Leni's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:36:29 -0700 60 Leni's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Das Narrenschiff 3224122
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.]]> 320 Sebastian Brant 3937715037 Leni 0 to-read 3.66 Das Narrenschiff
author: Sebastian Brant
name: Leni
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]]> Fahrenheit 451 13079982
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 249 Ray Bradbury Leni 0 to-read 3.97 1963 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Leni
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind]]> 29430708 The Blazing World and What I Loved.

Siri Husvedt has always been fascinated by biology and how human perception works. She is a lover of art, the humanities, and the sciences. She is a novelist and a feminist. Her lively, lucid essays in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women begin to make some sense of those plural perspectives.

Divided into three parts, the first section, “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women,” investigates the perceptual and gender biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. Among the legendary figures considered are Picasso, De Kooning, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

The second part, “The Delusions of Certainty,” is about the age-old mind/body problem that has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks. Hustvedt explains the relationship between the mental and the physical realms, showing what lies beyond the argument—desire, belief, and the imagination.

The final section, “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition,” discusses neurological disorders and the mysteries of hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology, and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound and powerful consideration of suicide.

There has been much talk about building a beautiful bridge across the chasm that separates the sciences and the humanities. At the moment, we have only a wobbly walkway, but Hustvedt is encouraged by the travelers making their way across it in both directions. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an insightful account of the journeys back and forth.]]> 576 Siri Hustvedt 1501141090 Leni 3 to-read 3.87 2016 A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
author: Siri Hustvedt
name: Leni
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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date added: 2026/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome]]> 28789711 SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.]]> 606 Mary Beard 1631492225 Leni 0 to-read 4.03 2015 SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
author: Mary Beard
name: Leni
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> Hippie 39731666 Hippie, his most autobiographical novel to date, Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to re-live the dream of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order – authoritarian politics, conservative modes of behavior, excessive consumerism, and an unbalanced concentration of wealth and power.

Following the “three days of peace and music” at Woodstock, the 1969 gathering in Bethel, NY that would change the world forever, hippie paradises began to emerge all around the world. In the Dam Square in Amsterdam, long-haired young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense could be found meditating, playing music and discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth. They were a generation refusing to live the robotic and unquestioning life that their parents had known.

At this time, Paulo is a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair who wants to become a writer. He sets off on a journey in search of freedom and a deeper meaning for his life: first, with a girlfriend, on the famous “Death Train to Bolivia,” then on to Peru and later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.

His travels take him further, to the famous square in Amsterdam, where Paulo meets Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip to Nepal, aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on a journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a transformation, changing their priorities and values, along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brings each of them to a choice and a decision that sets the course for their lives thereafter.]]> 306 Paulo Coelho 1473562678 Leni 4 3.63 2018 Hippie
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Leni
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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]]> Waldheimat 3378197 0 Peter Rosegger 3880426759 Leni 0 4.09 1877 Waldheimat
author: Peter Rosegger
name: Leni
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1877
rating: 0
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]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 173 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Leni 0 currently-reading 3.99 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Leni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials]]> 50189928
Nearly three hundred years ago the fate of Massachusetts was delivered into the hands of a pack of young girls. Because of the fantasies and hysterical antics of unbalanced teenagers, decent men and women were sent to the gallows. Medical science that day had no better explanation than “the evil eye”; and so Massachusetts was precipitated into a reign of terror that did not end until the highest in the land had been accused of witchcraft—ministers, a judge, the Governor’s lady. One by one were brought to the gallows such diverse personalities as a decent grandmother; a rakish, pipe-smoking female tramp; a plain farmer who thought only to save his wife from molestation; a lame old man whose toothless gums did not deny expression to a very salty vocabulary.

But from the very beginning some fought the hysteria, pitting sanity against insanity, and eventually forced the community to atone for its tragic error. Written with sly humor, much of the book reads like a novel. In the end, one is pretty sure what was wrong with Cotton Mather, the august judges, and the tormented young girls.

“The Devil in Massachusetts is a vivid and compassionate reconstruction of the Salem witchcraft hysteria. Marion Starkey has written history which illustrates the past and at the same time packs and important contemporary moral.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“It is certainly a ‘one sitting’ sort of book, with the dramatic appeal of the well-told story and the significances of good human history.”—Gerald Warner Brace

“A fresh and full narration…of one of the most lurid, pitiful and deeply significant episodes in American history….”—Odell Shepard]]> 380 Marion L. Starkey 1789125626 Leni 0 to-read 3.79 1949 The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials
author: Marion L. Starkey
name: Leni
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise]]> 200869482
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.]]> 336 Olivia Laing 0393882004 Leni 0 to-read 3.82 2024 The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
author: Olivia Laing
name: Leni
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves]]> 216970860 From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences

When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.]]> 352 Sophie Gilbert 0593656296 Leni 0 to-read 3.83 2025 Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
author: Sophie Gilbert
name: Leni
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
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]]> The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly]]> 158 Han Kang 0553448188 Leni 5 feminism 3.63 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Leni
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2025/09/28
date added: 2025/09/28
shelves: feminism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Leni 5 3.59 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Leni
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/09/24
date added: 2025/09/24
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]]> The Shining (The Shining, #1) 11588
As winter closes in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seems to develop a life of its own. It is meant to be empty. So who is the lady in Room 217 and who are the masked guests going up and down the elevator? And why do the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive?

