margins. As Black books are continuously being banned, protested, and debated, it is vital to honor the bookstores that have long given space to Black literature and Black readers.  

This vibrant book celebrates these deeply important spaces, offering a joyful, visual homage to Black-owned bookstores across the United States. Thoughtfully curated by writer and Black bookstore owner Katie Mitchell, Prose to the People profiles over fifty bookstores, both current and historic, detailing their origin stories, specialties, and political and cultural impact. Transporting readers from the northeast to the mid-Atlantic, the south, and the west coast, each profile is accompanied by rich photography that not only depicts the interiors of the bookstores, but illustrates the sense of history, activism, community, and inclusivity they embody. Bookstores include the historic D. Ruggles Books, the first known Black bookstore in the United States, Lewis Michaux's National Memorial African Bookstore, which held the largest collection of Black literature in the world, Pyramid Bookstore, the first chain of independently Black-owned bookstores in the country, and many more.

Interspersed throughout are essays by award-winning author Kiese Laymon, poet W.J. Lofton, and many more journalists, activists, authors, academics, and poets that offer deeper perspectives on the multifaceted roles that Black-owned bookstores play in society. Complete with a foreword by world-renowned poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, PROSE TO THE PEOPLE is a beautiful, all-encompassing tribute to these vital pillars of the Black community.]]> 240 Katie Mitchell 0593581342 Alex 0 to-read 4.50
author: Katie Mitchell
name: Alex
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 0
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]]> 207095636
Except, of course, her estranged family.

When her younger sister Cassidy shows up on her doorstep, in need of help and thoroughly - inexplicably - pissed off, the whole household gets turned on its end. Where did she spring from and why the heck is she so damn mad?

Savannah’s nanny Lane has grown all the way up, from a cute punk kid to a classic handsome heartbreaker, a long trail of short flings in their wake. They don’t have a second to waste on Cassidy, after all she’s rude, ignorant, hot-tempered and kind of a brat. It’s just� does their boss’s little sister have to be so hot?

Of course things could always get worse. Cassidy has one plan and one plan only: for her sister to turn her into a star.

Book Two of the Grace Notes Trilogy: an enemies-to-lovers, contemporary sapphic romance.

If you would appreciate any content warnings please check my website]]> 364 Ruby Landers 0648640248 Alex 3 4.30
author: Ruby Landers
name: Alex
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/22
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Did not mean to burn through this but so glad everyone in this has separate therapy journeys. This better continue into book three!
]]> 57998838 In this crackling, incisive blend of memoir and cultural reporting, one woman's quest to answer the question When can I say I'll be alone forever? leads her to explore the unprecedented rise of single adults, our society's pathologizing of loneliness, and the purpose of dating.

One evening, thirtysomething single writer Aimee Lutkin found herself at a dinner party surrounded by couples. When the conversation turned to her love life, Lutkin--who had dated on and (mostly) off for years--stated simply, I don't really know if I'm going to date anyone ever again. Some people are just alone forever. As her friends rushed to assure her that love comes when you least expect it and to recommend new dating apps, Lutkin wondered, Why, when there are more unmarried adults than ever before, is there so much pressure to couple up? Why is everyone so uncomfortable around single people? Why does it seem like your real life can't start until you meet The One? And is it possible to be single without being lonely?

Over the course of the next year, Lutkin set out to answer these questions and to see whether there really was some trick for escaping loneliness out there. She went on hundreds of dates; read the sociologists, authors, and relationship experts exploring singlehood and loneliness; dove into the wellness industrial complex; tossed it all aside to binge-watch Netflix and eat nachos; and probed the capitalist structures that make alternative family arrangements nearly impossible.

Chock-full of razor-sharp observations and poignant moments of vulnerability, The Lonely Hunter is a stirring account of one woman's experience of being alone and a revealing expose of our culture's deep biases against the un-coupled. Blazingly smart, insightful, and full of heart, this is a book for anyone determined to make, follow, and break their own rules.]]> 352 Aimee Lutkin 1984855883 Alex 2 3.50 2022
author: Aimee Lutkin
name: Alex
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
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Took forever and a day to finish. This wasn’t good! Narrow and shallow. I want to blame the author but if this was marketed correctly, maybe someone would like it. But not me. I’m sure a certain type of single 31-33 year olds will love it.
]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Alex 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Alex 0 to-read 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Alex
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58470813
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.]]> 256 Yōko Tawada 0811229289 Alex 0 to-read 3.28 2018
author: YĹŤko Tawada
name: Alex
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2018
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]]> 81071103
Isolated from society, the Brontë children spend all their time inventing elaborate fictional realms or roaming the wild moors above their family home in Yorkshire. When the time comes for them to venture out into the world to earn a living, each of them struggles to adapt, but for Emily the change is catastrophic. Torn from the landscape she loves and no longer able to immerse herself in the fantastical world of Gondal that she and her younger sister Anne have created, she is simply unable to function.

