Barbara's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:48:09 -0700 60 Barbara's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Colcoz 252546576 468 Emmanuel Carrère 8556524028 Barbara 0 to-read 4.62 2025 Colcoz
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex]]> 218460342

In THE DRY SEASON erzählt die Autorin und Essayistin, wie das Alleinsein ihre Sicht auf Liebe und Sex grundlegend verändert hat. Im Dialog mit Frauen aus der Menschheitsgeschichte - von Sappho über Hildegard von Bingen bis Virginia Woolf - fragt Wie gelingt es, sich selbst nicht in der Liebe zu verlieren? Ein kluges und persönliches Buch über Selbsterkenntnis, Begehren und Leidenschaft.


]]> 276 Melissa Febos 0593537238 Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.92 2025 The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
author: Melissa Febos
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/31
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Abandon Me: Memoirs 30038917
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.]]> 308 Melissa Febos 1632866579 Barbara 0 to-read 4.20 2017 Abandon Me: Memoirs
author: Melissa Febos
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 303 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Barbara 0 to-read 3.70 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Monique Escapes 231770356 Monique Escapes opens with a telephone call between Édouard Louis and his mother, who reveals that her partner is an alcoholic and emotionally abusive. Her sadness and fear distresses Édouard, who is in Athens, although his vacant apartment immediately offers her somewhere to stay - and an escape route.

Together, mother and son plot her next steps in what becomes a meditation on the price of liberty, the challenges involved in change, and the necessity of remaking their own relationship even as they work to free her from cycles of abuse. It is a work of remarkable emotional directness and a fascinating reflection on the interplay between life and art - and ultimately the story of an older women's reinvention as she starts a new life.]]> 128 Édouard Louis 1529949297 Barbara 0 currently-reading 4.02 2024 Monique Escapes
author: Édouard Louis
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth]]> 238226991 A spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 AM he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.]]> 361 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548532 Barbara 0 4.28 2026 London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/29
date added: 2026/08/29
shelves:
review:

]]> A paciente silenciosa 44033719 Um assassinato, uma verdade oculta. As raízes do silêncio são muito mais profundas do que se pode imaginar.

 Alicia Berenson escreve um diário para colocar suas ideias em ordem. Ele é tanto uma válvula de escape quanto uma forma de provar ao seu adorado marido que está bem. Ela não consegue suportar conviver com a ideia de que está deixando Gabriel preocupado, de que está lhe causando algum mal.

Alicia Berenson tinha 33 anos quando matou seu marido com cinco tiros. E nunca mais disse uma palavra.

O psicoterapeuta forense Theo Faber está convencido de que é capaz de tratar Alicia, depois de tantos outros falharem. E, se ela falar, ele será capaz de ouvir a verdade?]]> 367 Alex Michaelides 850111653X Barbara 0 4.18 2019 A paciente silenciosa
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/25
date added: 2026/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Morte É Um Dia Que Vale a Pena Viver]]> 31922986 192 Ana Cláudia Quintana Arantes 8544104401 Barbara 0 to-read 4.18 2019 A Morte É Um Dia Que Vale a Pena Viver
author: Ana Cláudia Quintana Arantes
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Quando 255213729 Em seu novo romance, Quando, Carla Madeira explora temas como maternidade, culpa, homofobia e violência no Brasil da década de 1980, mostrando, com riqueza de recursos formais, porque se tornou a escritora mais vendida do país.

Viridiana é a mãe amorosa e atenta de Margarida, Valquíria e Tito. No calor de um acontecimento trágico, será capaz do ato impensado: denunciar o próprio filho à polícia, o que abre um abismo entre eles. Depois de vinte anos sem se verem, quando o tempo parece ter dissolvido todas as possibilidades, Carla Madeira nos colocará diante da extraordinária força dos afetos.

"Este livro é uma leitura aguçada e potente de um tecido do Brasil e também um convite para outras tramas do nosso tecido social." – Rita von Hunty (na orelha de Quando)]]> 280 Carla Madeira 8501927430 Barbara 0 to-read 4.40 2026 Quando
author: Carla Madeira
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flores para Algernon 6630432 299 Daniel Keyes 846751146X Barbara 0 to-read 4.45 1966 Flores para Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Promise at Dawn 58174

A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic.]]> 348 Romain Gary 0811210162 Barbara 0 to-read 4.36 1960 Promise at Dawn
author: Romain Gary
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/07/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sismógrafo 60702055
"Sismógrafo" é a história desse retorno, assim como das memórias que ficaram marcadas, aquelas dos lugares por onde ele passa, e aquelas indeléveis da chapa fotográfica. Enquanto acompanha o narrador em um movimento de reencontro com seu passado, somos apresentados também à história de Eduardo, seu amadurecimento numa pequena cidade do interior brasileiro, a criação católica e as experimentações da sexualidade. A narrativa de formação tem seu ponto de virada quando o protagonista conhece Tomás, um ano à frente no colégio, e uma fotografia coloca essa relação em xeque.

Entre o dilema de Eduardo de se entender pela imagem e, ao mesmo tempo, tentar ultrapassá-la, vemos a construção de um painel de personagens que se chocam e se cruzam em uma trama lírica que, antes de caminhar para uma reconciliação entre aqueles que partiram e os que ficaram, é sobretudo um elogio ao tremor. As linhas que o sismógrafo desenha neste livro não são as dos movimentos do solo, mas sim as dos corpos que vibram no ritmo incerto do desejo. Partindo de uma experiência íntima, Leonardo Piana propõe uma leitura cortante e delicada da culpa e da violência associadas aos corpos dos homens gays.