Somewhere, somehow, there is an evil force in the hotel – and that too is beginning to shine.]]> 497 Stephen King 0450040186 Leni 0 to-read 4.28 1977 The Shining (The Shining, #1)
author: Stephen King
name: Leni
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/29
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]]> Die Ausweichschule 230935428
Kaleb Erdmanns Roman Die Ausweichschule ist ein gekonntes Spiel mit Perspektiven, ein Stück Autofiktion, das gleichermaßen publikumskritisch (wie voyeuristisch ist unser Interesse an der Aufarbeitung von Gewalttaten?) wie autokritisch ist (was gibt mir das Recht, über diesen Tag zu schreiben?). Ein pointierter, persönlicher, erschütternder Text über ein Phänomen, das uns weltweit umtreibt.]]> 305 Kaleb Erdmann 3843736561 Leni 4 3.97 Die Ausweichschule
author: Kaleb Erdmann
name: Leni
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 4
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]]> Breasts and Eggs 50736031
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations.

On another hot summer’s day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless.]]> 430 Mieko Kawakami 1609455878 Leni 0 to-read, feminism 3.85 2008 Breasts and Eggs
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Leni
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/25
shelves: to-read, feminism
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]]> Girl, Woman, Other 41081373
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.]]> 453 Bernardine Evaristo 0241364906 Leni 0 to-read, feminism 4.25 2019 Girl, Woman, Other
author: Bernardine Evaristo
name: Leni
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/25
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]]> The Song of Achilles 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller Leni 5 4.28 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Leni
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/15
date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: mythology, favourites, gay-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)]]> 36336078 Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.]]> 248 André Aciman Leni 5 4.08 2007 Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)
author: André Aciman
name: Leni
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/11
date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: summer, favourites, gay-stories
review:

]]> Pizza Girl 44088751 In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.]]> 208 Jean Kyoung Frazier 038554572X Leni 0 to-read, queer-women 3.34 2020 Pizza Girl
author: Jean Kyoung Frazier
name: Leni
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: to-read, queer-women
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]]> Boulder 49236083 Finalista del International Booker Prize 2023.

Después de la exitosa Permafrost, Boulder es la segunda novela del tríptico donde Eva Baltasar explora la voz, la vida y el cuerpo de tres mujeres.

La protagonista de Boulder se gana la vida como cocinera en un viejo barco mercante. Es la situación perfecta: soledad, una cabina, el océano, algún puerto en el que conocer mujeres y horas para encarar el vacío, para sentir la fuerza de la provisionalidad. Hasta que un día una de ellas consigue que abandone el mar, acceda a vivir entre cuatro paredes y se implique en la gestación asistida y en la educación de un hijo. ¿Qué ha hecho la maternidad con la mujer que en su día conoció en un bar de la Patagonia? ¿Qué hará ella, animal enjaulado en una casa unifamiliar de Reikiavik?
Todo ha cambiado excepto su apodo, Boulder: esas enormes piedras aisladas en medio del paisaje, expuestas a todo sin que nadie sepa de dónde vienen ni porque están ahí.]]> 128 Eva Baltasar 8439736967 Leni 0 to-read, queer-women 3.86 2020 Boulder
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Leni
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
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]]> Paradise Rot 39216527 A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery

Jo is in a strange new country for university, and having a more peculiar time than most. A house with no walls, a roommate with no boundaries, and a home that seems ever more alive. Jo’s sensitivity, and all her senses, become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, and dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval, presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire. A complex, poetic and strange novel about bodies, sexuality and the female gender.]]> 160 Jenny Hval Leni 0 to-read, queer-women 3.43 2009 Paradise Rot
author: Jenny Hval
name: Leni
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
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]]> Sunburn 75715117
Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.]]> 285 Chloe Michelle Howarth 0857308416 Leni 0 to-read, queer-women 4.25 2023 Sunburn
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: Leni
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: to-read, queer-women
review:

]]> Milk Fed 54304105
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

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

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]> 304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Leni 0 to-read 3.55 2021 Milk Fed
author: Melissa Broder
name: Leni
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Summer Will Show 958670 An alternative cover for this edition can be found here

Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion.

Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

]]> 406 Sylvia Townsend Warner 0140161767 Leni 0 to-read, queer-women 3.59 1936 Summer Will Show
author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
name: Leni
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: to-read, queer-women
review:

]]> Fair Play 902743 Fair Play portrays a love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side-by-side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other’s creativity we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.]]> 127 Tove Jansson 0954899539 Leni 0 queer-women, to-be-read 3.89 1989 Fair Play
author: Tove Jansson
name: Leni
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: queer-women, to-be-read
review:

]]> Animal Farm 170448 Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. Orwell is one of the very few modern satirists comparable to Jonathan Swift in power, artistry, and moral authority; in animal farm his spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy brilliantly highlight his stark message.

Taking as his starting point the betrayed promise of the Russian Revolution, Orwell lays out a vision that, in its bitter wisdom, gives us the clearest understanding we possess of the possible consequences of our social and political acts.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 Leni 0 to-be-read 4.10 1945 Animal Farm
author: George Orwell
name: Leni
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/24
shelves: to-be-read
review:

]]> Happy Place 61718053 Think of your happy place. . . .

HARRIET AND WYN have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.

They broke up five months ago . . . and still haven’t told their best friends.

Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week, they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale, and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laidback charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week . . . in front of those who know you best?]]> 388 Emily Henry 0593441273 Leni 0 currently-reading 3.92 2023 Happy Place
author: Emily Henry
name: Leni
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/20
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]]> Michael Kohlhaas 398145
It has become, in fact, a classic tale: that of the honorable man forced to take the law into his own hands. In this incendiary prototype, a minor tax dispute intensifies explosively, until the eponymous hero finds the forces of an entire kingdom, and even the great Martin Luther, gathered against him. But soon even Luther comes to echo the growing army of peasants asking, "Isn’t Kohlhaas right?"

Widely acknowledged as one of the masterworks of German literature, Michael Kohlhaas is also one of the most stirring tales ever written of the quest for justice.]]> 133 Heinrich von Kleist 0976140721 Leni 0 to-read 3.58 1810 Michael Kohlhaas
author: Heinrich von Kleist
name: Leni
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1810
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/15
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]]> The Nibelungenlied 18261 404 Unknown 0140441379 Leni 0 to-read 3.85 1200 The Nibelungenlied
author: Unknown
name: Leni
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1200
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/15
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Leni 0 3.83 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Leni
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Radical Intimacy 61389623 An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.]]> 196 Sophie K. Rosa 0745345166 Leni 0 to-read 4.11 2023 Radical Intimacy
author: Sophie K. Rosa
name: Leni
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Woman's Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi]]> 75367019 The history of a demonic tradition that was stolen from women – and then won back again.

Demonic temptresses – from siren-mermaids to Lilith – are well known today, and their mythology focuses around the seductive danger they pose to men. But the root of these figures can be traced back 4,000 years and in their earliest incarnations they were in fact demons worshipped and feared by like Lamashtu, the horrific talon-footed, serpentine monster, who strangled infants and murdered pregnant women, or the Gello, the ghost of a girl who had died a virgin and so killed expectant mothers and their babies out of jealousy.

This history of a demonic tradition from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day – from Lamashtu and Gello, to Lamia and Lilith, and mermaids and vampires – shows how these demons were co-opted by a male-centred society, before being recast as symbols of women's liberation. We also learn what this evolution can tell us about the experience of women and the danger of childbirth, changing attitudes towards sexuality and the movement for women's rights.]]> 304 Sarah Clegg 1803280255 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 3.97 Woman's Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi
author: Sarah Clegg
name: Leni
average rating: 3.97
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]]> Three Women 42201100 A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

Hailed as “a dazzling achievement” (Los Angeles Times) and “riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance” (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics—and topped bestseller lists—worldwide.

In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.

Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.]]> 306 Lisa Taddeo 1451642296 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 3.71 2019 Three Women
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: Leni
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/29
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]]> Is It Ever Just Sex? 96177642 A delightfully thought-provoking study of why we have sex, from award-winning psychoanalyst Darian Leader

'It was just sex.'

It's a familiar claim. But is it really possible?

The old idea that sexuality is a smouldering, animalistic force within us, desperate for release yet restrained by social forces, has little to support it. Bodies aren't just sticks that make fire when you rub them together, and the pain, heartache, and regret that can accompany the highs of sexual excitement show us that much more is at stake.

So, what are we really thinking about when we think about sex? And what are we really doing when we do it?

As acclaimed psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, with his trademark clarity, energy and wit, there is no such thing as 'just sex'. It is always about so much more than that - about phantasy, anxiety, guilt, revenge, violence, love - and Leader draws on his analytic experience, historical research and case studies to explore their importance to every aspect of our sexual lives.