As a child, Emily witnessed a rare natural phenomenon. After weeks of rain, the peaty soil on Crow Hill became so sodden that the earth exploded. Since then, her life has been dogged by tragedy and repeated failures. Her sisters are desperate to escape their unsatisfactory work as governesses and now the life of her brother Branwell, the hope of the family, is in turmoil. To the outside world, Emily appears taciturn, unexceptional; but beneath the surface her mind is in a creative ferment, ready to burst forth. As the pressure on her grows, another violent phenomenon is about to take place, one that will fuse her imaginary world of Gondal with the landscape Emily loves so passionately, and which will change the literary world forever.]]> 288 Karen Powell 1787704815 Alex 0 to-read 4.16
author: Karen Powell
name: Alex
average rating: 4.16
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]]> 59617268
Choosing as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women in the twentieth century, she spent years researching this brilliant work of narrative nonfiction detailing not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves, but the story of how society, the media and men in power reacted to these killings, painting their perpetrators as witches, hysterics, or femmes fatales . . . That is, either evil or out of control.

Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel and Teresa Alfaro all committed murder. Their crimes not only led to substantial court decisions, but gave rise to multiple novels, poems, short stories, paintings, plays, songs and films, produced and reproduced throughout the last century. In When Women Kill, we are provided with timelines of events leading up to and following their killings, their apprehension by the authorities, their trials and their representation in the media throughout and following the judicial process. Running in parallel with this often horrifying testimony are the diaries kept by Trabucco Zerán while she worked on her research, addressing the obstacles and dilemmas she encountered as she tackled this discomfiting yet necessary project.]]> 242 Alia Trabucco Zerán 191350526X Alex 0 to-read 3.80 2022
author: Alia Trabucco Zerán
name: Alex
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
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]]> 216524168 The first novel in the all-new Golden Girls Cozy Mystery Series!

When Dorothy’s obnoxious date is found dead in a hotel freezer, it not only ruins a gorgeous cheesecake but threatens the elaborate St. Olaf–themed wedding Rose is hosting.

Things are heating up, and not just because of Blanche’s hot flashes. Rose’s cousin is eloping to Miami, and Rose is playing host. If she can't balance the groom’s family’s snobbery against the traditional St. Olaf wedding week guidelines, her hometown may never accept her cousin again!

Dorothy quickly realizes she needs a date with whom she can exchange wedding-related wisecracks. Turning to a newfangled VHS dating service, she believes she’s found the ideal conversationalist. Unfortunately, what looks good on TV can actually be a total jerk in real life. It seems she’ll just have to enjoy the company of Sophia, Blanche, and whomever Blanche has targeted for a hookup.

As the Girls all pitch in, Rose is thrilled that the tea-and-fish-themed kickoff event is perfect, not a herring out of place. That is until Dorothy’s date is found dead—face-planted in an otherwise scrumptious-looking cheesecake. With every guest a suspect (especially Dorothy) and a marriage on the line, the four besties must ID the real killer, get the should-be-happy couple down the aisle, and make sure nobody from St. Olaf gets lost in the wilds of Miami. It’s up to the Golden Girls to sleuth out a way for friendship and love to win the day!]]> 336 Rachel Ekstrom Courage 1368102980 Alex 0 to-read 3.69 2025
author: Rachel Ekstrom Courage
name: Alex
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
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]]> 36366224 Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these five linked Hainish stories follow far-future human colonies living in the distant solar system

Here for the first time is the complete suite of five linked stories from Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed Hainish series, which tells the history of the Ekumen, the galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain. First published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe—two worlds whose peoples, long known as “owners� and “assets,� together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution.

In “Betrayals� a retired science teacher must make peace with her new neighbor, a disgraced revolutionary leader. In “Forgiveness Day,� a female official from the Ekumen arrives to survey the situation on Werel and struggles against its rigidly patriarchal culture. Embedded within “A Man of the People,� which describes the coming of age of Havzhiva, an Ekumen ambassador to Yeowe, is Le Guin’s most sustained description of the Ur-planet Hain. “A Woman’s Liberation� is the remarkable narrative of Rakam, born an asset on Werel, who must twice escape from slavery to freedom. Joined to them is “Old Music and the Slave Women,� in which the charismatic Hainish embassy worker, who appears in two of the four original stories, returns for a tale of his own. Of this capstone tale Le Guin has written, “the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last.”]]> 288 Ursula K. Le Guin Alex 0 to-read 4.38 2017
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
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]]> 102095 472 Clark Ashton Smith 0870541560 Alex 0 to-read 4.19 1931
author: Clark Ashton Smith
name: Alex
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1931
rating: 0
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]]> 208580636 One of Electric Literature’s �75 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2024�

From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman’s first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders

“Utterly beautiful . . . The yearning in these pages will haunt me.”—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.]]> 192 Bruna Dantas Lobato 0802163777 Alex 0 to-read 3.96 2024
author: Bruna Dantas Lobato
name: Alex
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Alex 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
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]]> 36950898 n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

When Andrei Kaplan's older brother Dima insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It's the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn, packs up his hockey stuff, and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia's violent capitalist transformation, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can't always remember who he is.

