Alicia's bookshelf: all

Alicia's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:32:26 -0700 60 Alicia's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Whore 373707 Whore is a searing look at the world's oldest profession and a confessional in the tradition of Sylvia Plath or John Berryman. "Cynthia," as the nameless narrator calls herself professionally, is a French-Canadian Catholic from the sticks who escapes her strict upbringing and stifling parents to move to Montreal as soon as she is old enough. One day she answers the ad of an escort agency, and quickly becomes compelled by her strange new calling. Visited by men including an Orthodox Jew cheating on his piety, a boorish Muslim with a deformed arm, a neverending parade of businessmen and fathers, and a young man whose youth and fitness disturbs her more than any of the rest of them, "Cynthia" delivers an unyielding, poetic, and deeply personal account of her whore's life.]]> 176 Nelly Arcan 0802170021 Alicia 0 to-read 3.31 2001 Whore

author: Nelly Arcan
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Passion According to G.H. 13082436 193 Clarice Lispector 0811219682 Alicia 0 2017 4.16 1964

author: Clarice Lispector
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at: 2017/06/19
date added: 2026/09/02
shelves: 2017
review:

]]> On Earth as it is Beneath 216684962 101 Ana Paula Maia 1917260105 Alicia 0 to-read 3.79 2017

author: Ana Paula Maia
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> She Who Remains 235788705 150 Rene Karabash 9533515740 Alicia 0 to-read 4.04 2018

author: Rene Karabash
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/21
shelves: to-read
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 Alicia 0 4.27 2026 London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/20
shelves: currently-reading, 2026, audiobook, nonfiction
review:

]]> The Crime of Sheila McGough 306600 The New York Times Book Review

The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.

An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.]]> 176 Janet Malcolm 0375704590 Alicia 0 to-read 3.61 1999

author: Janet Malcolm
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Foster 61206869 An international bestseller and one of The Times' "Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century," Claire Keegan's piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household--where everything is so well tended to--and this summer must soon come to an end.

Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan's great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.]]> 62 Claire Keegan 0802160158 Alicia 5 2026 4.36 2010 Foster

author: Claire Keegan
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/04
date added: 2026/08/04
shelves: 2026
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 118 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Alicia 0 2026 4.06 2021

author: Claire Keegan
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/03
date added: 2026/08/04
shelves: 2026
review:

]]> <![CDATA[So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't confuse it with the short story of the same name.

A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Alicia 0 3.94 2022 So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

author: Claire Keegan
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2026/07/29
date added: 2026/08/01
shelves: 2026, book-club, short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart]]> 15962 here.

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love. At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.

Iris is the only witness to the crime.

The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.]]> 416 Joyce Carol Oates 0452265819 Alicia 0 to-read 3.90 1990 Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/07/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Indecipherables 251241223 “Who do you think you are? Part Twilight Zone, part Mulholland Drive, Anne Hellman’s debut is a tantalizing detour into the uncanny.” —Stewart O’Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying

A pair of identical twins reconnect on a road trip where they realize they’re being stalked—by themselves—in this unsettling, imaginative tribute to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo

Meet Ava and Brin, identical twins on a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to Joshua Tree, in honor of their late mother. This is more than a pilgrimage—it’s a reunion after a year-long rift, after Ava almost died of a mysterious illness. From their first night on the road, the sisters encounter strangers who insist they’ve met them before—a waitress who is certain she served them a few days ago, a mechanic who shows Ava and Brin a picture of themselves driving a different car from earlier that day.

Ava and Brin realize that another pair of twins, seemingly identical to them in name and appearance, are stalking them. The cat-and-mouse game between the four identical women quickly devolves into something sinister and supernatural as the lines between them begin to blur. Doppelgängers, prophetic hallucinations, an unwavering fog—what do these shadow twins want? And what are Ava and Brin hiding?

The Indecipherables is a fever dream of a debut novel, a journey into the weird and uncanny, and an exploration of what horrors arise when we keep secrets from those we love—and from ourselves.]]> 272 Anne Hellman Alicia 0 2026, my-covers 2.82 2027 The Indecipherables

author: Anne Hellman
name: Alicia
average rating: 2.82
book published: 2027
rating: 0
read at: 2026/07/13
date added: 2026/07/13
shelves: 2026, my-covers
review:

]]> Cloud Six 249585023 Surprise, you’re dead! This hilarious and moving novel follows a couple forced into unthinkable challenges when, after dying in a plane crash, they find themselves in the lowest tier of heaven, filled with laughter and dread, fear and acceptance, and family bonds even death can't break.

Following a catastrophic plane crash, married couple Mam and Bunko have found themselves in Cloud Six. It's the newest, and lowest, tier of heaven, run by a slumlord demon named Widdershins who takes the form of an underwear model. With a rabbit skeleton as their guide, the pair do their best to remain hopeful and together in their to navigate the strangest of places, to find help, and to catch even one glimpse of the teen daughter they left behind.

While Mam and Bunko try to accept their fate, Widdershins navigates workplace politics and tries to impress an ex lover. And Amy, who appears in the book as our guide and scribe, grapples with how to tell an honest story with Satan breathing down her neck.

Cloud Six is Amy Fusselman at her most original and heartfelt, offering a blistering yet humorous take on the many trials of contemporary life, including parenting, substance abuse, depression, gun violence, and climate change.]]> 224 Amy Fusselman 1646223489 Alicia 0 to-read 4.15 2026 Cloud Six

author: Amy Fusselman
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/07/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Infinite Jest 75786 A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie—as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel.

On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1079 David Foster Wallace 0316066524 Alicia 5 4.30 1996 Infinite Jest

author: David Foster Wallace
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2015/12/31
date added: 2026/06/30
shelves: 2015, favorites, reread, 2026, currently-reading
review:
I once heard this book referred to as an "empathy handbook." this is true. it's too hard to write about right now, I know that I need to read it at least two more times before I can fully organize my thoughts and write well about IJ. right now I'll just say that this book made me cry on public transportation, and that feels really big, but also somehow really small. reading David Foster Wallace reminds me that I am small. not in a belittling way, more humbling I guess. we are all so small but still important, every single person, every god damn one of us.
]]> Notes from the Henhouse 150085712 'This book is heaven. Elspeth Barker writes like no one else'
OLIVIA LAING

'Deserves to be permanently on the bedside table - to cheer, reassure and inspire'
OBSERVER

'Gothic, poetic and exuberantly funny. What a pleasure it was to read'
ESTHER FREUD

'Joyous, startling, funny, lush, dark and complex'
THE TIMES

In Notes from the Henhouse, you will

A Gothic castle, a draughty Norfolk farmhouse and a malevolent Aga

A pet pig, Portia with a penchant for drama, an obsession with geraniums and an addiction to wine (the Bulgarian vintage)

George Barker, poet and beloved husband, warbling cowboy songs into his glass and declaiming Hopkins and Houseman in The Drinking Room

Five entrancing baby cherubimos, rolling and bouncing about in a big brass bed, before growing up at breakneck speed

The ecstasy of writing, the dither of procrastination, and the endless adventures to be had in the wild realms of the imagination

The outrage of death, the loneliness of widowhood, and then the surprising joys of of moving very slowly round the garden in a shapeless coat, planting drifts of narcissus bulbs for latter springs.