Livro vencedor do Prêmio Cidade de Belo Horizonte, "Sismógrafo" é também sobre uma geração que, nascida nos anos 90, enfrenta os horrores da vida adulta ao mesmo tempo que se depara com uma renovação do mundo tecnológico, com sua profusão de imagens a borrar as fronteiras entre o público e o privado. E essas imagens para sempre marcadas sobrevivem às distorções da memória, criando um tipo de memória infinita — a qual, mais do que construir zonas confortáveis de lembranças, impede violentamente que alguma coisa seja esquecida.]]> 248 Leonardo Piana Barbara 0 to-read 4.35 2022 Sismógrafo
author: Leonardo Piana
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Lázár 231425583
Ein Roman wie eine Welt, die überwältigende Saga einer Familie, getrieben von der Liebe und der Sehnsucht nach ihr, in den Strudeln des 20. Jahrhunderts. Fesselnd und berührend, zugleich voller Leichtigkeit, voller Träume und Geheimnisse, in denen sich die ganze Tragik und Schönheit der Existenz spiegelt. Und – ob angesichts historischer Katastrophen oder schöner Sommertage – die ewige Frage, wie man leben soll.]]> 336 Nelio Biedermann 3737102260 Barbara 0 to-read 3.73 2025 Lázár
author: Nelio Biedermann
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Taiwan Travelogue 205363984
Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.]]> 298 Yáng Shuāng-zǐ 1644453150 Barbara 0 to-read 3.94 2020 Taiwan Travelogue
author: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> EU SOU CACHORRO 222439467 Baek Heena 6589173052 Barbara 0 to-read 4.00 2019 EU SOU CACHORRO
author: Baek Heena
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yoga 54869368 380 Emmanuel Carrère 281805138X Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.86 2020 Yoga
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Malária: Um romance (Portuguese Edition)]]> 248276567
Um romance original, com uma perspectiva não antropocêntrica, que une a potência das narrativas autobiográficas, a maestria da construção ficcional e a beleza da divulgação científica.]]> 162 Carmen Stephan 658483560X Barbara 0 to-read 3.31 2012 Malária: Um romance (Portuguese Edition)
author: Carmen Stephan
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Crush 213870131 When a husband asks his reluctant wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible

She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. 

Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.]]> 288 Ada Calhoun 0593832027 Barbara 0 to-read 2.88 2025 Crush
author: Ada Calhoun
name: Barbara
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Game Changer (Game Changers, #1)]]> 220965585 New York Admirals captain Scott Hunter takes his pre-game rituals very seriously. In this case, it’s not just a lucky smoothie he’s craving—it’s the man who made it.

Pro hockey star Scott Hunter knows a good thing when he sees it. So, when a smoothie made by juice bar barista Kip Grady precedes Scott breaking his on-ice slump, he’s desperate to recreate the magic...and to get to know the sexy, funny guy behind the counter.

Kip knew there was more to Scott’s frequent visits than blended fruit, but he never let himself imagine being invited back to Scott’s penthouse. Or kissed with reckless abandon, nevermind touched everywhere all at once. When it happens it’s red-hot, incredible and frequent, but also only on Scott’s terms and always behind his closed apartment doors.

Scott needs Kip in his life, but with playoff season approaching, the spotlight on him is suddenly brighter than ever. He can’t afford to do anything that might derail his career…like introducing the world to his boyfriend. Kip is ready to go all-in with Scott—but how much longer will he have to remain a secret?]]> 400 Rachel Reid 1488038678 Barbara 0 3.79 2018 Game Changer (Game Changers, #1)
author: Rachel Reid
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2026/05/10
date added: 2026/05/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mau hábito (Portuguese Edition)]]> 201249244 O romance do ano de 2023 na Espanha, que se tornou um fenômeno editorial mundial, alia o universo kitsch de Almodóvar a relato cru e poético.

 

Narrado em primeira pessoa, Mau hábito nos apresenta a vida de uma menina que vive em um corpo que está aprendendo a habitar. Acompanhamos a protagonista, desde sua infância em um bairro de trabalhadores devastado pela heroína na Madri dos anos 1980, até sua juventude nas noites clandestinas dos anos 1990. Drogados, divas pop e anjos caídos a acompanham nessa jornada, superando a cada passo a violência que encontram.

Inventora de um universo criativo único, em que convivem teatro, história clássica e ativismo, Alana S. Portero, mulher trans, faz sua estreia na ficção, com este romance deslumbrante que se tornou um fenômeno internacional mesmo antes de sua publicação.

Mau hábito é um romance cru e feroz, mas também poético, em que os extremos se encontram para revelar que o ressentimento e a raiva contra o sistema são importantes para sobreviver em uma sociedade que não aceita quem é diferente. É uma história fronteiriça, identitária e mágica, sobre como nos tornamos quem somos e como uma vida pode ser habitada entre mundos.

 

"Peço que você leia Mau hábito, de Alana S. Portero, para compreender inteiramente o grau de adversidade, dor e perigo enfrentado pelas pessoas que crescem trans." – Pedro Almodóvar

"A prosa adquire o peso da poesia no primeiro romance de Alana S. Portero, que narra as aprendizagens de uma mulher trans na Madri dos anos 1980." – El País

"Este delicado romance de formação, nascido do brilho e do asfalto, tem múltiplas facetas, e ilumina e preenche de nuances as vidas trans, [...] aproximando-as da experiência de qualquer pessoa." – Vanity Fair España]]> 201 Alana S. Portero 6585854063 Barbara 0 to-read 4.43 2023 Mau hábito (Portuguese Edition)
author: Alana S. Portero
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yesteryear 238226942
Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? Natalie knows just two things for sure: this isn't her perfect life, and she must escape, by any means possible.

As darkly funny as it is shocking and gripping, Yesteryear is an electrifying examination of tradition, fame, faith and the grand performance of womanhood, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.]]> 400 Caro Claire Burke Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.83 2026 Yesteryear
author: Caro Claire Burke
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Famesick 52545816 In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.