Andrei learns to navigate Putin's Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly--but surprisingly sharp!--grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a cafe to send emails, and eventually some friends, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Over the course of the year, his grandmother's health declines and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei's politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.

A wise, sensitive novel about Russia, exile, family, love, history and fate, A Terrible Country asks what you owe the place you were born, and what it owes you. Writing with grace and humor, Keith Gessen gives us a brilliant and mature novel that is sure to mark him as one of the most talented novelists of his generation.]]> 338 Keith Gessen 0735221316 Alex 0 to-read 3.86 2018
author: Keith Gessen
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
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]]> 538842


Allison was one of the key figures in what became known as the Feminist Sex Wars. She was a panelist at the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. It was picketed by the New York chapter of Women Against Pornography, who called the panelists "anti-feminist terrorists." Some protesters accused Allison of supporting the sexual abuse of children because of the graphic content in her literary works.

She responded to such critics in this collection, The Women Who Hate Me: Poems by Dorothy Allison.]]> 69 Dorothy Allison 0932379982 Alex 0 to-read 4.05 1983
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Alex
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1983
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]]> 203579085 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 291 Julia Armfield 125034431X Alex 0 to-read 3.58 2024
author: Julia Armfield
name: Alex
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
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]]> 60372438 Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, a modern gothic story of nine young women sent to work at a remote Alpine hotel and what happens when one of them goes missing

With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, nineteen-year-old Rafa leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, she sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees--and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other young women receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while they toil constantly to perform their role and prepare the hotel for guests, none arrive. Instead, they contort themselves daily to the expectations of their strict, matronly bosses without clear purpose and, in their spare moments, escape to the herb garden, confide in each other, and quickly find solace together. Finally, the hotel is filled with people for a wild and raucous party, only for one of the women to disappear. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths we teach young women, what we raise them to expect from the world, and whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.]]> 208 Johanne Lykke Holm 0593539672 Alex 0 to-read 3.15 2020
author: Johanne Lykke Holm
name: Alex
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2020
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]]> 189187278
This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.   ]]> 103 Eva Baltasar 1916751008 Alex 0 to-read 3.66 2022
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Alex
average rating: 3.66
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]]> 351089
But when she was hired to teach at Brigham Young University, Martha was troubled by the way the Church’s elders silenced dissidents and masked truths that contradicted its published beliefs. Most troubling of all, she was forced to face her history of sexual abuse by one of the Church’s most prominent authorities. The New York Times bestseller Leaving the Saints chronicles Martha’s decision to sever her relationship with the faith that had cradled her for so long and to confront and forgive the person who betrayed her so deeply.

Leaving the Saints offers a rare glimpse inside one of the world’s most secretive religions while telling a profoundly moving story of personal courage, survival, and the transformative power of spirituality.]]> 352 Martha N. Beck 0307335992 Alex 0 to-read 3.86 2005
author: Martha N. Beck
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2005
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]]> 195790788
Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles—a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.�

Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn't risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.� So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.]]> 304 Tia Levings 1250288282 Alex 0 to-read 4.31 2024
author: Tia Levings
name: Alex
average rating: 4.31
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]]> 91872 Trash, Allison's landmark collection, laid the groundwork for her critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, the National Book Award finalist that was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "simply stunning...a wonderful work of fiction by a major talent." In addition to Allison's classic stories, this new edition of Trash features "Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories," an introduction in which Allison discusses the writing of Trash and "Compassion," a never-before-published short story.

First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of storytelling.

A book that resonates with uncompromising candor and incandescence, Trash is sure to captivate Allison's legion of readers and win her a devoted new following.]]> 240 Dorothy Allison 0452283515 Alex 0 to-read 4.12 1988
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1988
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]]> 25354 320 Dorothy Allison 0452287057 Alex 0 to-read 4.14 1992
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Alex
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1992
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]]> 165395 246 Rita Mae Brown 0553146963 Alex 0 to-read 3.92 1973
author: Rita Mae Brown
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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]]> 43975907 Marty, age 57, was given a preliminary diagnosis of ALS by his family doctor. Seven weeks later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a neurologist. Ten months and ten days later, Marty passed away.

From day one, Alison, Marty’s spouse of over twenty-five years, kept a journal as a way to navigate the overwhelming state of her mind and soul. Soon the rawness of her words harmonized to tell the story of Marty’s diagnosis, illness, and decline. Her journal became a chronicle of caregiving as well as an emotional exploration of the tensions between the intuitive and the pragmatic, the logical and illogical, and the all-consuming demands of being both spouse and nurse. Divided into short pieces, some of which reads as free verse, Alison’s words are at times profoundly intense and painfully private.