' One of our most important contemporary thinkers' Guardian

'Leader writes beautifully, with majestic clarity and an easy flow between argument and case-study' Telegraph

'Leader is as much a philosopher as a psychoanalyst and his ideas are engrossing and enlightening' Metro]]> 284 Darian Leader 0241998158 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 3.27 2023 Is It Ever Just Sex?
author: Darian Leader
name: Leni
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman]]> 528985 She Comes First—an essential guidebook to oral sex from the author of Be Honest—You’re Not That Into Him Either. The New York Times praises Kerner’s “cool sense of humor and an obsessive desire to inform,” as he “encourages men through an act that many find mystifying.” An indispensable aid to a healthier, more fulfilling sex life for her and him, She Comes First offers techniques and philosophy that have already earned raves from the likes of bestselling author and Loveline co-host Dr. Drew Pinsky as well as Playgirl magazine, which cheers, “Hallelujah!”.]]> 228 Ian Kerner 0060538252 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 4.02 2004 She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman
author: Ian Kerner
name: Leni
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/29
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]]> Want 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons – some complicated, some not – so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 3.36 2024 Want
author: Gillian Anderson
name: Leni
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life]]> 22609341
Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.

The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.

Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm.

Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.

And Emily Nagoski can prove it.]]> 400 Emily Nagoski 1476762090 Leni 0 to-read, sexuality 4.27 2015 Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life
author: Emily Nagoski
name: Leni
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> Women Who Run With the Wolves 241823
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.]]> 537 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 0345409876 Leni 1 4.10 1992 Women Who Run With the Wolves
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: Leni
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1992
rating: 1
read at: 2025/07/20
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]]> Trespasses 60417483 Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. ]]> 292 Louise Kennedy 0593540891 Leni 0 to-read 3.90 2022 Trespasses
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Leni
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Die schmutzige Frau (German Edition)]]> 63325996 Ein trügerisch sanfter, inspirierender Roman über eine Ehe und ihre existenziellen Konsequenzen.

Ein Mann kauft seiner Frau ein großzügiges Apartment über der Stadt. Dort soll sie sich Zeit für sich nehmen und ihren Neigungen nachgehen. Aber die Sache hat einen Die Frau kann die Wohnung nicht mehr verlassen. »Hier oben brauche ich niemanden, keinen Liebhaber, keinen Ausblick und Meinenmann schon gar nicht«, sagt sie trotzig. Nun ist sie hoch über der Stadt sich selbst, ihren Wünschen und Fantasien ausgeliefert, während ihr Mann seine ganz eigenen Interessen verfolgt.

»Eine sprachgewandte, reflektierte Autorin, die sich auf Zwischentöne versteht.« DLF]]> 166 Annette Pehnt 349260417X Leni 3 3.42 Die schmutzige Frau (German Edition)
author: Annette Pehnt
name: Leni
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/06/09
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]]> The House of the Seven Gables 90192 225 Nathaniel Hawthorne 0393924769 Leni 0 to-read 3.46 1851 The House of the Seven Gables
author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
name: Leni
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1851
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials]]> 17290747 Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been "afflicted", 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn’t include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev. Cotton Mather called "a desolation of names."

The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals still deserve to be remembered and, in remembering specific lives, modern readers can benefit from such historical intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged.]]> 445 Marilynne K. Roach 0306821206 Leni 0 to-read 3.40 2013 Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials
author: Marilynne K. Roach
name: Leni
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (The Physick Book, #1)]]> 4836308
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest--to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.

As the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined.

Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation.
(katherinehowe.com)]]> 371 Katherine Howe 1401340903 Leni 0 to-read 3.73 2009 The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (The Physick Book, #1)
author: Katherine Howe
name: Leni
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/08
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]]> Young Goodman Brown 562471 48 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1557423628 Leni 0 to-read 3.65 1835 Young Goodman Brown
author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
name: Leni
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1835
rating: 0
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]]> The Heretic's Daughter 3181953 Kathleen Kent is a tenth generation descendant of Martha Carrier. She paints a haunting portrait, not just of Puritan New England, but also of one family's deep and abiding love in the face of fear and persecution.]]> 332 Kathleen Kent 0316037532 Leni 0 to-read 3.79 2008 The Heretic's Daughter
author: Kathleen Kent
name: Leni
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft]]> 774028 231 Paul S. Boyer 0674785266 Leni 0 to-read 3.73 1974 Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
author: Paul S. Boyer
name: Leni
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> The Witches: Salem, 1692 24819449 Cleopatra, provides an electrifying, fresh view of the Salem witch trials.

The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.

The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled--in crackling detail and lyrical prose--by one of our most acclaimed historians.]]> 498 Stacy Schiff 0316200603 Leni 0 to-read 3.27 2015 The Witches: Salem, 1692
author: Stacy Schiff
name: Leni
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2015
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]]> Ein schönes Ausländerkind 202240179
Sie war Klassenbeste, studierte und arbeitet jetzt superseriös in der Verwaltung, und trotzdem hat die Erzählerin das Gefühl, nirgendwo so richtig hineinzupassen. Erstmals gibt es die großartig lakonische Toxische Pommes und ihren traumatischen Weg zum perfekt integrierten Ausländerkind in Romanform. Seit drei Jahren macht sie auf TikTok und Instagram sehr erfolgreich Comedy, parodiert Balkan-Mentalität und Hipstertum und bringt alltägliche Mikroaggressionen auf den Punkt.
]]> 209 Toxische Pommes 3552074104 Leni 0 to-read 4.33 2024 Ein schönes Ausländerkind
author: Toxische Pommes
name: Leni
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/06
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]]> Und alle so still 200268186
An einem Sonntag im Juni gerät die Welt aus dem Takt: Frauen liegen auf der Straße. Reglos, in stillem Protest. Hier kreuzen sich die Wege von Elin, Nuri und Ruth.