This collection of autobiographical essays from the inimitable Elspeth Barker, author of the beloved modern classic O Caledonia, is a delightful portrait of a riotous, rapturous, remarkable life.]]> 229 Elspeth Barker 1399612514 Alicia 0 2026, nonfiction, essays 3.93 Notes from the Henhouse

author: Elspeth Barker
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/30
date added: 2026/06/30
shelves: 2026, nonfiction, essays
review:

]]> The Count of Monte Cristo 7126 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Alicia 0 4.31 1846 The Count of Monte Cristo

author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1846
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/30
shelves: currently-reading, 2026, with-eric
review:

]]> Women Without Men 249010547
Drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur’s unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. It is still as pertinent and discerning today as it was when travelling secretly from hand to hand upon its first publication in 1989.]]> 128 Shahrnush Parsipur 0241792517 Alicia 0 to-read 3.65 1973 Women Without Men

author: Shahrnush Parsipur
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter 239779283 A tender, moving, and insightful account of queer motherhood and an interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described “ugly” woman

Ugly is a word with fangs that can kill a woman’s self-esteem in one bite. Edicts about how women should look, behave, and think are the brutal forge through which they are made — not born. And to defy the pretty imperative is to become invisible. It can be a hard thing to admit to yourself, let alone to your child— to say the words, “I am ugly,” or “I am seen as ugly.” But early on in her motherhood journey, watching her young daughter begin to wrestle with beauty standards, Stephanie Fairyington felt compelled to face her own demons, to unpack her own ugly self-perception, one that she could trace to her own childhood, in order to conquer this seemingly immoveable frontier, far too taboo even among women to broach—the ways in which women’s lives are unfairly contoured by the nature of their looks.

The multiple iterations of ugliness that Fairyington saw in her young self—her physical appearance, her unavoidably obvious queerness, and her dissonant gender expression—are not present in her beautiful and traditionally feminine daughter. But Fairyington’s old feelings of inadequacy take on new meaning as she confronts fresh insecurities around her role as the non-biological mother in her relationship, exacerbating wounds from a lifetime of being treated from the poverty of her genetic inheritance to questions about her parentage to doubts about the legitimacy of her family.

Interlacing cultural history and analysis with memoir, Ugly is a probing investigation into cultural norms and the formation of our aesthetic sense of self. Fairyington contrasts her so-called ugliness with her daughter’s attraction and adherence to beauty ideals, a tender and tenuous condition that by age seven she was already walking a tightrope to maintain. By sharing the history of her troubled self-image, Fairyington invites us to go rogue, to invent a new language and logic to overthrow all the ways that women have been cultivated to hate themselves.]]> 288 Stephanie Fairyington 0593701887 Alicia 0 to-read 3.80 Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter

author: Stephanie Fairyington
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith – Moving Essays on Chronic Illness, Recovery and Healing]]> 234878152 "It’s a blessing to live while Darcey Steinke is writing." — Maggie Nelson
"A work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth... absolutely beautiful." — Elizabeth Gilbert
Darcey Steinke, acclaimed author of Flash Count Diary and Suicide Blonde, explores the world of pain for those who suffer and those who love them.

Steinke gets to the heart of pain with her usual brilliance, humor, candor, and empathy. In chapters that trace the body—The Spine, The Heart, The Knees, and more—she introduces sufferers to new and ancient understandings of pain through history, philosophy, religion, pop culture, and reported human experience. Leaving no stone unturned, Steinke takes readers under the knife, through the archives, and across oceans. She interviews working physicians, analyzes the writings of Frida Kahlo, recounts her own back surgery, and journeys to Lourdes, where she finds herself invited to participate in the famed pilgrimage site's rituals.

For readers of Joan Didion, C. S. Lewis, Sheila Heti, and Leslie Jamison, This Is the Door beautifully illuminates the experience of pain and its myriad effects on the body, mind, and soul. Whether you are hurting or know someone who is, whether your pain is somatic or spiritual, This Is the Door is a revelation.]]> 288 Darcey Steinke 0063289164 Alicia 0 to-read 3.81 This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith – Moving Essays on Chronic Illness, Recovery and Healing

This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith – Moving Essays on Chronic Illness, Recovery and Healing

author: Darcey Steinke
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Nature Seed: How to Raise Adventurous and Nurturing Kids]]> 56646774
'A valuable practical guide to helping children form a kinship with nature' Independent

Many of us want to spend more time outside with our kids - but what do we do when we're there, and why is a connection to nature so important and wonderful anyway?

The Nature Seed is a practical and philosophical guide for anyone with children in their lives. Full of the wonders of sharing the natural world with young minds, it's a manual for finding awe in the cracks of the pavement and magic on a stroll around the block.

Whether on an urban walk or in an inner-city park, out in the woods or by the sea, Lucy weaves together stories of how a connection to nature helps children thrive, and Ken draws on his time working with kids outdoors to give you creative, easy and free child-led activities to deepen that connection, from wild art to simple fires, potions, foraging and make-believe.

Wherever you live, The Nature Seed offers a radical vision of a new kinship with nature, one that will help all of us expand, nurture and deepen our wild life.]]> 240 Lucy Jones 178816797X Alicia 0 to-read 4.05 The Nature Seed: How to Raise Adventurous and Nurturing Kids

The Nature Seed: How to Raise Adventurous and Nurturing Kids

author: Lucy Jones
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]> 310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Alicia 0 to-read 4.34 2023 Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

author: Lucy Jones
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild]]> 52379364
Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland's primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Urgent and uplifting, Losing Eden is a rallying cry for a wilder way of life - for finding asylum in the soil and joy in the trees - which might just help us to save the living planet, as well as ourselves, from a future of ecological grief.]]> 256 Lucy Jones 0241425158 Alicia 0 to-read 4.04 2020 Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

author: Lucy Jones
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Children's Bach 83817408
follows Dexter and Athena Fox, a husband and wife who live with their two sons in the inner suburbs of early-1980s Melbourne. Dexter is gregarious, opinionated, and old fashioned. Athena is a dutiful wife and mother, stoic yet underestimated. Though their son’s disability strains the family at times, they appear to lead otherwise happy lives.