The composition of the intricate notes of a life in its final movements includes another stanza of the journal that became Dance Me to the the guiding of children grappling with the imminent loss of a parent, and the shifting roles of family, friends, and community—all of which add their own complex rhythms.

Dance Me to the End is an evocative memoir about the emotional impact of witnessing a loved one suffer from a neurological, degenerative, and terminal disease. This is a detailed account of grief, shock and pain coexisting with the levity, laughter and love shared with her husband and sons in those final months of Marty's life.]]> 320 Alison Acheson 1927366860 Alex 4 4.46 2019
author: Alison Acheson
name: Alex
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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]]> 5771014 What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents, teachers, coaches, businesspeople—and everyone else—with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.

Whether you're coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.

Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world's talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.

� Deep Practice--Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn't know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.

� Ignition--We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.

� Master Coaching--What are the secrets of the world's most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these "talent whisperers" to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.

These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo's to Michael Jordan's. The good news about myelin is that it isn't fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.

Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.]]> 288 Daniel Coyle 1598878735 Alex 0 to-read 4.01 2009
author: Daniel Coyle
name: Alex
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2009
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]]> 55481231
As Martha Beck says in her book, “Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period.�

In The Way of Integrity , Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us—people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits—all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole.

Inspired by The Divine Comedy , Beck uses Dante’s classic hero’s journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us.

With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but also bring us to a place of genuine happiness.]]> 327 Martha N. Beck 1984881485 Alex 0 to-read 4.15 2021
author: Martha N. Beck
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
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]]> 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Alex 0 to-read 3.92 2021
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
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]]> 56898281
When Anushay Hossain became pregnant in the US, she was so relieved. Growing up in Bangladesh in the 1980s, where the concept of women’s healthcare hardly existed, she understood how lucky she was to access the best in the world. But she couldn’t have been more wrong. Things started to go awry from the minute she stepped in the hospital, and after thirty hours of labor (two of which she spent pushing), Hossain’s epidural slipped. Her pain was so severe that she ran a fever of 104 degrees, and as she shook and trembled uncontrollably, the doctors finally performed an emergency C-section.

Giving birth in the richest country on earth, Hossain never imagined she could die in labor. But she almost did. The experience put her on a journey to explore, understand, and share how women—especially women of color—are dismissed to death by systemic sexism in American healthcare.

Following in the footsteps of feminist manifestos such as The Feminine Mystique and Rage Becomes Her , The Pain Gap is an eye-opening and stirring call to arms that encourages women to flip their “hysteria complex� on its head and use it to revolutionize women’s healthcare. This book tells the story of Hossain’s experiences—from growing up in South Asia surrounded by staggering maternal mortality rates to lobbying for global health legislation on Capitol Hill to nearly becoming a statistic herself. Along the way, she realized that a little fury might be just what the doctor ordered.

Meticulously researched and deeply reported, this book explores real women’s traumatic experiences with America’s healthcare system—and empowers everyone to use their experiences to bring about the healthcare revolution women need.]]> 304 Anushay Hossain 1982177772 Alex 0 to-read 3.65 2021
author: Anushay Hossain
name: Alex
average rating: 3.65
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]]> 223854541 A down-on-her-luck woman makes a deal with a crafty demon to win back her ex-girlfriend after a proposal gone awry, only to discover the girl of her dreams might be the devil she knows, from nationally bestselling author Alexandria Bellefleur.

Samantha Cooper is having a day from hell.

In less than 24 hours, her life has unraveled, leaving her single and with nowhere to live. Adding insult to injury, she’s trapped in an elevator with a gorgeous woman claiming to be a demon.

Daphne is not at all what Samantha expected from someone claiming to be an evil supernatural entity. She’s pretty, witty, dressed in pink, and smells nice. And she’s here to offer Samantha a deal she can’t refuse. Six wishes in exchange for one tiny trade—Samantha’s soul. There’s a glaring loophole in their contract, one Samantha fully intends to exploit so she doesn’t fork over her soul. After all, she only needs one wish to win her ex back.

Hell-bent to gather the last of the one thousand souls she needs so that she can be free of her own devilish deal, Daphne grants each of Samantha’s wishes . . . with a twist, so that Samantha is forced to make another.

As Samantha’s wishes dwindle and Daphne offers her glimpses into the life she thought she wanted, the unlikely pair grows close. Perhaps the girl of Samantha’s dreams is actually the stuff of nightmares, but Samantha and Daphne will have to outsmart the Devil himself if they want a chance at happily ever after.]]> 336 Alexandria Bellefleur 0593952502 Alex 0 to-read 3.83 2025
author: Alexandria Bellefleur
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
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]]> 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace Alex 4 4.26 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Alex
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/04
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review:
Just when I thought it was over, it pulled me back in
]]> 7603 Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

]]> 356 Azar Nafisi 081297106X Alex 0 to-read 3.64 2003
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Alex
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> 210623116
None of the five come back.