Elin, Anfang zwanzig, eine erfolgreiche Influencerin, der etwas zugestoßen ist, von dem sie nicht weiß, ob es Gewalt war.
Nuri, neunzehn Jahre, der die Schule abgebrochen hat und versucht, sich als Fahrradkurier, Bettenschubser und Barkeeper über Wasser zu halten.
Ruth, Mitte fünfzig, die als Pflegefachkraft im Krankenhaus arbeitet und deren Pflichtgefühl unerschöpflich scheint.

Es ist der Beginn einer Revolte, bei der Frauen nicht mehr das tun, was sie immer getan haben. Plötzlich steht alles infrage, worauf unser System fußt. Ergreifen Elin, Nuri und Ruth die Chance auf Veränderung]]> 356 Mareike Fallwickl 3644013381 Leni 0 to-read 4.28 2024 Und alle so still
author: Mareike Fallwickl
name: Leni
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?]]> 214946449
Juno schreibt online mit Männern, die Frauen online ihre Liebe gestehen und so versuchen, sie um ihr Geld zu bringen. Doch statt darauf hereinzufallen, werden genau diese Männer zu einer Form von Freiheit für Juno. In den Gesprächen kann sie sein, wer sie will und sagen, was sie will – und das vermeintlich ohne Konsequenzen. Ganz im Gegensatz zu ihrem sonstigen Leben, in dem sie immer unterwegs, immer besorgt um Jupiter, immer beschäftigt und eingebunden ist. Also flüchtet Juno ab und zu vor ihrem Alltag ins Internet und spielt dort Spielchen mit Männern, die sie anlügen. Sie selbst wird zur Lügnerin. Aber ist es nicht so, dass man sich beim Lügen zuallererst selbst belügt? Eines Tages trifft Juno auf Benu, der ihre Behauptungen ebenso durchschaut wie sie seine. Und trotz der Entfernung zwischen ihnen entsteht eine Verbindung. »Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir« ist ein tiefgehender Roman, aber so leichtfüßig wie eine Komödie.]]> 224 Martina Hefter 3608988262 Leni 0 to-read 3.31 2024 Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?
author: Martina Hefter
name: Leni
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/04
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]]> <![CDATA[I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem]]> 89526
As history and fantasy merge, Maryse Condé, acclaimed author of Tree of Life and Segu, creates the richly imagined life of a fascinating woman.]]> 225 Maryse Condé 0345384202 Leni 0 to-read 4.04 1986 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
author: Maryse Condé
name: Leni
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love]]> 17601
In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.

With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.]]> 208 bell hooks 0743456084 Leni 0 to-read 4.35 2003 The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
author: bell hooks
name: Leni
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/01
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]]> M Train 24728470 M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.]]> 256 Patti Smith 1101875100 Leni 0 to-read 4.01 2015 M Train
author: Patti Smith
name: Leni
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It]]> 60613920 298 Richard V. Reeves 1800750544 Leni 0 to-read 3.95 2022 Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It
author: Richard V. Reeves
name: Leni
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/30
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]]> The Signature of All Things 20763711 A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and City of Girls

In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry’s brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father’s money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma’s research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life.

Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert’s wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.
 ]]> 499 Elizabeth Gilbert 0143125842 Leni 3 3.93 2013 The Signature of All Things
author: Elizabeth Gilbert
name: Leni
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/09
date added: 2025/05/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind]]> 23692271 512 Yuval Noah Harari Leni 4 4.31 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Leni
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/05/29
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]]> Letters to a Young Poet 46199
A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.]]> 80 Rainer Maria Rilke 0486422453 Leni 4 4.30 1929 Letters to a Young Poet
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Leni
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2025/05/29
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]]> Schachnovelle 1016722 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9783596215225

»Das Unwahrscheinliche hatte sich ereignet, der Weltmeister, der Champion zahlloser Turniere hatte die Fahne gestrichen vor einem Unbekannten, einem Manne, der zwanzig oder fünfundzwanzig Jahre kein Schachbrett angerührt. Unser Freund, der Anonymus, der Ignotus, hatte den stärksten Schachspieler der Erde in offenem Kampfe besiegt!«