But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces, she and her cast of beguiling companions reveal another world to Dexter and Athena: a bohemian underground, unbound by routine and driven by desire, where choice seems to exist independent of consequence. And as Athena delves deeper into this other kind of life, the tenuous bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Painted on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, is “a jewel” among Garner’s revered catalog (Ben Lerner), a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.]]> 176 Helen Garner 0553387413 Alicia 0 to-read 3.53 1984 The Children's Bach

author: Helen Garner
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Monkey Grip 157981753
The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.
Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to ween herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.
When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.
A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.]]> 352 Helen Garner 0553387456 Alicia 0 to-read 3.52 1977

author: Helen Garner
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> So Late in the Day 73936042
From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan's new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.]]> 64 Claire Keegan 0571382010 Alicia 0 to-read 3.94 2022 So Late in the Day

author: Claire Keegan
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anarchist Who Shared My Name]]> 39022072 The Anarchist Who Shared My Name elegantly captures the life of a man who sought to resist political injustice and paid the ultimate price for his protest. Martín Sánchez's thrilling tale is the unsettling chronicle of a dark chapter in Spanish history, as courageous as it is timely.]]> 573 Pablo Martín Sánchez 1941920721 Alicia 0 to-read 4.34 2012 The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

author: Pablo Martín Sánchez
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> Hens Dancing 357036
While Venetia’s life may not be as glamorous as the one she left behind in the city ten years ago, it certainly isn’t dull. She has two exuberant young boys and one splendid baby girl–known simply as The Beauty–to feed and outfit and keep happy. Other responsibilities include upkeep of a lovely but ramshackle old house, complete with a garden growing with wild abandon, and the care of a variety of bloomered bantam hens. Then there’s her mother, sometimes helpful and supportive but more often busy tossing back vodka and smoking cigarettes; a rather cute but presumptuous bathroom contractor and his oversexed Labrador; and various other friends, relations and country characters who dart in and out of Venetia’s life, wreaking havoc along the way.

Fortunately for her, Venetia is the sort who can find beauty in the surrounding mayhem, and fortunately for us, she records it all with wry wit and great verve, sharing the joys and sometimes dubious pleasures of raising a family in the English countryside.]]> 288 Raffaella Barker 038572182X Alicia 0 to-read 3.92 1999 Hens Dancing

author: Raffaella Barker
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/06/02
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]]> O Caledonia 60321053 In the tradition of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a darkly humorous modern classic of Scottish literature about a doomed adolescent growing up in the mid-20th century—featuring a new introduction by Maggie O’Farrell, award-winning author of Hamnet.

Janet lies murdered beneath the castle stairs, attired in her mother’s black lace wedding dress, lamented only by her pet jackdaw…

Author Elspeth Barker masterfully evokes the harsh climate of Scotland in this atmospheric gothic tale that has been compared to the works of the Brontës, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edward Gorey. Immersed in a world of isolation and loneliness, Barker’s ill-fated young heroine Janet turns to literature, nature, and her Aunt Lila, who offers brief flashes of respite in an otherwise foreboding life. People, birds, and beasts move through the background in a tale that is as rich and atmospheric as it is witty and mordant. The family’s motto—Moriens sed Invictus (Dying but Unconquered)—is a well-suited epitaph for wild and courageous Janet, whose fierce determination to remain steadfastly herself makes her one of the most unforgettable protagonists in contemporary literature.]]> 188 Elspeth Barker 1668004615 Alicia 0 to-read 3.89 1991 O Caledonia

author: Elspeth Barker
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them]]> 62991302
Since first domesticating the chicken thousands of years ago, humans have become exceptionally adept at raising them for food. Yet most people rarely interact with chickens or know much about them. In Under the Henfluence, culture reporter Tove Danovich explores the lives of these quirky, mysterious birds who stole her heart the moment her first box of chicks arrived at the post office.

From a hatchery in Iowa to a chicken show in Ohio to a rooster rescue in Minnesota, Danovich interviews the people breeding, training, healing, and, most importantly, adoring chickens. With more than 60 billion chickens killed every year on industrial farms around the world, they’re easy to dismiss as just another dinner ingredient. Yet Danovich’s reporting reveals the hidden cleverness, quiet sweetness, and irresistible personalities of these birds, as well as the complex human-chicken relationship that has evolved over centuries. This glimpse into the lives of backyard chickens doesn’t just help us to understand chickens better—it also casts light back on ourselves and what we’ve ignored throughout the explosive growth of industrial agriculture. Woven with delightful and sometimes heartbreaking anecdotes from Danovich’s own henhouse, Under the Henfluence proves that chickens are so much more than what they bring to the table.]]> 232 Tove Danovich 1572843217 Alicia 0 2026, memoir, nonfiction 4.14 2023 Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them

Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them

author: Tove Danovich
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2026/05/27
date added: 2026/05/29
shelves: 2026, memoir, nonfiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage]]> 231108670 It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.

In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.

With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.]]> 256 Belle Burden 0593733312 Alicia 0 4.02 2026 Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

author: Belle Burden
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143
Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 Alicia 0 to-read 4.07 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain

author: James Baldwin
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1953
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]]> 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 Alicia 5 2026, favorites 3.83 2026

author: Caro Claire Burke
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2026
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/13
date added: 2026/05/13
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]]> <![CDATA[The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies]]> 205363941 A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.

On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.” On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.”

Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.]]> 176 Deborah Levy 0374614970 Alicia 0 to-read 3.50 2023 The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies

The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies

author: Deborah Levy
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.50
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]]> A Strange and Sublime Address 1191831 208 Amit Chaudhuri 043412348X Alicia 0 to-read 3.75 1991

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1991
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]]> <![CDATA[A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 185079601
“They met in ordinary ways,” writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, “a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend’s casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.”

Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant.

Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather. Mark Twain publishes Grant’s memoirs; W. E. B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography.

Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James’s, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring ; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1967.

The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists.]]> 416 Rachel Cohen 1681378108 Alicia 0 to-read 4.25 2004 A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review Books Classics)

A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review Books Classics)

author: Rachel Cohen
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2004
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]]> Famesick 250850098 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.]]> 12 Lena Dunham Alicia 0 4.05 2026 Famesick

author: Lena Dunham
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.05
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]]> <![CDATA[Body Songs: A Memoir of Long Covid, Chronic Illness, and Unconventional Recovery]]> 251239412 A luminous, searching memoir of illness, uncertainty, and the strange, intimate work of healing

In 2022, Emma Zimmerman contracted COVID-19. What she expected to be a mild illness instead unraveled into something far more a cascade of persistent, inexplicable symptoms that reshaped her days and her sense of self. Almost overnight, she found herself living inside the reality of chronic illness—adrift in a body she no longer recognized.

What followed was a year of searching. Emma moved through doctors’ offices and online forums, through diagnoses and dead ends, through the uneasy terrain between conventional medicine and alternative treatments. Along the way, she began to ask harder questions—not only about what was happening to her body, but about how we understand illness in the first place.

Body Songs traces that journey. Anchored in Emma’s own experience with long Covid and enriched by conversations with clinicians, researchers, and fellow patients, it is less a guide than a with the limits of certainty, the porous boundary between mind and body, and the stories we tell about what makes us sick—or well.