A major search immediately gets underway. Days crawl past, agonisingly, with no sign of the girls or their teacher. The Principal of the school, godmother to one of the missing students, is desperately trying to hold the parents, the school community - and herself - together. She needs to find out what happened before the police do. Finally, separated and traumatised, the four girls re-appear. But the male teacher does not.

And The Cins aren't talking.

Wing is unforgettable. An immersive, propulsive, headlong, heartrush of a read. Provocative, sharp, bristling with intent, it is both raging and tender. A novel about the fault lines in female friendships. Between mothers and daughters. Between older and younger generations. And of course, between men and women. It is a novel that meets its times head on, with great power, honesty and urgency.

As the author of the international sensation, The Bride Stripped Bare, Nikki Gemmell defined sex, desire and identity for a generation of women. Now, two decades later, she comes full circle, with another incendiary novel about what it means to be a woman today.]]> 0 Nikki Gemmell 1460714601 Alex 0 to-read 3.14
author: Nikki Gemmell
name: Alex
average rating: 3.14
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]]> 51542370
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.

Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters� true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.]]> 224 Catherine Lacey 0374230927 Alex 0 to-read 3.71 2020
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Alex
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 18490560
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.

Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?

The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.]]> 244 Catherine Lacey 0374534497 Alex 0 to-read 3.31 2014
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Alex
average rating: 3.31
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]]> 204312519 But as the stakes get higher, and the pressures of publicity increase, it isn't only their love that is put to the test.

Revenge. Deceit. Betrayal.
Every action has a reaction. And payback is a...

Whistleblower is Book III of The Senator's Wife Series.]]> 490 Jen Lyon Alex 4 4.69
author: Jen Lyon
name: Alex
average rating: 4.69
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rating: 4
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]]> 123265511 But it's more than either woman hoped for. More than they ever imagined.
Until a secret is revealed that threatens it all. Their relationship. Alex's career. Catharine's business. Even their lives. When it all comes crashing down, both women must ask themselves—how can love survive?]]> 300 Jen Lyon Alex 4 4.63
author: Jen Lyon
name: Alex
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 60727827 Withnail and I in 1987. When his beloved wife Joan died in 2021 after almost forty years together, she set him a challenge: to find a pocketful of happiness in every day.

The result is this book.

Set between the present day and flashbacks to delightfully indiscreet diary entries recalling landmarks from his remarkable life and glittering career, this is an immensely personal and profound memoir that celebrates and cherishes life’s unexpected joys.
Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor.]]> 352 Richard E. Grant 1398519472 Alex 0 to-read 4.32 2022
author: Richard E. Grant
name: Alex
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 167216
In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls—a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boys—only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.
A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitteridge to millions of readers.]]> 304 Elizabeth Strout 0375705198 Alex 0 to-read 3.82 1998
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Alex
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> 62919785
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,� yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.�

In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays� origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.

As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth—and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we’re looking for.

“Lively� (The Washington Post), “fascinating� (Amanda Foreman), and “intrepid� (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is an irresistible work of literary detection that will forever change how you think of Shakespeare…and of how we as a society decide what’s up for debate and what’s just nonsense, just heresy.]]> 416 Elizabeth Winkler 198217126X Alex 0 to-read 4.17 2023
author: Elizabeth Winkler
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Alex 0 to-read 4.50 2025
author: John Green
name: Alex
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
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]]> 93026765 Two Women. Two Worlds. One Love Worth Risking it All.

When professional soccer player Alex Grey goes on a vacation to the local South Carolina islands, she isn't anticipating any life-changing events. Just a relaxing weekend to prepare for the upcoming season. But that quickly changes when she finds herself the lone witness to a sailing accident and makes the decision to risk her own life to save a drowning woman—unwittingly coming to the rescue of a U.S. senator's wife, Catharine Cleveland.

Despite the vast disparity between their worlds, the two women find themselves inexplicably drawn to one another after the near-catastrophic afternoon. Following a series of interactions from the soccer fields of Portland, to the Marina District of San Francisco Bay, and the cutthroat political circle of Washington, D.C., they find their friendship growing, transforming into an attraction neither woman can deny.

Nor an attraction either woman can comfortably embrace.

As the magnetism of their connection grows, both women are forced to decide if the pursuit of love is worth the cost while living under the scrutiny of the public eye.