Das Erstaunen ist groß, als der unscheinbare Dr. B., österreichischer Emigrant auf einem Passagierdampfer von New York nach Buenos Aires, eher zufällig gegen den amtierenden Schachweltmeister Mirko Czentovic antritt und seinen mechanisch routinierten Gegner mit verspielter Leichtigkeit besiegt. Doch das Schachspiel fördert Erinnerungen an den Terror seiner Inhaftierung im Nationalsozialismus zutage und reißt eine seelische Wunde wieder auf, die erneut Dr. B.s geistige Gesundheit bedroht.]]> 112 Stefan Zweig Leni 4 4.22 1942 Schachnovelle
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Leni
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/12
date added: 2025/05/29
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]]> Vienna 1384429 427 Eva Menasse 3462034650 Leni 0 to-read 3.72 2005 Vienna
author: Eva Menasse
name: Leni
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/22
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]]> Das Café am Rande der Welt 1780947 128 John P. Strelecky 3423209690 Leni 0 3.46 2003 Das Café am Rande der Welt
author: John P. Strelecky
name: Leni
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> The Plague 11989 The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947. It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.

The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.]]> 308 Albert Camus Leni 0 to-read 4.05 1947 The Plague
author: Albert Camus
name: Leni
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> <![CDATA[It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1)]]> 27362503
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.]]> 386 Colleen Hoover 1668021048 Leni 2 4.10 2016 It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1)
author: Colleen Hoover
name: Leni
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2022/11/08
date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> Piranesi 50202953 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781635575637.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 245 Susanna Clarke Leni 4 4.19 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Leni
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Little Women (Little Women, #1)]]> 1934 Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

Note: This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780451529305.

]]> 449 Louisa May Alcott Leni 5 4.17 1868 Little Women (Little Women, #1)
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Leni
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1868
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> Das kunstseidene Mädchen 1132524 256 Irmgard Keun Leni 5 3.47 1932 Das kunstseidene Mädchen
author: Irmgard Keun
name: Leni
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/16
date added: 2025/05/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Jeder weiß, dass deine Mutter eine Hexe ist]]> 200269406 Ein fesselnder Roman über den wohl bekanntesten deutschen Hexenprozess gegen Katharina Kepler, die Mutter des Astronomen und Physikers Johannes Kepler, erzählt aus der Sicht einer starken, unabhängigen Frau. 

Leonberg, 1618: Die Pest grassiert, Krieg wird ausbrechen, Angst und Misstrauen herrschen. Der kaiserliche Astronom und Protestant Johannes Kepler ist mit den gewagten Thesen seines heliozentrischen Weltbildes bei den württembergischen Herrschern nicht sonderlich beliebt und muss ins Exil. In der Zwischenzeit hält man sich in Leonberg an seiner Mutter Katharina schadlos. Rivka Galchen schreibt aus Sicht «Kätherlin» Keplers, der Sicht einer unabhängig denkenden, im besten Sinne «eigenwilligen» Frau von dem historisch belegten, langjährigen Hexenprozess (1615-21), und stellt sich und uns die Frage, wie wirkmächtig selbständig handelnde Frauen in der Historie waren. In Galchens neuem Roman prallen Welten aufeinander, politisch, religiös und gesellschaftlich, an einem historischen Wendepunkt vor dem Dreißigjährigem Krieg, Pest und einsetzender Renaissance.

«Dieser Roman enthält zahlreiche Lektionen für unsere eigene Zeit, über die Macht von Furcht und Aberglauben, Böses entstehen zu lassen. Dabei verzücken Galchens spielerisch poetische Sätze wie die Magie in Märchen.» Oprah Winfrey 

«Eine weise Meditation über das hysterische Spiel mit abstrusen Schuldzuweisungen, das uns im Internetzeitalter so vertraut ist.» Lauren Groff]]> 310 Rivka Galchen 3644045313 Leni 0 to-read 3.34 2021 Jeder weiß, dass deine Mutter eine Hexe ist
author: Rivka Galchen
name: Leni
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
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]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 183 Aysegül Savas 163973306X Leni 0 to-read 3.83 2024 The Anthropologists
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Leni
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
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]]> Engel des Vergessens 12224292 250 Maja Haderlap Leni 0 to-be-read 4.07 2011 Engel des Vergessens
author: Maja Haderlap
name: Leni
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> The Bell Jar 56616095 (back cover)]]> 288 Sylvia Plath 0060837020 Leni 0 to-be-read 3.99 1963 The Bell Jar
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Leni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Kairos 58877223 379 Jenny Erpenbeck 332860085X Leni 0 to-be-read 3.31 2021 Kairos
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Leni
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
shelves: to-be-read
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]]> Die Blechtrommel 762756 782 Günter Grass 3423118210 Leni 0 to-read 3.81 1959 Die Blechtrommel
author: Günter Grass
name: Leni
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Lichtspiel 125461683 Die barbarische Natur des Regimes spürt die heimgekehrte Familie mit aller Deutlichkeit. Doch der Propagandaminister in Berlin will das Filmgenie haben, er kennt keinen Widerspruch, und er verspricht viel. Während Pabst noch glaubt, dass er dem Werben widerstehen, dass er sich keiner Diktatur als der der Kunst fügen wird, ist er schon den ersten Schritt in die rettungslose Verstrickung gegangen.