At the heart of the book is Emma’s encounter with the neuroplastic approach—a treatment model predicated on the understanding that the brain itself can shape the body’s experience of pain and illness. But rather than offering easy answers, she approaches this terrain with curiosity and care, weaving together personal narrative with the voices and perspectives she gathers along the way.

Vivid, lyrical, and deeply felt, Body Songs is an exploration of what it means to live inside a body in flux. It is a story of disruption and return, of doubt and attention, and of the quiet, radical act of learning to listen—to the body, to the mind, and to the meanings we make of both.]]> Emma Zimmerman 0593994280 Alicia 0 to-read 5.00 Body Songs: A Memoir of Long Covid, Chronic Illness, and Unconventional Recovery

Body Songs: A Memoir of Long Covid, Chronic Illness, and Unconventional Recovery

author: Emma Zimmerman
name: Alicia
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]]> Transcription 231387262 From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.]]> 144 Ben Lerner 0374618593 Alicia 0 to-read 3.81 2026

author: Ben Lerner
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.81
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]]> <![CDATA[Good and Evil and Other Stories]]> 222683966 A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales from the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature winner and three-time Booker finalist, Samanta Schweblin.

Once a decade a story collection rips a hole in the sky and we remember how it feels to have a spell cast upon us. From Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son to the earthquake stories of Haruki Murakami, these books are often short, but unforgettable. Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil is such a book. Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these six stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life—ourselves.

In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring, to go home to her family, only to wish she could go back. In another, a sorrowful father finds himself unable to communicate with his son after a life-changing misfortune occurs under his supervision. In yet another, a dying woman calls a friend she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years—not since an accident which forever changed them both.

Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection—but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive.

Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin’s worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river’s current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream.]]> 192 Samanta Schweblin 0593803108 Alicia 0 to-read 3.70 2025 Good and Evil and Other Stories

author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
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]]> Rottenheart 246554055 Revenge me. For I am murdered . . .

Odette and Cecilia are young women, living between their grand homes in Hampstead and the imposing, ancient Herne House in Suffolk. Though Odette's artist mother Lydia keeps a tight grasp on her, she and her beloved Cecilia are mostly left free to roam, to learn and to love.

But when Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. As the funeral rites are performed, Odette's aunt, the cold and implacable Claudine, increasingly takes charge of the household, while her father retreats to his study. Odette, lost in grief, disappears into the shadows.

But as Claudine is announced as Odette's new stepmother, a sinister presence in the house makes itself known. To her horror, Odette realises that despite her death, Lydia never really left. And now she wants revenge . . .

Inspired by Hamlet, the ultimate revenge tragedy, Rottenheart is the stunning new sapphic gothic horror novel from Kat Dunn, the lauded author of Hungerstone and Bitterthorn. Set in the 1890s, this a story of love and grief, mothers and daughters, death and madness.]]> 320 Kat Dunn 1638934657 Alicia 0 2025, my-covers 3.73 2026 Rottenheart

author: Kat Dunn
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at: 2025/10/06
date added: 2026/05/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City]]> 233411662 From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.]]> 336 Kate Brown 1324105836 Alicia 0 to-read 4.24 Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

author: Kate Brown
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.24
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]]> <![CDATA[Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith]]> 62039161
Grammy Award–winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.

He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation. He was always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”

In Cosmic Scholar , the Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to his life in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture. He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy or sober.

Exhaustively researched, energetically told, and complete with a trove of images, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue canonization of an American icon.

Includes black-and-white and color images]]> 416 John F. Szwed 0374282242 Alicia 0 to-read 4.23 Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

author: John F. Szwed
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.23
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]]> In the Land of Pain 110988
In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (“This is the one-man-band of pain”) and his treatments (“Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath”); about his fears and reflections (“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my science”); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (“Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners”); and about the “clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.”

Given Barnes’s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.]]> 112 Alphonse Daudet 0375414851 Alicia 0 to-read 3.88 1929 In the Land of Pain

author: Alphonse Daudet
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1929
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]]> <![CDATA[The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness]]> 58574423 A landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases

A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.

Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color.

Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

]]> 324 Meghan O'Rourke 1594633797 Alicia 0 currently-reading 4.01 2022 The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

author: Meghan O'Rourke
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
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]]> <![CDATA[Little Apocalypses: Essays on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World]]> 238740272
In this collection of beautifully crafted essays, Kaitlyn Teer—herself the mother of two young children—blends personal narrative, cultural analysis, and wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary research to offer new ways for readers to think more deeply and more hopefully about the radical possibilities of caregiving to bring a more just and sustainable future into being. In “World Without End” Teer examines the apocalyptic rhetoric that shapes our understanding of the climate crisis and shows us where to find new stories that can shape our imaginations of what’s still possible. In “Mother of All Messes” Teer considers the pressures to perform green motherhood and calls for refocusing efforts to collective action on for mutual flourishing. Teer’s writing overflows with love for her children, her community, and the natural world, and offers an invitation to face the uncertain future with curiosity and imagination.

A thoughtful and eye-opening look at the power of caregiving in crisis, Little Apocalypses is a call to action—an invitation to parents to become active participants in carving a different path forward for all of us, our children, and our planet.]]> 304 Kaitlyn Teer 0063440229 Alicia 0 to-read 4.31 Little Apocalypses: Essays on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World

Little Apocalypses: Essays on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World

author: Kaitlyn Teer
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.31
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]]> <![CDATA[Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Economics]]> 23206098 240 Katrine Marçal 1846275644 Alicia 0 to-read 3.62 2012

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Economics

author: Katrine Marçal
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601
Now you can read her award-winning story. Candid and entertaining, Wynn-Williams’ account pulls back the curtain on Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the global elite. She exposes the true cost of Silicon Valley’s ambition, from outrageous schemes cooked up on private jets to the alarming consequences of Facebook’s aggressive pursuit of global dominance.

Careless People is an ordinary woman's gripping and darkly funny memoir that will forever change how you view the technology that runs our lives – and the unchecked power of those who control it.]]> 382 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Alicia 0 4.10 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/01
date added: 2026/04/10
shelves: 2026, audiobook, book-club, memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain]]> 50021854 A groundbreaking mind-body protocol to heal chronic pain, backed by new research.Chronic pain is an epidemic. Fifty million Americans struggle with back pain, headaches, or some other pain that resists all treatment. Desperate pain sufferers are told again and again that there is no cure for chronic pain.Alan Gordon, a psychotherapist and the founder of the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, was in grad school when he started experiencing chronic pain and it completely derailed his life. He saw multiple doctors and received many diagnoses, but none of the medical treatments helped. Frustrated with conventional pain management, he developed Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a mind-body protocol that eliminated his own chronic pain and has transformed the lives of thousands of his patients.PRT is rooted in neuroscience, which has shown that while chronic pain feels like it's coming from the body, in most cases it's generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain. PRT is a system of psychological techniques that rewires the brain to break out of the cycle of chronic pain.The University of Colorado-Boulder recently conducted a large randomized controlled study on PRT, and the results are remarkable. By the end of the study, the majority of patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free. What's more, these dramatic changes held up over time. The Way Out brings PRT to readers. It combines accessible science with a concrete, step-by-step plan to teach sufferers how to heal their own chronic pain.]]> 224 Alan Gordon 0593086848 Alicia 0 currently-reading 4.38 2020 The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain

The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain

author: Alan Gordon
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/09
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet]]> 123627807 Eager. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat. Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania’s car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities. Today, as our planet’s road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world―and how we can create a better future for all living beings. 20 illustrations

A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and Editors' Choice • A Science News Favorite Book of 2023 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 • A Smithsonian Staff Favorite of 2023 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 • Finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism • Finalist for the Reading the West Award • Finalist for the Colorado Book Award • Winner of the Banff Mountain Book Competition in Environmental Literature • Winner of the Sierra Club's Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing ]]> 384 Ben Goldfarb 1324005890 Alicia 0 to-read 4.42 2023 Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

author: Ben Goldfarb
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/08
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]]> Is a River Alive? 218569826 Underland delivers a revelatory book that transforms how we look at the natural world—and life itself.

Hailed as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler” (Holly Morris, New York Times), Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reporting, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, which flows through his own years and days. Powered by Macfarlane’s dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.]]> 384 Robert Macfarlane 0393242137 Alicia 0 to-read 4.14 2025

author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> Arctic Dreams 16878
This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing.

The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forest, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of the indigenous people, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, beguilement, and wonder.

Written in prose as memorably pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.]]> 464 Barry Lopez 0375727485 Alicia 0 to-read 4.24 1986

author: Barry Lopez
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays]]> 61061662
An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020, following a summer wildfire that consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it--a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he'd long warned.

At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez's legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. And we witness poignant returns to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the wild McKenzie River. In prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and--as he has done throughout his career--with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.

With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez's keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.]]> 11 Barry Lopez Alicia 0 currently-reading 4.40 2022

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

author: Barry Lopez
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life]]> 28014216
Moving to America in 2008, Finnish journalist Anu Partanen quickly went from confident, successful professional to wary, self-doubting mess. She found that navigating the basics of everyday life—from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare—was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first, she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to a freewheeling new culture. But as she got to know Americans better, she discovered they shared her deep apprehension. To understand why life is so different in the U.S. and Finland, Partanen began to look closely at both.

In The Nordic Theory of Everything, Partanen compares and contrasts life in the United States with life in the Nordic region, focusing on four key relationships—parents and children, men and women, employees and employers, and government and citizens. She debunks criticism that Nordic countries are socialist “nanny states,” revealing instead that it is we Americans who are far more enmeshed in unhealthy dependencies than we realize. As Partanen explains step by step, the Nordic approach allows citizens to enjoy more individual freedom and independence than we do.

Partanen wants to open Americans’ eyes to how much better things can be—to show her beloved new country what it can learn from her homeland to reinvigorate and fulfill the promise of the American dream—to provide the opportunity to live a healthy, safe, economically secure, upwardly mobile life for everyone. Offering insights, advice, and solutions, The Nordic Theory of Everything makes a convincing argument that we can rebuild our society, rekindle our optimism, and restore true freedom to our relationships and lives.]]> 448 Anu Partanen 0062316567 Alicia 0 to-read 3.84 2016 The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

author: Anu Partanen
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990]]> 222033782 A sweeping chronicle of four years in 1980s New York, a crucible that would transform the city and leave it more divided than ever—a rollicking, real-life Bonfire of the Vanities featuring larger-than-life personalities of Donald Trump, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, and countless others

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events—involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters—would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. Jimmy Breslin. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire—the tabloids. In The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these convulsive, defining years.

The Gods of New York is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for Could it be both the great working-class city, lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the very systems intended to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.]]> 451 Jonathan Mahler 052551063X Alicia 0 to-read 4.28 2025 The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990

The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990

author: Jonathan Mahler
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood]]> 222376602 From the bestselling and award-winning nature writer Adam Nicolson, a glorious new adventure into the British wilderness.

By Adam Nicolson’s home, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is passed through by deer, wild boar and many birds – nightingales who sing in the evening, a cuckoo, turtle doves, pheasants, robins, owls. A couple of years ago, he deicide to embark on an attempt to redress his ignorance, to encounter birds, to engage with this marvellous layer of life he had so far looked past. He wanted to look and listen, to return to ‘bird school’ and see what it might teach him.

This gorgeous book is the result, tracing Adam’s adventure setting up a small shed on the edge of the field and getting to know the where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things. It beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and emotion. Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, and exposes our relationship as people with the wild.]]> 448 Adam Nicolson 0374617376 Alicia 0 to-read 3.95 2025 Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood

author: Adam Nicolson
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?]]> 6763725 81 Mark Fisher 1846943175 Alicia 0 to-read 4.20 2009

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

author: Mark Fisher
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power]]> 37133029 Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

]]> 96 Byung-Chul Han 1784785784 Alicia 0 to-read 4.07 2014 Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

author: Byung-Chul Han
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1)]]> 211721806 The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series—now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

Includes part one of the exclusive bonus story “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret.”]]> 450 Matt Dinniman 059382024X Alicia 0 to-read 4.36 2020 Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1)

Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1)

author: Matt Dinniman
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States]]> 40121985 A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire," exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories--the islands, atolls, and archipelagos--this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century's most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of space. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.]]> 513 Daniel Immerwahr 0374172145 Alicia 0 4.45 2019 How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

author: Daniel Immerwahr
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Alicia 0 2026, audiobook, nonfiction 4.47 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2026/03/07
date added: 2026/03/07
shelves: 2026, audiobook, nonfiction
review:

]]> East of Eden 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Alicia 5 favorites, 2026
—

Absolutely the greatest book I've ever read. Makes me think that everything is going to be okay (timshel). Have already read it twice, more than likely going to reread it many times throughout my life—like revisiting an old friend but having a new conversation with them each time. (2014)]]> 4.44 1952 East of Eden

author: John Steinbeck
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2026/03/04
date added: 2026/03/04
shelves: favorites, 2026
review:
I first read East of Eden when I was in high school because a boy I knew told me it was his favorite novel and I was pretty sure he was my soul mate. He wasn't, but he had good taste in books. Read it again a few years later, and now for a third time more than a decade later. I was curious to see if I would find it as affecting in my early thirties as I did in my late teens. My 2014 review feels corny and I considered deleting it out of a mild sense of embarrassment (everything is almost certainly not going to be okay???) but, cringe notwithstanding, it still feels true in some elemental sense. Twelve years later........can confirm this book still fucking rips. (2026)

—

Absolutely the greatest book I've ever read. Makes me think that everything is going to be okay (timshel). Have already read it twice, more than likely going to reread it many times throughout my life—like revisiting an old friend but having a new conversation with them each time. (2014)
]]> <![CDATA[Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream]]> 218671853 A damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.

Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prison service providers. The industry manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.

Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but also modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. Yet their firms have to disclose almost nothing about how they operate, leaving workers and communities on the hook when a company begins to flounder without warning. Twenty percent of companies acquired through private equity buyouts go bankrupt within ten years, accounting for forty percent of all U.S. bankruptcies and putting millions’ of workers jobs at risk. How did private equity firms become so good at making money for themselves and so damaging for the rest of society?

Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company tells the hidden story of private equity through the experiences of four American workers who watched as private equity upended their employers and a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and a public housing organizer.

In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar companies like Apollo Global Management, Bain Capital, and KKR, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.]]> 294 Megan Greenwell 0063299356 Alicia 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

author: Megan Greenwell
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial]]> 58735036 Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and told with the air of suspense that few writers can handle, Wastelands is a story I wish I had written. --From the Foreword by John Grisham

The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world's most powerful companies--and, miraculously, they won.

As vivid and fast-paced as a thriller, Wastelands takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America's farmland and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight.

There is Elsie Herring, the most outspoken of the neighbors, who has endured racial slurs and the threat of a restraining order to tell the story of the waste raining down on her rooftop from the hog operation next door. There is Don Webb, a larger-than-life hog farmer turned grassroots crusader, and Rick Dove, a riverkeeper and erstwhile military judge who has pioneered the use of aerial photography to document the scale of the pollution. There is Woodell McGowan, a quiet man whose quest to redeem his family's ancestral land encourages him to become a better neighbor, and Dr. Steve Wing, a groundbreaking epidemiologist whose work on the health effects of hog waste exposure translates the neighbors' stories into the argot of science. And there is Tom Butler, an environmental savant and hog industry insider whose whistleblowing testimony electrifies the jury.

Fighting alongside them in the courtroom is Mona Lisa Wallace, who broke the gender barrier in her small southern town and built a storied legal career out of vanquishing corporate giants, and Mike Kaeske, whose trial skills are second to none.

With journalistic rigor and a novelist's instinct for story, Corban Addison's Wastelands captures the inspiring struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once-invincible corporation to change, and to preserve the rights--and restore the heritage--of a long-suffering community.]]> 388 Corban Addison 0593320824 Alicia 0 to-read 4.42 2022 Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial

Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial

author: Corban Addison
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Fact Checker 214339575
It’s just a puff piece about a farmer’s market, I said to myself. It’s not going to kill anyone.

It started out like any other morning for the Fact Checker. The piece, “Mandeville/Green,” didn’t raise any red flags. There were more pressing stories that week—it being 2004 New York City and all.

“Mandeville/Green” was a light, breezy look at a local farm called New Egypt, whose Ramapo tomatoes were quickly becoming the summer’s hottest produce. At first glance, the story seemed straightforward, but one line made the Fact Checker pause: a stray quote from a New Egypt volunteer named Sylvia making a cryptic reference to “nefarious business” at the farmer’s market. “People sell everything here,” she’s alleged to have said. “It ain’t all green.”

When Sylvia abruptly disappears the morning after an unexpectedly long night with the Fact Checker, he becomes obsessed with finding her. Did Sylvia discover something unsavory about New Egypt or its messianic owner? Is it possible she had some reason to fear for her safety? Or was it simply something the Fact Checker said?

Striking the perfect balance of humor, wonder, sadness, and poignancy, Austin Kelley’s debut novel takes readers on a quixotic quest from one hidden corner of New York City to another—from an underground supper club in the Financial District to an abandoned-boat-turned-anarchist-community-space on the Gowanus Canal. As the story develops, the Fact Checker begins to question his perception of what’s real and what’s not. Facts can be deceiving, after all, and if you aren’t careful, you might miss the truth right in front of your eyes.]]> 256 Austin Kelley 0802164102 Alicia 0 to-read 2.70 The Fact Checker

author: Austin Kelley
name: Alicia
average rating: 2.70
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks]]> 61244676 From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.]]> 16 Patrick Radden Keefe 0593591720 Alicia 0 2026, audiobook, nonfiction 3.83 2022 Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2026/02/20
date added: 2026/02/21
shelves: 2026, audiobook, nonfiction
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]]> Up in the Old Hotel 210783 The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.]]> 716 Joseph Mitchell 0679746315 Alicia 0 to-read 4.33 1992 Up in the Old Hotel

author: Joseph Mitchell
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity]]> 222925312 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human

In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With masterful insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how your very soul is at stake.

It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Writing in the tradition of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil, Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic, poetic, and erudite, Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.]]> 366 Paul Kingsnorth 0593850645 Alicia 0 to-read 3.92 2025 Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

author: Paul Kingsnorth
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/12
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]]> Man and His Symbols 221516563 An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.

The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred images that break down Carl Jung’s revolutionary ideas

“Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.” Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can we understand them? And how can we use them to shape our lives? There is perhaps no one more equipped to answer these questions than the legendary psychologist Carl G. Jung. It is in his life’s work that the unconscious mind comes to be understood as an expansive, rich world just as vital and true a part of the mind as the conscious, and it is in our dreams—those personal, integral expressions of our deepest selves—that it communicates itself to us. A seminal text written explicitly for the general reader, Man and His Symbols is a guide to understanding the symbols in our dreams and using that knowledge to build fuller, more receptive lives. Full of fascinating case studies and examples pulled from philosophy, history, myth, fairy tales, and more, this groundbreaking work—profusely illustrated with hundreds of visual examples—offers invaluable insight into the symbols we dream that demand understanding, why we seek meaning at all, and how these very symbols affect our lives. By illuminating the means to examine our prejudices, interpret psychological meanings, break free of our influences, and recenter our individuality, Man and His Symbols proves to be—decades after its conception—a revelatory, absorbing, and relevant experience.]]> 510 C.G. Jung 0307800555 Alicia 0 to-read 4.25 1964

author: C.G. Jung
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists!]]> 247687349 From the award-winning author of My Friend Dahmer and Kent State comes a timely graphic novel about racism, violence, and political turmoil in the early 20th century, when a handful of cartoonists and journalists pushed back against a corrupt administration to defend the rights of free speech

“WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE . . . BUT WE FORGOT.”

It’s 1916. President Woodrow Wilson―a deeply divisive authoritarian who is also a white supremacist with open contempt for constitutional rights―sits in the Oval Office.

Racial tensions, unprecedented economic inequality, a groundswell of support for unionization, and the rise of both a reactionary far right militia and a growing radical opposition shake the very foundations of American society. A pandemic is two years away. And the 1900s have only just gotten started.

“AMERICA IS A COUNTRY ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS.”

The Dissidents follows a group of real and influential political cartoonists who worked for the magazine The Masses―Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Cornelia Barns, and others, dominant in their day but now forgotten―as well as a fictional young German immigrant from Cleveland, Joe Hertle, who has come to New York to make his name.