The Senator's Wife is Book One in a three book series.]]> 479 Jen Lyon Alex 4 Love a trilogy 4.40 2023
author: Jen Lyon
name: Alex
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/12
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Love a trilogy
]]> 253578 384 Clifford Irving 1401308546 Alex 0 to-read 3.54 1981
author: Clifford Irving
name: Alex
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin Alex 0 to-read 4.11 1969
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Alex
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 8869362 Lambda Literary Review

From its beginning—“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.”—to its end—“You can actually learn to have grace. And that’s heaven.”—poet, essayist and performer Eileen Myles� chronicle transmits an energy and vividness that will not soon leave its readers. Her story of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and her own creative drive in the meditative and raucous environment that was New York City in its punk and indie heyday, is engrossing, poignant, and funny. This is a voice from the underground that redefines the meaning of the word.]]> 256 Eileen Myles 1935928066 Alex 0 to-read 3.94 2008
author: Eileen Myles
name: Alex
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> 39891524 208 Mary Wollstonecraft Alex 0 3.30 1792
author: Mary Wollstonecraft
name: Alex
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1792
rating: 0
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]]> 108428
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.]]> 128 Angela Y. Davis 1583225811 Alex 0 to-read 4.53 2003
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Alex
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> 113429 205 Miranda July 0743299396 Alex 0 summer 3.83 2007
author: Miranda July
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 76545 64 Louise GlĂĽck 0060957956 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.97 1999
author: Louise GlĂĽck
name: Alex
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 321660 244 Chris Kraus 1584350016 Alex 0 to-read 4.02 2000
author: Chris Kraus
name: Alex
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> 730139 Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of the controversial chapter on Israel. Also previously untranslated is Gustave Thibon's postscript of 1990, which reminds us how privileged we are to be able to read a work which offers each reader such 'light for the spirit and nourishment for the soul'. This is a book that no one with a serious interest in the spiritual life can afford to be without.]]> 224 Simone Weil 0415290015 Alex 4
“I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really loves is something other than nothingness.”]]> 4.32 1947
author: Simone Weil
name: Alex
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1947
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
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Like they said about Mean Girls on that Facebook page pre-2010, this book is endlessly quotable

“I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really loves is something other than nothingness.�
]]> 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Alex 0 to-read 4.42 2025
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Alex
average rating: 4.42
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]]> 1170964 288 Anne LaBastille 0140153349 Alex 0 to-read 4.17 1975
author: Anne LaBastille
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Alex 4 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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]]> 30303793 For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson's scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh

After the publication of her short story "The Lottery" in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the "The Possibility of Evil" and "The Summer People." In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There's something sinister in suburbia.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 195 Shirley Jackson 0241295424 Alex 0 to-read 4.00 2016
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Alex
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
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]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Alex 0 to-read 4.60 2025
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Alex
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> 215217614 A beautiful con artist insinuates herself into a wealthy socialite’s life . . . with deadly consequences, in this serpentine thriller about identity and obsession, from actress, director and bestselling author Krysten Ritter.

 Liz Dawson weaves through a crowd with the ease of a tropical breeze, moving seamlessly through elite circles, sparking instant connections and making every new acquaintance feel like an intimate friend. She’s clever, smooth, and confident—qualities that make her a brilliant serial con artist.

Isabelle Beresford is strikingly beautiful, obscenely wealthy, and the new owner of Casa Esmerelda, a fabulous villa on the Mexican coast—attributes that make her the perfect mark. When she offers Liz a job handling the installation of a piece of art in her otherwise vacant home, Liz can’t resist the allure of a beach retreat. She longs for a reset, a chance to finally shed the grip of her addiction to the conning game.

But when Liz, with her lush dark hair and intense green eyes, is mistaken for Isabelle herself, Liz can’t help effortlessly slipping into the socialite’s identity. The transition is so easeful, it almost feels like fate. But just who is Isabelle Beresford really, and why does she seem to have abandoned this stunning life of hers?

As Liz insinuates herself deeper into the dazzling—and deceptive—world of the Punta Mita resort community, she draws closer to the dangers surrounding the real Isabelle. Dangers that may have already ensnared Liz, too. This might not be the con of her life—but the con that ends it.]]> 272 Krysten Ritter 0063334607 Alex 0 3.74 2025
author: Krysten Ritter
name: Alex
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 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 Alex 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Alex
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> 213870075 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.�

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims—a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine�Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the professor’s classroom into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.]]> 320 Cristina Rivera Garza 0593737008 Alex 0 to-read 3.01 2007
author: Cristina Rivera Garza
name: Alex
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> 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 Alex 0 4.58 2017
author: Mary Oliver
name: Alex
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2017
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]]> 17142
With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,� “Everybody’s Protest Novel,� “Many Thousands Gone,� and “Stranger in the Village.�

Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,� he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.� With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.�

The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.� The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.]]> 869 James Baldwin 1883011523 Alex 0 to-read 4.66 1998
author: James Baldwin
name: Alex
average rating: 4.66
book published: 1998
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]]> 101124639
The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]> 384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 Alex 5 favourites 3.99 2023
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Alex
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 18045891
Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition - ISBN 10: 0307341550 (ISBN 13: 9780307341556)]]> 254 Gillian Flynn 0297851535 Alex 5 4.05 2006
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Alex
average rating: 4.05
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]]> 61419634 240 Nancy Schoenberger 0062947176 Alex 0 to-read 3.92 2023
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name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
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]]> 782426
"An incisive, exceedingly thoughtful look at the distorted lens through which Hollywood has historically viewed women. It is a valuable contribution not just of film criticism but to a society in which the vital role of women is just beginning to emerge."� Christian Science Monitor

"Haskell is interested in women—how they are used in movies, how they use movies, and how the parts they play function as projections and verifications of our myths about women's lot and woman's psyche and even, lately, women's lib."—Jane Kramer, Village Voice

"In examining the goddesses worshipped by an entire nation, Molly Haskell reveals a good deal about our national character and our most cherished sexual myths. . . . Concerned with the deeply ingrained belief of women's inferiority, she analyzes movies as a social product as well as a social arbiter, and she effectively demonstrates how women are encouraged to impose limitations on themselves by fashioning those selves after flickering shadows in a darkened auditorium—sexual creatures who possess neither ability nor ambition beyond their bodies. . . . Both as an examination of film and as sociology, From Reverence to Rape is excellent."—Harriet Kriegel, The Nation]]> 444 Molly Haskell 0226318850 Alex 0 to-read 3.82 1974
author: Molly Haskell
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average rating: 3.82
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]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Alex 4 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: Alex
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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I’d like spend a few months in Hudson and see what happens
]]> 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Alex 0 to-read 3.71 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Alex
average rating: 3.71
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]]> 214152244 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668076217.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.]]> 304 Kate Fagan Alex 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Kate Fagan
name: Alex
average rating: 3.74
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]]> 214152402 A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1668058146 Alex 0 to-read 4.06 2025
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Alex
average rating: 4.06
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]]> 214537791
“Brilliant � so alive and vibrating that it took my breath away.”—Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

Star point guard Mack Morris’s senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of Mack’s father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. Playing side by side for their high school basketball team, Mack and Liv discover an electrifying, game-winning chemistry on the court. Off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship—one that feels out-of-bounds in their small Pennsylvania town. Mack teeters on the precipice of adulthood as desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline. Caught between the dual impulses of ambition and self-destruction, Mack must decide what kind of life they want to fight for.

Written with the lush longing of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name,the obsessive attention of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl, and with all the romance and feeling of the beloved 2000 movie Love & Basketball, A Sharp Endless Need is a stunning testament to the big feelings of coming-of-age, falling in love, and, of course, playing sports.]]> 272 Marisa Crane 0593733649 Alex 0 to-read 4.16 2025
author: Marisa Crane
name: Alex
average rating: 4.16
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]]> 198563740
“A joyful, exhilarating romp of a romance!� —Ashley Herring Blake, bestselling author of Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date

Bette is in love for the first time in her life. Finally, everything makes sense. Until it doesn’t.

As Bette approached thirty, she realized something big: she’s into women. And then she fell for Mei, who’s entirely perfect. Until, out of the blue, Mei suggests they take a break. She wants Bette to have the opportunity she missed out on in her twenties: to explore the queer dating scene, and then return certain about their future, her desires, and herself.

Reluctantly, Bette sets out on a mission: date hot women and have hot casual sex, before returning to her loving girlfriend. Maybe, put that way, it doesn’t sound so bad�

Often heady and thrilling, occasionally cringe, Bette’s odyssey will take her to some unexpected places. But with her new friend, the gorgeous and self-assured Ruth, as her queer dating guide, Bette can’t possibly fail. Right?]]> 384 Kate Young 0143137980 Alex 0 to-read 3.95
author: Kate Young
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]]> 176443353
A long time ago, Logan Maletis and Rosemary Hale used to be friends. They spent their childhood summers running through the woods, rebelling against their conservative small town, and dreaming of escaping. But then an incident the summer before high school turned them into bitter rivals. After graduation, they went ten years without speaking.

Now in their thirties, Logan and Rosemary find they aren’t quite living the lives of adventure they imagined for themselves. Still in their small town and working as teachers at their alma mater, they’re both stuck in old patterns. Uptight Rosemary chooses security and stability over all else, working constantly, and her most stable relationship is with her label maker. Chaotic and impulsive Logan has a long list of misguided ex-lovers and an apathetic shrug she uses to protect herself from anything real. And as hard as they try to avoid each other—and their complicated past—they keep crashing into each other. Including with their cars.