Daniel Kehlmanns Roman über Kunst und Macht, Schönheit und Barbarei ist ein Triumph.
Lichtspiel zeigt, was Literatur vermag: durch Erfindung die Wahrheit hervortreten zu lassen.]]> 464 Daniel Kehlmann 3644018456 Leni 0 to-be-read 4.27 2023 Lichtspiel
author: Daniel Kehlmann
name: Leni
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Tanz der Teufel 60574189 288 Fiston Mwanza Mujila Leni 0 to-read 3.46 2020 Tanz der Teufel
author: Fiston Mwanza Mujila
name: Leni
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> The Details 63313297 An acclaimed Swedish author makes her English language debut with this intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.

A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the woman's own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.

There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who gleefully campaigns for a baby even though he knows their love has no future. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret.

The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.]]> 144 Ia Genberg 0063309718 Leni 0 to-read 3.92 2022 The Details
author: Ia Genberg
name: Leni
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Mayflies 50162215 From the widely renowned author Andrew O'Hagan, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Mayflies is a memorial to youth's euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.]]> 288 Andrew O'Hagan 0571273688 Leni 0 to-read 3.89 2020 Mayflies
author: Andrew O'Hagan
name: Leni
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> The Night Circus 9361589
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.]]> 506 Erin Morgenstern Leni 0 to-read 3.99 2011 The Night Circus
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Leni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Leonardo da Vinci 34684622 600 Walter Isaacson 1501139150 Leni 0 to-read 4.16 2017 Leonardo da Vinci
author: Walter Isaacson
name: Leni
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Leni 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Leni
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Homo Faber 10009 214 Max Frisch 0156421356 Leni 4 3.70 1957 Homo Faber
author: Max Frisch
name: Leni
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/05
date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> Die Wand 1132217 an alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Eine Frau will mit ihrer Kusine und deren Mann ein paar Tage in einem Jagdhaus in den Bergen verbringen. Nach der Ankunft unternimmt das Paar noch einen Gang ins nächste Dorf und kehrt nicht mehr zurück. Am nächsten Morgen stößt die Frau auf eine unüberwindbare Wand, hinter der Totenstarre herrscht. Abgeschlossen von der übrigen Welt, richtet sie sich inmittten ihres engumgrenzten Stücks Natur und umgeben von einigen zugelaufenen Tieren aufs Überleben ein.]]> 285 Marlen Haushofer 3548605710 Leni 5 4.06 1963 Die Wand
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Leni
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/04/28
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]]> Notes on ‘Camp’ 36436100 'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.'

These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Stevie Smith; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outerspace.]]> 57 Susan Sontag 0241339707 Leni 0 to-read 3.97 1964 Notes on ‘Camp’
author: Susan Sontag
name: Leni
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> Crooked Plow 120855172 Heralded as the most important Brazilian novel of the century so far, this bestseller's unique blend of magic and social realism won it three literary awards and global acclaim

'I heard  our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.'

Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.]]> 288 Itamar Vieira Junior 1839766425 Leni 5 4.15 2019 Crooked Plow
author: Itamar Vieira Junior
name: Leni
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Kein Platz für Idioten: das Stück und die Fernsehfassung]]> 1739565 125 Felix Mitterer 385218164X Leni 0 3.42 Kein Platz für Idioten: das Stück und die Fernsehfassung
author: Felix Mitterer
name: Leni
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> The Road to the Salt Sea 57504849
Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel where he must flash his “toothpaste-white smile” for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and draws life lessons from the game of chess.

But Able’s ordinary life is upended when an early morning room service order leads him to interfere with Akudo, a sex worker involved with a powerful but dangerous hotel guest. Suddenly caught in a web of violence, guilt, and fear, Able must run to save himself—a journey that leads him into the desert with a group of drug-addled migrants, headed by a charismatic religious leader calling himself Ben Ten. The travelers’ dream of reaching Europe and a new life in a better place is shattered when they fall prey to human traffickers, suffer starvation, and find themselves on the precipice of death, fighting for their lives and their freedom.