They rub elbows with the great opposition voices of the day, such as journalists Max Eastman and John Reed, and the radical provocateur Emma Goldman. What they document in their cartoons and illustrations is a country spiraling into darkness, under attack by German saboteurs and private militias, plagued by racism, and rocked by class war.

For the crime of documenting the times they live in, these cartoonists are indicted for sedition and put on trial by the U.S. government―with twenty-year sentences hanging over their heads. Two others are forced to flee the country into exile. Another is incarcerated by the U.S. army and scheduled for execution!

Award-winning author Derf Backderf raises the bar for visual storytelling in this gripping, layered, and perceptive original graphic novel, told through the lens of the political cartoonists whose work shaped our history and also held a mirror to it. Finding a personal connection as a journalist who started out as a political cartoonist, he opens a door to our past and crafts a story that pulls from the strongest elements of his previous work. In The Dissidents, Backderf delivers an utterly unique account of U.S. history, making connections to the events of today as they relate to the seeds that were sown over a hundred years ago.

The Dissidents is his magnum opus. It is a gripping tale of political passion, artistic ambition, love, and betrayal, with great characters and unexpected twists. It’s a suspenseful and fascinating American story that is almost completely forgotten today―and a terrifying and relevant warning from the past.]]> 344 Derf Backderf 1419772554 Alicia 0 to-read 4.52 2026 The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists!

The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists!

author: Derf Backderf
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook]]> 33516589 The long-awaited memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant.

When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers.
In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity. Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded.
Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.]]> 304 Alice Waters 030771828X Alicia 0 to-read 3.41 2017 Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook

author: Alice Waters
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> Lost Lambs 231127175 Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With Lost Lambs, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.]]> 323 Madeline Cash 0374619239 Alicia 0 to-read 3.80 2026

author: Madeline Cash
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> Banal Nightmare 199927666 A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature” (The New Yorker)

Margaret Anne (“Moddie”) Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

So begins Halle Butler's sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, and dream of wild triumphs and elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.]]> 336 Halle Butler 0593730356 Alicia 0 to-read 3.39 2024 Banal Nightmare

author: Halle Butler
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 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 Alicia 0 to-read 3.64 2025 Flesh

author: David Szalay
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World]]> 13168199
In this optimistic book, readers meet leading scientists and environmentalists and visit imaginary Edens, designer ecosystems, and Pleistocene parks. Marris describes innovative conservation approaches, including rewilding, assisted migration, and the embrace of so-called novel ecosystems.

Rambunctious Garden is short on gloom and long on interesting theories and fascinating narratives, all of which bring home the idea that we must give up our romantic notions of pristine wilderness and replace them with the concept of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden planet, tended by us.]]> 224 Emma Marris 160819454X Alicia 0 to-read 4.03 2011 Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

author: Emma Marris
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/03
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]]> <![CDATA[A Rebellion of Care: Poems and Essays]]> 220458601 A moving manifesto in poems and essays, inviting readers to embrace their humanity and live fully alive in our age of social change, hyper-capitalism, rampant individualism, and loneliness.

yes, everyone is struggling right now
so please be gracious

be kind & patient, but subvert
every institution that relies on our suffering

Something isn’t right. Every generation thinks that, but we have more cause than most. The way our society has been constructed is just not good for our bodies, nor our minds, nor our hearts. What possible chance do our souls have?

Yet, amidst all of this, there is an unwavering desire to embrace life in all its facets. In his debut collection, popular Instagram writer David Gate inspires us to rally for what makes life worth creating art as a form of care, living beyond consumer impulse, loving our neighbors (even the weird ones), and more. This book invites readers to ponder the complexities of self, community, love, and resilience.

Rejecting the notion that despair and positivity are our only available responses, Gate urges readers to foster deep friendships that challenge social orders and embrace questions of meaning and purpose. For, in his words, "saying something true in a world awash with lies is the first act of rebellion.]]> 224 David Gate 059360217X Alicia 0 to-read 4.45 A Rebellion of Care: Poems and Essays

author: David Gate
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.45
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rating: 0
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]]> The Compound 218460337 Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Winner takes all.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twentysomething—wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, such as champagne and lipstick, and communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

The cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she'll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.]]> 292 Aisling Rawle 0593977270 Alicia 0 to-read 3.51 2025

author: Aisling Rawle
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/03
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]]> Escape! 232206245 A propulsive debut novel following a has-been reality TV star and a disgraced producer who get one last shot at redemption on a show set on a remote island, only to discover that the plot twists are beyond what they ever imagined.

Everyone gets the story arc they deserve.

Kent Duvall, a faded reality show winner, just wants another chance at glory—to find his way out of his depressing life and back to his highlight reel. When a scandal is captured on camera at a charity event, he gets his shot, on a new jungle survival show with seven other contestants. Each of them has been cast as a type—Ruddy the bully, Miriam the nerd, Ashley the love interest—but everyone is more than they appear.

The contestants’ goals seem simple—survive the wild, build a raft, win treasure. But Beck Bermann, a reality producer who suffered her own public shaming, sees them as characters in her redemption arc.

As the schemes and strategies spiral out, breakout camps sabotage each other and rival producers struggle to control the storyline. Soon the question becomes less about who will win than who will make it out in one piece.]]> 448 Stephen Fishbach Alicia 0 to-read 3.55 2026 Escape!

author: Stephen Fishbach
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature]]> 215612512 A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.

Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.]]> 255 Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian 1954118902 Alicia 0 to-read 3.96 2025 Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

author: Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden]]> 62919890 A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant.

In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of the planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage readers to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.]]> 321 Camille T. Dungy 1982195304 Alicia 0 to-read 4.11 2023 Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

author: Camille T. Dungy
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand]]> 215361966 In this beautifully written memoir, an accomplished journalist leaves New York City to work as an amateur farmhand at Princeton Seminary, while harvesting spiritual lessons that change his life

Jeff Chu had a seemingly successful life. As a writer at a fast-paced magazine company, he penned glossy profiles of business leaders while living with his husband in a New York City brownstone. Yet he struggled, as many of us do, with feelings of loneliness and disillusionment, all while trying to reconcile his identity as a first-generation Chinese American. Seeking a remedy, he left his job and enrolled at Princeton Seminary’s “Farminary,” a 21-acre farm where students learn to work the soil while asking the big questions of life.

As the seasons turn, Chu introduces us to a cast of characters, human and not, each with their own lesson to teach. From the cranes that visit the pond, to the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, to the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu gently interrogates his relationship with the food on his plate and his own heritage, discovering what the earth is trying to teach us--if we’ll stop and listen.