For the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, 'like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.' It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset. Or to the set of the hit show that you – as a twenty-five-year-old – are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to the White House, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster. But Dunham does it – even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her – because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition. All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again – if only she could remember who that self was.

As Dunham takes us through her journey, tracking her rise to fame – from selling the pilot of Girls to the present – in three acts, it becomes clear that the spotlight casts long shadows, distorting the relationships she once held dear and isolating everyone in its glare. When an endless supply of drugs can’t protect you from pain – and begins to control your every move – being famous doesn’t stand a chance against the darker corners of the human experience.

In Famesick, Dunham asks herself what the cost of fulfilling her dreams has really been, and whether it was worth it. What she finds is deeper than physical relief, and more lasting, as she learns to live with what she can’t change and turn her regrets into wisdom that can carry her forward, as she reconnects to what, and who, she loves.]]> 288 Lena Dunham 1460713052 Barbara 0 4.17 2026 Famesick
author: Lena Dunham
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/21
date added: 2026/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Floodlines 235791503
In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the rediscovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father’s legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize.

As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.

Spanning continents and decades—from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps—Floodlines is at once an intimate family drama and, in its scope, a modern epic. It is a rare novel that bridges the historic and the immediate and a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure.]]> 336 Saleem Haddad Barbara 0 to-read 4.10 2026 Floodlines
author: Saleem Haddad
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> After Sappho 61089551 What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.

It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her – the man she has been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name and, alongside it, her life.

1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted. But she is sure she can sell a painting – and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller – and fuller.

Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation, justice and control over their own lives.

Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Eileen Gray, Lina Poletti: these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic, furious and funny, After Sappho celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past – and offers hope for our present, and our futures.]]> 272 Selby Wynn Schwartz 1324092319 Barbara 0 to-read 3.45 2022 After Sappho
author: Selby Wynn Schwartz
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Hymn to Life 229290592
Four years later, he and fifty other men were put on trial and Gisèle’s courage in waiving her right to anonymity made global headlines. ‘Shame must change sides,’ she declared, giving voice and hope to millions. Her words became a rallying cry and her decision marked a turning point in public feeling about sexual violence.

For the first time, and with unwavering honesty and grace, she describes a difficult childhood, first love, her career and motherhood. It is a life in determined search of happiness, both before and after her devastating discovery. She is an ordinary person who faces extraordinary catastrophe, whose example changes the world.

Ultimately, Gisèle Pelicot emerges with a renewed passion and reverence for living, and for love. A Hymn to Life is an unforgettable testament and promise: that victims have no reason to feel ashamed; that even after unimaginable betrayal we can go on; and that colour will always return to life.]]> 8 Gisèle Pelicot Barbara 0 4.66 2026 A Hymn to Life
author: Gisèle Pelicot
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at: 2026/03/02
date added: 2026/03/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Sad Tiger 213341733 Winner of the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023 and the Strega Prize in 2024, the book that shook France to its core.

“Sad Tiger forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult.” (Annie Ernaux)

Like Annie Ernaux or Sheila Heti, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary autobiographical form.

Through its radical honesty, and also through its thoughtful interrogations into the nature of life and literature, Neige Sinno shares with her readers her journey from someone who considered her life to have been stolen from her to someone who over the twenty years that elapsed from her reporting the rape to writing this book, somehow got her life back, all without ever being able to erase or even change what had happened to her as a child.

“Reading Sad Tyger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

This international literary phenomenon—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger—is a forensic exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. Repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child, Neige Sinno tells of a family life built around lies and deception. She was seven or eight years old when her stepfather started abusing her. At fourteen or fifteen the abuse stopped. At nineteen, she decides to break her silence which leads to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno starts a new life in Mexico, far away from France.

It is through the craft of her narrative and her powerful direct analysis of the deep-seated taboo that Sinno explores the different facets of memory, her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. How do we become who we are? What remains unsaid in families? How is society implicated? This harrowing auto-fictional account of the author's sexual abuse as a child is mediated through analysis of various literary texts, including works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes.

In this unparalleled work that contains a thousand questions, a thousand jewel-like insights, there is an abiding how to protect others from the rape, the incest that she herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prizes, 2024
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023
Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Goncourt des Lyceens, 2023
Winner of the Femina Prize, 2023
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Medicis Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Decembre Prize, 2023]]> 198 Neige Sinno 1644214687 Barbara 5 4.40 2023 Sad Tiger
author: Neige Sinno
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2026/02/06
date added: 2026/02/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Tiger, Tiger 8979038
One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is fifty-one. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child's paradise of exotic pets and an elaborate backyard garden. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed by caring for Margaux, is grateful for the attention Peter lavishes on her, and he creates an imaginative universe for her, much as Lewis Carroll did for his real-life Alice.

In time, he insidiously takes on the role of Margaux's playmate, father, and lover. Charming and manipulative, Peter burrows into every aspect of Margaux's life and transforms her from a child fizzing with imagination and affection into a brainwashed young woman on the verge of suicide. But when she is twenty-two, it is Peter -- ill, and wracked with guilt -- who kills himself, at the age of sixty-six.

Told with lyricism, depth, and mesmerizing clarity, Tiger, Tiger vividly illustrates the healing power of memory and disclosure. This extraordinary memoir is an unprecedented glimpse into the psyche of a young girl in free fall and conveys to readers -- including parents and survivors of abuse -- just how completely a pedophile enchants his victim and binds her to him.]]> 336 Margaux Fragoso 0374277621 Barbara 0 to-read 3.77 2011 Tiger, Tiger
author: Margaux Fragoso
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> What I Know About You 206012667
In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek's entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family's strong women, he starts to do just that - until a patient's son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men's unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background.