As Able God moves into the treacherous unknown, his consciousness becomes focused on survival and the foundations of his beliefs—his ideas about betterment and salvation—are forever altered. Suspenseful, incisive, and illuminating, The Road to the Salt Sea is a story of family, fate, religion, survival, the failures of the Nigerian class system, and what often happens to those who seek their fortunes elsewhere.]]> 300 Samuel Kolawole 0063050889 Leni 3 3.75 2024 The Road to the Salt Sea
author: Samuel Kolawole
name: Leni
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> Blutbuch 60912431
Dieser Roman ist ein stilistisch und formal einzigartiger Befreiungsakt von den Dingen, die wir ungefragt weitertragen: Geschlechter, Traumata, Klassenzugehörigkeiten. Kim de l'Horizon macht sich auf die Suche nach anderen Arten von Wissen und Überlieferung, Erzählen und Ichwerdung, unterspült dabei die linearen Formen der Familienerzählung und nähert sich einer flüssigen und strömenden Art des Schreibens, die nicht festlegt, sondern öffnet.]]> 336 Kim de l'Horizon 383218208X Leni 5 3.84 2022 Blutbuch
author: Kim de l'Horizon
name: Leni
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> The Third Policeman 27208 The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.]]> 200 Flann O'Brien 156478214X Leni 0 3.99 1967 The Third Policeman
author: Flann O'Brien
name: Leni
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 14201
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke Leni 0 to-read 3.85 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Leni
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Wood at Midwinter 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 60 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 Leni 0 to-read 3.40 2024 The Wood at Midwinter
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Leni
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> Der Trafikant 16122118
Als sich Franz kurz darauf Hals über Kopf in die Varietétänzerin Anezka verliebt und in eine tiefe Verunsicherung stürzt, sucht er bei Professor Freud Rat. Dabei stellt sich jedoch schnell heraus, dass dem weltbekannten Psychoanalytiker das weibliche Geschlecht ein mindestens ebenso großes Rätsel ist wie Franz. Ohnmächtig fühlen sich beide auch angesichts der sich dramatisch zuspitzenden politisch-gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse. Und schon bald werden sie und Anezka jäh vom Strudel der Ereignisse auseinandergerissen.]]> 256 Robert Seethaler 303695645X Leni 5 3.75 2012 Der Trafikant
author: Robert Seethaler
name: Leni
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> Das Feld 40041967
Was bleibt von einem Leben?

Einer wurde geboren, verfiel dem Glücksspiel und starb. Ein anderer hat nun endlich verstanden, in welchem Moment sich sein Leben entschied. Eine erinnert sich daran, dass ihr Mann ein Leben lang ihre Hand in seiner gehalten hat. Eine andere hatte siebenundsechzig Männer, doch nur einen hat sie geliebt. Und einer dachte: Man müsste mal raus hier. Doch dann blieb er. In Robert Seethalers neuem Roman geht es um das, was sich nicht fassen lässt. Es ist ein Buch der Menschenleben, jedes ganz anders, jedes mit anderen verbunden. Sie fügen sich zum Roman einer kleinen Stadt und zu einem Bild menschlicher Koexistenz.]]> 240 Robert Seethaler 3446260382 Leni 5 3.49 2018 Das Feld
author: Robert Seethaler
name: Leni
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> Ein ganzes Leben 22550484 155 Robert Seethaler 3446246452 Leni 5 3.98 2014 Ein ganzes Leben
author: Robert Seethaler
name: Leni
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Leni 5 4.13 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Leni
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Leni 0 to-read 4.15 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Leni
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> All Fours 197798168 An irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious, and surprising novel about a woman upending her life.

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Leni 0 to-read 3.39 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Leni
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett 0385550367 Leni 0 to-read 4.38 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Leni
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> River East, River West 127823210
Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and she is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed. She plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Although he once dreamed of a bright future, he is now one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life and how much will ever be enough.

In a stunning reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative and set against China’s political history and economic rise, River East, River West is an intimate family drama and a sharp social novel. Alternating between Alva and Lu Fang’s points of view, this is a profoundly moving exploration of race and class, cultural identity and belonging, and the often-false promise of the American Dream.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAYA ANGELOU BOOK AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE STANFORDS' FICTION WITH A SENSE OF PLACE AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE MASSACHUSETTS BOOK AWARD]]> 352 Aube Rey Lescure 0063257858 Leni 3 3.96 2024 River East, River West
author: Aube Rey Lescure
name: Leni
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1)]]> 62047992 150 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278677 Leni 5 3.64 2010 Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1)
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: Leni
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> At the Mountains of Madness 32767 At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries --and their encounter with an untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization--is a milestone of macabre literature.

This Definitive Edition of At the Mountains of Madness (The Modern Library) also includes Lovecraft's long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."]]> 194 H.P. Lovecraft 0812974417 Leni 4 3.84 1936 At the Mountains of Madness
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Leni
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1936
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Leni 0 to-read 4.02 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Leni
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> Robinson Crusoe 44302922 Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.

Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer), a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra", now part of Chile, which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world and is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. It is generally seen as a contender for the first English novel. Before the end of 1719, the book had already run through four editions, and it has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, the Robinsonade.]]> 271 Daniel Defoe 6052491949 Leni 0 3.76 1719 Robinson Crusoe
author: Daniel Defoe
name: Leni
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1719
rating: 0
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]]>