In gorgeous, moving prose, Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to each other at a time when we are drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more meaningful life, this book is a tribute to friendship, acceptance, spirituality, and how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.]]> 314 Jeff Chu 0593727363 Alicia 0 to-read 3.97 2025 Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand

Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand

author: Jeff Chu
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
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]]> 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 Alicia 0 to-read 3.74 2024

author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/03
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]]> <![CDATA[You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters]]> 242513369 A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters by the award-winning author of Strangers to Ourselves.

You Won't Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves), of bonds broken and renewed. With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in six essays, five originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.”

Aviv renders one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, about the writer Alice Munro’s family, a daughter’s abuse is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape this foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge can form and deform a family and a life.]]> 240 Rachel Aviv 0525657053 Alicia 0 to-read 4.23 2026 You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

author: Rachel Aviv
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1)]]> 533613
The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins--with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.]]> 210 Terry Pratchett 0061020710 Alicia 0 2026 3.75 1983 The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1)

author: Terry Pratchett
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at: 2026/02/02
date added: 2026/02/03
shelves: 2026
review:

]]> <![CDATA[To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse]]> 198971189 The mysterious true story of Connie Converse--a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition--and the tale of one man's quest to understand her life

This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse's voice on a bootleg recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense--a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement spurred on by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell that exploded a decade later.

And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative among those who had also discovered her music: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?

Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse's story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.

But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her, a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It's a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.]]> Howard Fishman 0593626915 Alicia 0 3.88 To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

author: Howard Fishman
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/31
shelves: currently-reading, 2026, audiobook, nonfiction
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]]> <![CDATA[The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream]]> 6004724
Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.]]> 432 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521308 Alicia 0 to-read 4.14 2009 The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> Orwell's Roses 56557019
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this understudied aspect of Orwell's life journeys though his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.]]> 320 Rebecca Solnit Alicia 0 to-read 4.15 2021 Orwell's Roses

author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Wanderlust: A History of Walking]]> 78287 356 Rebecca Solnit 1859843816 Alicia 0 to-read 3.90 2014

author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/28
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Worn: A People's History of Clothing]]> 56753473 A sweeping and captivatingly told history of clothing and the stuff it's made of--an unparalleled deep dive into how we've made what we wear, and how our garments have transformed our societies, our planet, and our lives.

In this ambitious, panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories--Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool--about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis Quatorze to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed from lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast fashion brands. Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet's worst polluters, relying on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities and companies of textile and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear.

Drawn from years of intensive research and reporting from around the world, and brimming with fascinating anecdotal material, Worn reveals to us that our clothing comes not just from the countries listed on the tags or ready-made from our factories--it comes, as well, from deep in our histories.]]> 400 Sofi Thanhauser 1524748390 Alicia 0 to-read 4.21 2022 Worn: A People's History of Clothing

author: Sofi Thanhauser
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> Leaves of Grass 27494 624 Walt Whitman Alicia 0 to-read 4.12 1855

author: Walt Whitman
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1855
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bread of Angels: A Memoir 230422843 A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairy tales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.

The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, “Dancing Barefoot” and “Because the Night.”

She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred “Sonic” Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again—the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.]]> 288 Patti Smith 1101875127 Alicia 0 to-read 4.17 2025 Bread of Angels: A Memoir

author: Patti Smith
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey]]> 39070739 The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known--in the late 1940s, no less--to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.]]> 504 Mark Dery 0316188549 Alicia 0 to-read 3.76 2018 Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

author: Mark Dery
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Middlemarch 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]> 912 George Eliot 0451529170 Alicia 0 to-read 4.02 1872 Middlemarch

author: George Eliot
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Woman Destroyed 141421 254 Simone de Beauvoir Alicia 0 to-read 4.00 1967

author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty]]> 55890379 18 Patrick Radden Keefe 0593162390 Alicia 5 2026, audiobook, nonfiction 4.55 2021

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2026/01/23
date added: 2026/01/23
shelves: 2026, audiobook, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me]]> 59577177 A staggering memoir from New York Times bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.

As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own.

The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.]]> 272 Ada Calhoun 0802159788 Alicia 4 2026, memoir, nonfiction 3.97 2022 Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

author: Ada Calhoun
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2026/01/19
date added: 2026/01/23
shelves: 2026, memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tidy Up Your Life: Make Space for What Matters Most]]> 230060814 Brought to you by Penguin.

Bring order to your home and focus to your busy life.

This is the step-by-step method from the social media sensation Tidy Dad.
A father of three with a stressful job, Tyler Moore felt his life resembled an overstuffed disorganized and overly busy behind the tidy, closed doors. When it all became too much for their 750-square-foot apartment and his nerves, he set out to unpack the physical and emotional mess around him.
He learned that tidying is about so much more than the decluttering of a physical space. When he analyzed what was 'just enough', he was able to devise systems and hacks that brought order to his whole life.

How to identify what really matters both emotionally and physically to you and the people who share your space. The goal is not 'always tidy' but 'easily tidied' and other principles for lifting some of the mental and physical burdens we feel when managing our homes. Tips for making a 'one-area-a-weekday' cleaning schedule and other simple routines that complement household rhythms and eliminate intensive weekend cleaning. A vital book for the overwhelmed, overworked and stressed-out.

]]> Tyler Moore Alicia 0 currently-reading 3.18 Tidy Up Your Life: Make Space for What Matters Most

Tidy Up Your Life: Make Space for What Matters Most

author: Tyler Moore
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Artists in Times of War and Other Essays (Open Media)]]> 51627 112 Howard Zinn 1583226028 Alicia 0 to-read 4.01 2000

Artists in Times of War and Other Essays (Open Media)

author: Howard Zinn
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Private Equity: A Memoir 195267508 A gripping memoir of one woman’s self-discovery inside a top Wall Street firm, and an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture

When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.

Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.]]> 352 Carrie Sun 0593654994 Alicia 3 2026, audiobook, memoir 3.54 2024 Private Equity: A Memoir

author: Carrie Sun
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2026/01/08
date added: 2026/01/12
shelves: 2026, audiobook, memoir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age]]> 217245609 The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own.

In the summer of 2020 a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess’s baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable—more than ever—to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession.

As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children.

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender-reveal videos, rare-disease Facebook groups, “freebirth” influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology’s distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son’s early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways technology fractures and reconstitutes our lives.]]> 272 Amanda Hess 0385549733 Alicia 4 2026 4.08 2025 Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

author: Amanda Hess
name: Alicia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2026/01/10
date added: 2026/01/12
shelves: 2026
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children]]> 28595855 In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading child psychologists, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective and shatters the myth of "good parenting".Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult.In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong—it’s not just based on bad science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative—and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.]]> 322 Alison Gopnik 1429944331 Alicia 0 to-read 3.73 2016 The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

author: Alison Gopnik
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Just Watch Me 235992127 Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.]]> 288 Lior Torenberg 1668091186 Alicia 0 2025, my-covers 3.49 2026 Just Watch Me

author: Lior Torenberg
name: Alicia
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/05
shelves: 2025, my-covers
review:

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