The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time?

From Cairo's grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal's grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a famil]]> 224 Éric Chacour 1552454851 Barbara 0 to-read 4.05 2023 What I Know About You
author: Éric Chacour
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]]> 8520610 The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. 

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.]]> 333 Susan Cain 0307352145 Barbara 0 currently-reading 4.07 2012 Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
author: Susan Cain
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Son of Man 197239437 240 Jean-Baptiste Del Amo 0802160905 Barbara 0 to-read 3.89 2021 The Son of Man
author: Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> When Breath Becomes Air 25899336 This memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living?

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both—now with an epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi.]]> 208 Paul Kalanithi 0812988418 Barbara 5 4.42 2016 When Breath Becomes Air
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2026/01/23
date added: 2026/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Just Kids 206318521 Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.]]> 262 Patti Smith 006621131X Barbara 0 4.21 2010 Just Kids
author: Patti Smith
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2026/01/23
date added: 2026/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Wednesday's Child: Stories 83817692 A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.]]> 257 Yiyun Li 0374606382 Barbara 0 to-read 3.85 2023 Wednesday's Child: Stories
author: Yiyun Li
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> You Exist Too Much 41720140
Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people.

Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings: for love, and a place to call home.]]> 263 Zaina Arafat 1948226502 Barbara 0 to-read 3.59 2020 You Exist Too Much
author: Zaina Arafat
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 402 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.85 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Da próxima vez que você cair do cavalo]]> 236320543 169 Panayotis Pascot 6585960351 Barbara 5 3.67 2023 Da próxima vez que você cair do cavalo
author: Panayotis Pascot
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2026/01/05
date added: 2026/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Café Tangerinn 222177826 Uma história envolvente sobre família, identidade e pertencimento

Ideal para os fãs de A redoma de vidro e da Tetralogia Napolitana de Elena Ferrante

Mina tem trinta anos e vive em Londres. Quando deixou para trás sua família e a cidade natal na costa da Itália, ela acreditava que poderia ter a vida que sempre sonhou. No entanto, por trás das fotos perfeitas nas redes sociais, a verdade é que ela se sentia mais deslocada do que nunca.

Quando recebe a notícia da morte de seu pai, Omar, Mina volta à pequena cidade italiana onde cresceu. Lá, ela reencontra o Café Tangerinn, o bar à beira-mar que o pai — um imigrante marroquino muçulmano — mantinha para sustentar a família e acolher outros imigrantes como eles. Ao conversar com os antigos clientes do bar, Mina descobre novas histórias sobre o pai e, a partir daí, começa a entender melhor suas raízes e, principalmente, a si mesma.

Em uma narrativa ao mesmo tempo doce e mordaz, Café Tangerinn é um romance literário sobre os elos que unem uma família e a jornada de uma jovem em busca de seu lugar no mundo. A obra marca a notável estreia de Emanuela Anechoum, uma das vozes mais poderosas da nova literatura italiana.]]> 263 Emanuela Anechoum 6558302268 Barbara 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Café Tangerinn
author: Emanuela Anechoum
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Limonov 12151198 489 Emmanuel Carrère 2818014050 Barbara 0 to-read 4.13 2011 Limonov
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Things in Nature Merely Grow 221164555 Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

"There is no good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.

"There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both. Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home."

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a time line." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she doing "things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is 'to be.' Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.]]> 192 Yiyun Li 0374617317 Barbara 5 4.29 2025 Things in Nature Merely Grow
author: Yiyun Li
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/12/29
date added: 2025/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> O avesso da pele 54278521 Um romance sobre identidade e as complexas relações raciais, sobre violência e negritude, O avesso da pele é uma obra contundente no panorama da nova ficção literária brasileira.

O avesso da pele é a história de Pedro, que, após a morte do pai, assassinado numa desastrosa abordagem policial, sai em busca de resgatar o passado da família e refazer os caminhos paternos. Com uma narrativa sensível e por vezes brutal, Jeferson Tenório traz à superfície um país marcado pelo racismo e por um sistema educacional falido, e um denso relato sobre as relações entre pais e filhos.
O que está em jogo é a vida de um homem abalado pelas inevitáveis fraturas existenciais da sua condição de negro em um país racista, um processo de dor, de acerto de contas, mas também de redenção, superação e liberdade. Com habilidade incomum para conceber e estruturar personagens e de lidar com as complexidades e pequenas tragédias das relações familiares, Jeferson Tenório se consolida como uma das vozes mais potentes e estilisticamente corajosas da literatura brasileira contemporânea.


"Não é de graça que Tenório, além de autor premiado, é tão bem acolhido pelo público e pela crítica. Ele não faz turismo, safári social, na desgraça geral do país, não faz da crítica à desigualdade um truque, um atalho apelativo e barato, panfletário, para ter mais aceitação, reconhecimento. Estamos diante de um escritor que, correndo todos os riscos, sabe arquitetar uma boa trama e encantar o leitor. Por muitas vezes durante a leitura eu disse para mim mesmo: como ele consegue construir personagens tão reais e fáceis de serem amados? Eu agradeço, a literatura brasileira agradece." – Paulo Scott