But when their beloved former English teacher and lifelong mentor tells them he has only a few months to live, they’re forced together once and for all to fulfill his last a cross-country road trip. Stuffed into the gayest van west of the Mississippi, the three embark on a life-changing summer trip—from Washington state to the Grand Canyon, from the Gulf Coast to coastal Maine—that will chart a new future and perhaps lead them back to one another.]]> 368 Alison Cochrun 1668021196 Alex 0 4.09 2024
author: Alison Cochrun
name: Alex
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
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]]> 215815693 From the author of Under the Rainbow, a hilarious, emotional love story about an anxious publicist who's tasked with keeping an extremely gay starlet in the closet—but ends up falling for her instead.�

It's 2005, and Ali is a publicist for Hollywood's biggest stars. Part of her job entails keeping gay celebrities in the closet—which is pretty ironic, since she's a lesbian. When Ali is assigned a new gay client, Cara Bisset, who's breaking onto the scene with a (hetero) romantic blockbuster, keeping Cara's sexuality under wraps becomes Ali's biggest challenge yet.

Cara is unruly and unpredictable, and hates that she has to hide her identity. After a series of increasingly close calls, Ali is sent on the worldwide promotional tour for the movie to help keep Cara in line. Instead, she finds herself drawn to Cara's confidence and bravery. For the past year, Ali has been mired in grief after losing her partner in a freak accident. But with Cara, Ali's fears about the world subside, and she begins to question the Hollywood closeting system she’s helped perpetuate. 

As Cara's fame continues to rise, both Ali and Cara have to decide which is more maintaining the status quo, or risking it all for another chance at love.]]> 370 Celia Laskey 1538765616 Alex 0 to-read 3.44 2025
author: Celia Laskey
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average rating: 3.44
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]]> 218372269
Celeste is extremely talented, sexy, and gay, and would be the perfect collaborator and rebound for Gemma if it weren’t for one major fact: she’s Gemma’s ex, the one that broke her heart in college and moved to a whole another country before Gemma could even make sense of what went wrong between them. Despite working on a project together about what constitutes love and romance in the modern age, when it comes to their own affairs, both Gemma and Celeste are tripping over each other’s feet…and into each other’s arms.

Heightened by their shared love for love and the unmistakable sparks that still fly between them, Gemma and Celeste struggle to keep their relationship strictly professional. For the sake of her career, Gemma needs this piece to do well. And for the sake of what’s left of her beaten up hopeless romantic heart, she wants to fall head over heels for Celeste again. But can she trust Celeste to feel the same this time around?

LOVE IN FOCUS is a second chance sapphic rom com that will appeal to fans of THE BOLD TYPE and DELILAH GREEN DOESN’T CARE.]]> 320 Lyla Lee 1538767554 Alex 0 to-read 3.70 2025
author: Lyla Lee
name: Alex
average rating: 3.70
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]]> 222361600 A pair of Gothic novelists trade rivalry for love in this swoony, steamy, sapphic Regency by USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Vasti.

Celebrated authoress Lady Georgiana Cleeve has achieved fame and fortune. Unfortunately, she’s also acquired an the enigmatic Lady Darling, whose spine-tingling plots appear to be pulled straight from Georgiana’s own manuscripts. What’s a stubborn, steely writer to do? Unmask her rival, of course.

But unmasking doesn’t go according to plan—because Lady Darling is actually Cat Lacey, the butler’s daughter and object of Georgiana’s very secret, very embarrassing teenage infatuation.

Cat Lacey has spent a decade clawing her family out of poverty. The last thing she needs is to be distracted by the stunning(ly pretentious) Lady Georgiana Cleeve. But Cat can’t seem to escape her infuriatingly beautiful rival—including at the eerie manor where they both plan to set their next books. The plot unexpectedly thickens, however, when the novelists find themselves trapped in the manor together. In between ghostly moans and spectral staff, Cat and Georgiana come face-to-face with real the scorching passion that’s been haunting their rivalry all along.]]> Alexandra Vasti 1250910994 Alex 0 to-read 4.36 2025
author: Alexandra Vasti
name: Alex
average rating: 4.36
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]]> 30199417
The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there’s something electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless narrator we find in twenty-five-year-old Leif. Infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, housesitting for Leif’s parents� wealthy friends, and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur.

Leif makes Oola his he will attempt an infinitesimal cartography of her every thought and gesture, her every dimple, every snag, every swell of memory and hollow. And yet in this atmosphere of stifling and paranoid isolation, the world around Leif and Oola begins to warp--the tap water turns salty, plants die, and Oola falls dangerously ill. Finally, it becomes clear that the currents surging just below the surface of Leif’s story are infinitely stranger than they first appear.

Oola is a mind-bendingly original novel about the way that--particularly in the changeable, unsteady just-post-college years--sex, privilege, desire, and creativity can bend, blur, and break. Brittany Newell bursts into the literary world with a narrative as twisted and fresh as it is addicting.]]> 272 Brittany Newell 1250114144 Alex 0 to-read 3.35 2017
author: Brittany Newell
name: Alex
average rating: 3.35
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]]> 211934957 A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.

Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers� secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.

Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .

A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.]]> 352 Brittany Newell 0374613893 Alex 0 to-read 3.61 2025
author: Brittany Newell
name: Alex
average rating: 3.61
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