"Através de um profundo mergulho em seus personagens, O avesso da pele consegue abordar as questões centrais da sociedade brasileira. E o mais potente nisso tudo é que, aqui, o real e as reflexões partem sempre de dentro pra fora." – Geovani Martins]]> 192 Jeferson Tenório 8535933395 Barbara 0 4.53 2020 O avesso da pele
author: Jeferson Tenório
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/12/23
date added: 2025/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Mother Mary Comes to Me 224004055 A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.]]> 331 Arundhati Roy 1668094711 Barbara 0 currently-reading 4.36 2025 Mother Mary Comes to Me
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/12/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Os Irmãos Karamazov I 15718311
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.]]> 395 Fyodor Dostoevsky Barbara 0 to-read 3.75 1879 Os Irmãos Karamazov I
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1879
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> People We Meet on Vacation 54985743 Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows without a doubt it was on that ill-fated final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?]]> 361 Emily Henry 1984806750 Barbara 0 to-read 3.83 2021 People We Meet on Vacation
author: Emily Henry
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Audition 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 197 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Barbara 0 3.25 2025 Audition
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/12/01
date added: 2025/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270 On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

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

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.]]> 176 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Barbara 0 3.68 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/11/30
date added: 2025/11/30
shelves:
review:

]]> The Charioteer 67699
Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.]]> 347 Mary Renault 0375714189 Barbara 0 to-read 4.10 1953 The Charioteer
author: Mary Renault
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flesh 214152261
A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.]]> 368 David Szalay 198212279X Barbara 4 3.64 2025 Flesh
author: David Szalay
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/11/21
date added: 2025/11/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Forbidden Notebook 61026364 Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante.

In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.

Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.

An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.]]> 288 Alba de Céspedes 1662601395 Barbara 1 4.24 1952 Forbidden Notebook
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1952
rating: 1
read at: 2025/10/22
date added: 2025/10/22
shelves:
review:

]]> All the Way to the River 223405886 Eat Pray Love inspired millions of readers to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery. A decade later, Big Magic empowered countless others to live their most creative lives. Now comes another landmark book—about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.

In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if the love of your life—and the person you most trusted in the world—became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance, or craving—and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.]]> 400 Elizabeth Gilbert 0593540980 Barbara 5 3.69 2025 All the Way to the River
author: Elizabeth Gilbert
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> A última filha 230791282 3 Fatima Daas Barbara 0 3.00 2020 A última filha
author: Fatima Daas
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/21
date added: 2025/09/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Filha 234466038 No interior do Rio Grande do Sul, a caçula de sete irmãos chega à adolescência e percebe que, para sobreviver, precisa escapar dali. Dezesseis anos mais tarde, ao receber a notícia da iminente morte do pai, decide voltar à cidade natal para um acerto de contas com o passado.

Numa cidade pequena do Rio Grande do Sul, Manu é uma jovem às vésperas da adolescência. Dentro e fora do ambiente doméstico, onde a masculinidade domina, ela percebe que ser mulher é uma condição que limita seu lugar no mundo – uma fonte de privação e angústia. Cedo a garota chega à conclusão de que precisa encontrar uma rota de fuga, de preferência bem longe dali.
Já adulta, morando em outra cidade, Manu recebe a notícia de que o pai está muito doente e decide visitá-lo. O retorno é um caminho por um lado, a força a se haver com mágoas do passado; por outro, oferece a chance de ressignificar uma relação marcada pela incompreensão, pelo silêncio e pela violência.
Neste romance com fortes tintas autobiográficas, Manoela Sawitzki joga luz sobre o processo de se tornar mulher, a delicadeza das dinâmicas familiares e o modo como o luto é capaz de reconfigurar vínculos.]]> 128 Manoela Sawitzki 8535940111 Barbara 0 to-read 3.75 2025 Filha
author: Manoela Sawitzki
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef]]> 220161223
The world of London’s fine dining restaurants is so much more than she imagined: It’s more challenging and more exciting, too. There are the exhausting lows of sixty-hour work weeks in windowless kitchens, and the shock of stepping into the changing room as the only woman. There are the thrilling highs of a busy night, when service is running smoothly; electrifying run-ins with hot bartenders and even hotter chefs; and, always, the exhilaration of cycling hands-free through a city that is still sleeping, on a morning where anything can happen.]]> 336 Slutty Cheff 1668070227 Barbara 0 3.39 Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef
author: Slutty Cheff
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.39
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/09/02
date added: 2025/09/02
shelves:
review:

]]> We Should All Be Feminists 22738563 We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.

With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike.

Argued in the same observant, witty and clever prose that has made Adichie a bestselling novelist, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman today—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.]]> 52 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Barbara 0 4.41 2012 We Should All Be Feminists
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Fundamentally 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Barbara 0 to-read 3.66 2025 Fundamentally
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Everything I Know About Love 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 Barbara 0 to-read 3.93 2018 Everything I Know About Love
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gene: Minha história de despersonalização]]> 238204577 76 Hannah Maruci 6559009068 Barbara 5 5.00 Gene: Minha história de despersonalização
author: Hannah Maruci
name: Barbara
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![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 Barbara 0 to-read 4.02 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories]]> 111126 Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

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

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.]]> 323 Alice Munro 0375727434 Barbara 0 to-read 4.06 2001 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives]]> 436255 247 Kennedy Fraser 0394585399 Barbara 0 to-read 4.03 1996 Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives
author: Kennedy Fraser
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Rosa Mais Vermelha Desabrocha: O Amor nos Tempos do Capitalismo Tardio ou por Que as Pessoas Se Apaixonam Tão Raramente Hoje em Dia]]> 57631208 Com muito humor e inteligência, e o título emprestado de um verso da poeta norte-americana Hilda Doolittle, A rosa mais vermelha desabrocha examina as engrenagens do amor nos tempos do capitalismo tardio. A partir de histórias como a de Sócrates, que traiu Alcibíades há mais de dois mil anos, ou a de Teseu, que abandonou a amada Ariadne de uma hora para outra na ilha de Naxos, e com a ajuda de Beyoncé, do filósofo Sören Kierkegaard, dos smurfs, da namorada alucinada de Lorde Byron, de Platão, de Jabba de Star Wars, e de outros especialistas na arte de amar, a artista sueca Liv Strömquist mais uma vez desconstrói mitos e se afirma como uma das quadrinistas mais relevantes da atualidade.]]> 176 Liv Strömquist 6557821741 Barbara 0 to-read 4.33 2019 A Rosa Mais Vermelha Desabrocha: O Amor nos Tempos do Capitalismo Tardio ou por Que as Pessoas Se Apaixonam Tão Raramente Hoje em Dia
author: Liv Strömquist
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Notes on Grief 57032570 Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.]]> 86 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593320808 Barbara 0 4.25 2021 Notes on Grief
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/21
date added: 2025/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Stay True 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Barbara 0 3.97 2022 Stay True
author: Hua Hsu
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/17
date added: 2025/06/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Blessings 159269939 'Chukwuebuka Ibeh's writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When Obiefuna's father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family's apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.

Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, BLESSINGS is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.]]> 246 Chukwuebuka Ibeh 0241998034 Barbara 0 to-read 4.10 2024 Blessings
author: Chukwuebuka Ibeh
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dream Count 219521090
In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 474 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.76 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> God Explained in a Taxi Ride 1230038 128 Paul Arden 0141032227 Barbara 0 to-read 3.64 God Explained in a Taxi Ride
author: Paul Arden
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dois irmãos 6931717
Dois irmãos é a história de como se constroem as relações de identidade e diferença nessa casa. Mas o lugar da família se estende ao espaço de Manaus, o porto à margem do rio Negro: a cidade e o rio, metáforas das ruínas e da passagem do tempo, acompanham o andamento do drama familiar.

O narrador busca a identidade de seu pai entre os homens da casa, entre os restos de outras histórias. Tenta reconstruir os cacos do passado, ora como testemunha, ora como quem ouviu e guardou, mudo, as histórias dos outros. Do seu canto, ele vê personagens que se entregam ao incesto, à vingança, à paixão desmesurada. Num jogo de inventar a memória, tenta transformá-la em ponto de convergência do passado. Sua fala nos mostra Halim, o pai, sempre à espera da decisão mais acertada diante dos abismos familiares: a desmedida dedicação de sua mulher ao filho preferido, Omar; o trauma de Yaqub, o filho que, adolescente, foi levado a se separar da família; a relação amorosa entre Rânia e seus irmãos. De Domingas, o que ele nos diz é que esta é uma mulher que não fez escolhas.

Em Dois irmãos os conflitos são alimentados pela rede de interditos no interior da família, e somente quando se passaram mais de trinta anos, quando quase todos já estão mortos, é que o narrador parece motivado a olhar para eles. Mas o relato que escreve — se é corroído pela dúvida e se dá todos os sinais de empenho em descobrir uma verdade qualquer — não parece amenizar o silêncio que o habita.

O romance de Milton Hatoum impressiona pela verticalidade e delicadeza na composição do enredo e dos personagens. Há um jogo minucioso com a linguagem cujo resultado é a impossibilidade de estabelecer um sentido prévio à narrativa. Esse sentido será, aos poucos, construído no próprio ato da leitura.]]> 292 Milton Hatoum Barbara 0 to-read 4.20 2000 Dois irmãos
author: Milton Hatoum
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nove Noites 9347578 Sessenta e dois anos depois, ao tomar conhecimento da história por acaso, num artigo de jornal, o narrador deste livro é levado a investigar de maneira obsessiva e inexplicada as razões do suicídio do antropólogo. Em sua busca obstinada pelas cartas do morto ou pelo testamento de um engenheiro que ficara amigo do antropólogo nos seus últimos meses de vida, o narrador é guiado por razões pessoais que não serão reveladas até o final do romance, mas que dizem respeito à sua experiência de criança na selva, à história e à morte de seu próprio pai.
Nove noites narra a descida ao coração das trevas empreendida pelo jovem expoente da antropologia americana, colega de Lévi-Strauss e aluno dileto de Ruth Benedict, às vésperas da Segunda Guerra. A história é contada em dois tempos, na tribo dos índios krahô (interior do sertão brasileiro) e na combinação progressiva entre a busca pelo testamento do engenheiro e a pesquisa que o narrador vai fazendo em arquivos, atrás das cartas do antropólogo e dos que o conheceram na época.
Para escrever o livro, Bernardo Carvalho travou contato com os Krahô, no Estado do Tocantins, e foi aos Estados Unidos em busca de documentos e pessoas que pudessem saber algo sobre o antropólogo.
A história de Buell Quain revela as contradições e os desejos de um homem sozinho numa terra estranha, confrontado com os seus próprios limites e com a alteridade mais absoluta, numa narrativa que faz referências aos romances de Joseph Conrad e aos relatos do escritor inglês Bruce Chatwin.]]> 152 Bernardo Carvalho 8535908617 Barbara 0 to-read 3.55 2002 Nove Noites
author: Bernardo Carvalho
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> O Filho Eterno 5504210 224 Cristovão Tezza 8501077887 Barbara 0 to-read 3.77 2007 O Filho Eterno
author: Cristovão Tezza
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Um defeito de cor 6262794 Livro que inspirou o samba enredo da Portela, no carnaval de 2024. A fascinante história de uma africana em busca do filho perdido que se tornou um clássico da literatura contemporânea. Um defeito de cor, de Ana Maria Gonçalves, é narrado de uma maneira original e pungente que prende a atenção da primeira à última página.

Vencedor do prestigioso Prêmio Casa de las Américas e incluído na lista da Folha de S.Paulo como o sétimo entre 200 livros mais importantes para entender o Brasil em seus 200 anos de independência, Um defeito de cor conta a saga de Kehinde, mulher negra que, aos oito anos, é sequestrada no Reino do Daomé, atual Benin, e trazida para ser escravizada na Ilha de Itaparica, na Bahia.

No livro, Kehinde narra em detalhes a sua captura, a vida como escravizada, os seus amores, as desilusões, os sofrimentos, as viagens em busca de um de seus filhos e de sua religiosidade. Além disso, mostra como conseguiu a sua carta de alforria e, na volta para a África, tornou-se uma empresária bem-sucedida, apesar de todos os percalços e aventuras pelos quais passou. A personagem foi inspirada em Luísa Mahin, que teria sido mãe do poeta Luís Gama e participado da célebre Revolta dos Malês, movimento liderado por escravizados muçulmanos a favor da Abolição.

Pautado em intensa pesquisa documental, Um defeito de cor é um retrato original e pungente da exploração e da luta de africanos na diáspora e de seus descendentes, durante oito décadas da formação da sociedade brasileira. O livro inspirou, em 2022, uma exposição homônima no Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), com curadoria de Amanda Bonan, Marcelo Campos e da própria Ana Maria Gonçalves.

"Um defeito de cor, da Ana Maria Gonçalves, é um [livro] que precisa ser colocado nas escolas. Ele me transformou." – Fábio Porchat.

"Escrito pela mineira Ana Maria Gonçalves, a obra, de leitura voraz, prende a atenção do leitor da primeira à última página." – Glamurama.

"Nesse livro, Ana Maria Gonçalves produz um corte plurissignificativo nos protocolos de representação do negro e da negrura na sociedade e na literatura brasileiras." – Leda Maria Martins, pesquisadora, ensaísta e professora aposentada da UFMG.

"Romance histórico da diáspora negra do Brasil. Apresenta-se como contraponto ao apagamento da história do povo negro. Primeiro épico antiescravagista da literatura brasileira." – Luiz Fernando Carvalho, diretor de cinema e TV.

"Com uma perspectiva feminina e moderna sobre um fenômeno que determina a vida brasileira até os dias de hoje, é um livro essencial para a compreensão do país." – Noemi Jaffe, escritora, professora e crítica literária.]]> 952 Ana Maria Gonçalves 8501071757 Barbara 0 to-read 4.73 2006 Um defeito de cor
author: Ana Maria Gonçalves
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Elogio da Sombra 29740705 75 Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 9896415862 Barbara 0 to-read 3.93 1933 Elogio da Sombra
author: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sociopath 176443093
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.]]> 368 Patric Gagne 166800318X Barbara 0 3.72 2024 Sociopath
author: Patric Gagne
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/23
date added: 2025/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lobster: And Other Things I’m Learning To Love]]> 140394138 Sunday Times bestselling Slug
'Funny, so smart and refreshingly honest' SARAH MILLICAN

'Hollie McNish's words always sweep me away' GIOVANNA FLETCHER

This book is written out of both hate and love for the world
As people, we are capable of both love and hate; amazement and disgust; fun and misery. So why do we live in a world that is constantly telling us to hate, both ourselves and others?

We are told to be repulsed by our own bodies, bodies that let us laugh and sweat and eat toast; to be ashamed of pleasure; to be embarrassed by fun.

In this collection, Hollie McNish brings her inimitable style to the question of what have been taught to hate, and if we might learn to love again.

'Never have we needed her more' STYLIST

'I've loved her work for years' JO BRAND

'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPEST]]> 480 Hollie McNish 0349726639 Barbara 0 to-read 4.40 Lobster: And Other Things I’m Learning To Love
author: Hollie McNish
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever…

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Barbara 4 3.71 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Love in Exile 60683642 ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human’

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.]]> 208 Shon Faye 0241605989 Barbara 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Love in Exile
author: Shon Faye
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> O parque das irmãs magníficas 58449477 Quando chegou à cidade de Córdoba para estudar na universidade, a autora argentina Camila Sosa Villada decidiu ir ao Parque Sarmiento durante a noite. Estava morta de medo, pensando que poderia se concretizar a qualquer momento o brutal veredito que havia escutado de seu pai: "Um dia vão bater nessa porta para me avisar que te encontraram morta, jogada numa vala". Para ele, esse era o único destino possível para um rapaz que se vestia de mulher.
Camila queria ver as famosas travestis do parque, e lá, diante daquelas mulheres e da difícil realidade a que são submetidas, foi imediatamente acolhida e sentiu, pela primeira vez em sua vida, que havia encontrado seu lugar de pertencimento no mundo.
O romance O parque da irmãs magníficas é isso tudo: um rito de iniciação, um conto de fadas ou uma história de terror, o retrato de uma identidade de grupo, um manifesto explosivo, uma visita guiada à imaginação da autora. Nestas páginas convergem duas facetas da comunidade trans, facetas que fascinam e repelem sociedades no mundo inteiro: a fúria travesti e a festa que há em ser travesti.]]> 242 Camila Sosa Villada 6555354089 Barbara 0 to-read 4.47 2019 O parque das irmãs magníficas
author: Camila Sosa Villada
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In the Dream House 43317482 251 Carmen Maria Machado 1644450038 Barbara 5 4.38 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

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

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Barbara 2 3.74 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 256 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Barbara 5 4.23 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:

]]> How to Kill Your Family 50224049 I have killed several people (some brutally, others calmly) and yet I currently languish in jail for a murder I did not commit.

When I think about what I actually did, I feel somewhat sad that nobody will ever know about the complex operation that I undertook. Getting away with it is highly preferable, of course, but perhaps when I’m long gone, someone will open an old safe and find this confession. The public would reel. After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily got on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.

When Grace Bernard discovers her absentee millionaire father has rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge, and sets about to kill every member of his family. Readers have a front row seat as Grace picks off the family one by one – and the result is as and gruesome as it is entertaining in this wickedly dark romp about class, family, love… and murder.

But then Grace is imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit.

Outrageously funny, compulsive and subversive, perfect for fans of Killing Eve and My Sister, the Serial Killer.]]> 355 Bella Mackie Barbara 0 to-read 3.48 2021 How to Kill Your Family
author: Bella Mackie
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mrs. S 63083089
In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.” Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.

That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite—an assured, authoritative paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless summer, their unspoken yearning blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer fades, a choice must be made.

Seductive, stylish, and disarmingly wry, K Patrick’s bold and revelatory debut smolders with the heat of summer as it explores the queer experience and the force of forbidden love.]]> 240 K. Patrick 1609458419 Barbara 0 to-read 3.58 2023 Mrs. S
author: K. Patrick
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Perfection 203200544 137 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 Barbara 0 to-read 3.70 2022 Perfection
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957 A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Barbara 0 to-read 4.04 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bellies 63028672 I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.]]> 368 Nicola Dinan 1335490884 Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.98 2023 Bellies
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Untamed 52129515 Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.]]> 333 Glennon Doyle 1984801252 Barbara 0 currently-reading 3.97 2020 Untamed
author: Glennon Doyle
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> I'm a Fan 60151826 I'm A Fan, a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal hetero-normative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

In this incredible debut, Sheena Patel announces herself as a vital new voice in literature, capable of rendering a range of emotions and visceral experiences on the page. Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour—Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.]]> 207 Sheena Patel Barbara 0 3.22 2022 I'm a Fan
author: Sheena Patel
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There]]> 215073599 Renting is a nightmare...

Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot. Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can't shake the sense that there's something not quite right about the place...

It's not just the humourless estate agent and nameless it's the chill that seeps through the draughty windows; the damp spreading from the cellar door; the way the organic fruit and veg never lasts as long as it should. And most of all, it's the upstairs neighbours, whose very existence makes peaceful coexistence very difficult indeed.

The longer Áine spends inside the flat - pretending to work from home; dissecting messages from the friends whose lives seem to have moved on without her - the less it feels like home. And as Áine fixates on the cracks in the ceiling, it becomes harder to ignore the cracks in her relationship with Elliott...

Brilliantly observed and darkly funny, I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a ghost story set in the rental crisis. A wonderfully clear-eyed portrait of loneliness, loss and belonging, it examines what it means to feel at home.]]> 288 Róisín Lanigan 0241668557 Barbara 0 to-read 3.33 2025 I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There
author: Róisín Lanigan
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Barbara 0 to-read 4.19 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Motherhood 36203362 How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.]]> 304 Sheila Heti 1627790772 Barbara 0 to-read 3.64 2018 Motherhood
author: Sheila Heti
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Arrangements in Blue 211772088 223 Amy Key 1787333892 Barbara 5 3.65 2023 Arrangements in Blue
author: Amy Key
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Childhood / Youth / Dependency]]> 50742897 370 Tove Ditlevsen Barbara 0 to-read 4.37 1971 Childhood / Youth / Dependency
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Cleopatra and Frankenstein 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

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

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

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 368 Coco Mellors 1635576814 Barbara 0 to-read 3.66 2022 Cleopatra and Frankenstein
author: Coco Mellors
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Deus na escuridão 212086577 240 MAE VALTER HUGO 6558302101 Barbara 0 to-read 4.09 2024 Deus na escuridão
author: MAE VALTER HUGO
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Barbara 5 3.39 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Disappoint Me 218153678 An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.]]> 320 Nicola Dinan 0593977874 Barbara 0 to-read 3.94 2025 Disappoint Me
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Changer : Méthode 58866741
É. L.

Édouard Louis est l’auteur de plusieurs livres autobiographiques. Il est également un des traducteurs de la poétesse canadienne Anne Carson.]]> 352 Édouard Louis 2021483045 Barbara 0 to-read 4.31 2021 Changer : Méthode
author: Édouard Louis
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> It Chooses You 11266880 PennySaver, the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the “Large leather Jacket, $10”? It seemed important to find out—or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.

Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.

Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July’s off-kilter honesty and deadpan humor, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.]]> 218 Miranda July 1936365014 Barbara 0 to-read 4.03 2011 It Chooses You
author: Miranda July
name: Barbara
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen, #1)]]> 212807260 Your table awaits at the Chibineko Kitchen, where a soul-nourishing meal in the company of the resident kitten will transport you back in time to reunite with departed loved ones—for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and The Midnight Library.

In a remote seaside town outside of Tokyo, Kotoko makes her way along a seashell path, lured by whispers of an enigmatic restaurant whose kagezen, or traditional meals offered in remembrance of loved ones, promise a reunion with the departed. When a gust of wind lifts off her hat, she sees running after it a young man who looks like her recently deceased brother. But it’s not her brother; it’s Kai, the restaurant’s young chef, who returns her hat and brings her to the tiny establishment, where he introduces her to Chibi, the resident kitten, and serves her steaming bowls of simmered fish, rice, and miso soup—the exact meal her brother used to cook for her. As she takes her first delicious bite, the gulls outside fall silent, the air grows hazy, and Kotoko begins a magical journey of last chances and new beginnings.]]> 192 Yuta Takahashi 0143138618 Barbara 0 to-read 3.99 2020 The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen, #1)
author: Yuta Takahashi
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English]]> 57693584
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?]]> 194 Noor Naga 164445081X Barbara 0 to-read 3.94 2022 If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
author: Noor Naga
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Vegetariana 42442340 176 Han Kang 8588808285 Barbara 0 3.73 2007 A Vegetariana
author: Han Kang
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Family Happiness 164409 271 Laurie Colwin 0060958979 Barbara 0 to-read 3.77 1982 Family Happiness
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Barbara
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>