joanna namoc's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:12:31 -0700 60 joanna namoc's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg I Who Have Never Known Men 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 206 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 joanna namoc 5 4.18 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/07
date added: 2026/08/07
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]]> The Frozen River 112975658
Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon's newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.

Inspired by the life of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into history.]]> 448 Ariel Lawhon 0385546874 joanna namoc 4 4.34 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2026/08/05
date added: 2026/08/05
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]]> McGlue 20949594 Selected for the inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose by Rivka Galchen.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation—he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.]]> 118 Ottessa Moshfegh 1934200859 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.30 2014 McGlue
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea]]> 40604846
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.

Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.]]> 338 Barbara Demick joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.48 2009 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
author: Barbara Demick
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/23
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]]> American Hagwon 245957901 At last, the National Book Award finalist and NYT bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: Min Jin Lee has written a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, one that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year.

Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures.

The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.]]> 656 Min Jin Lee 1538752042 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.21 2026 American Hagwon
author: Min Jin Lee
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/11
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]]> Taipei Story 247546631 From R.F. Kuang, the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author of Katabasis and Yellowface, comes a wryly humorous and profoundly moving coming-of-age novel that grapples with grief, language, and culture shock—all set against the backdrop of an unforgettable summer in Taipei.

College freshman Lily Chen is off to spend the summer in Taipei at an intensive language program like so many Chinese American students before her, hoping to connect with the culture she inherited but never fully understood. But a promising start quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate is driving her insane, and a reckless trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon has her classmates viciously gossiping. She feels adrift, a foreigner in a country she thought would feel like home.

Then shocking news Lily’s grandfather has passed away. The loss forces her to grapple with now-unanswerable questions about her family history. As Lily grieves, she’s drawn into a journey of self-discovery—piecing together memories, stories, and silences over a series of hilarious and devastating attempts at connection.

Taipei Story What if the diaspora fantasy of homecoming never comes true? What if learning a language can’t bring you any closer to the people you’re trying to reach? What if you search for your family’s history, but your family doesn’t want to share? What if you wait too long to ask the right questions? As Lily struggles for answers, her summer becomes a poignant search for understanding—of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.]]> 288 R.F. Kuang 0063473747 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.64 2026 Taipei Story
author: R.F. Kuang
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt]]> 242975495
Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.]]> 256 Ben Reeves 1668216361 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.94 2026 Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
author: Ben Reeves
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/11
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]]> Pachinko 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee joanna namoc 5 favorites 4.35 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/01
date added: 2026/05/11
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Midnight Library (The Midnight World, #1)]]> 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 joanna namoc 3 3.95 2020 The Midnight Library (The Midnight World, #1)
author: Matt Haig
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2026/03/06
date added: 2026/05/11
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]]> Either/Or: A Fragment of Life 24970 'What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?'

Either/Or is the earliest of the major works of Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most startlingly original thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, and the first which he wrote under a pseudonym, as he would for his greatest philosophical writings. Adopting the viewpoints of two distinct figures with radically different beliefs--the aesthetic young man of Part One, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section--Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is an exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical--both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.

This lightly abridged edition fully conveys the vigour and eloquence of the original. Alastair Hannay's introduction explains the philosophical background to the work and places it in the context of its times.]]> 633 Søren Kierkegaard joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.18 1843 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
author: Søren Kierkegaard
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1843
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/07
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]]> Orbital 123136728 Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.]]> 224 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 joanna namoc 0 currently-reading 3.44 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/22
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]]> The Stranger 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus joanna namoc 5 4.04 1942 The Stranger
author: Albert Camus
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2026/02/22
date added: 2026/02/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Comet in Moominland (The Moomins, #2)]]> 1003725 ]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0713628278 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.27 1946 Comet in Moominland (The Moomins, #2)
author: Tove Jansson
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Lessons in Chemistry 206305528
But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.]]> 404 Bonnie Garmus joanna namoc 3 4.24 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2026/02/08
date added: 2026/02/22
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]]> Cloudstreet 343881 Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.

Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.

]]> 426 Tim Winton 0743234413 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.02 1991 Cloudstreet
author: Tim Winton
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/21
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]]> No Longer Human 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.96 1948 No Longer Human
author: Osamu Dazai
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/24
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]]> A Nervous Breakdown 28385946 'I did have hallucinations, but did they harm anyone? Who did they harm, that's what I'd like to know!']]> 112 Anton Chekhov joanna namoc 0 currently-reading 3.71 1895 A Nervous Breakdown
author: Anton Chekhov
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1895
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/11/03
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Strange Houses (Strange Houses, #1)]]> 218671839
What is the true purpose behind the house's disturbing design? And what happened to the former owners who disappeared without a trace? When a body suddenly appears and a young woman reaches out about a second house, it soon becomes clear that the writer and his friend may be in over their heads. Structured around a series of chilling floorplans, with Strange Houses, mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu casts readers in the role of detective, inviting them to help map out the truth hidden within these puzzling floor plans . . . and the terrifying plot behind it all.]]> 203 Uketsu 006343315X joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.54 2021 Strange Houses (Strange Houses, #1)
author: Uketsu
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> Katabasis 210223811 Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:

The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.]]> 559 R.F. Kuang joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.69 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/26
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]]> Open Water 53414230
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.]]> 145 Caleb Azumah Nelson 0241448778 joanna namoc 5 3.99 2021 Open Water
author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/10/18
date added: 2025/10/18
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]]> One Day 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.88 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante joanna namoc 0 currently-reading 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/09/09
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship]]> 11352031  ]]> 253 Shari Y. Manning 1609181956 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.20 2011 Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship
author: Shari Y. Manning
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/21
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]]> <![CDATA[On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 joanna namoc 0 currently-reading 4.02 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/08/15
date added: 2025/08/15
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Intimacies 55918474 A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.]]> 225 Katie Kitamura 0399576169 joanna namoc 5 3.63 2021 Intimacies
author: Katie Kitamura
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/08/15
date added: 2025/08/15
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review:
been a while since i was last glued to a book like this. exceptional writing. interesting plot.
]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 332 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/15
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]]> A Separation 30407998
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go and search for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. Adrift in the wild landscape, she traces the disintegration of their relationship, and discovers she understands less than she thought about the man she used to love.

A story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation is about the gulf that divides us from the lives of others and the narratives we create for ourselves. As the narrator reflects upon her love for a man who may never have been what he appeared, Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on the brink of catastrophe. A Separation is a riveting stylistic masterpiece of absence and presence that will leave the reader astonished, and transfixed.]]> 231 Katie Kitamura 039957610X joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.04 2017 A Separation
author: Katie Kitamura
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)]]> 60657589 A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, Shadow, and the Fair Folk to other people.

So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.]]> 336 Heather Fawcett 059350013X joanna namoc 4 3.95 2023 Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)
author: Heather Fawcett
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/08/08
date added: 2025/08/08
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]]> The Judgment (Short Story) 57751613 78 Franz Kafka joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.56 1913 The Judgment (Short Story)
author: Franz Kafka
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
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]]> In the Penal Colony 581552 The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces is a collection of short stories and recollections by Franz Kafka, with additional writings by Max Brod. First published in 1948 by Schocken Books, this volume includes all the works Kafka intended for publication, and published during his lifetime (the only exception in The Stoker which serves as a first chapter for the novel Amerika). It also includes critical pieces by Kafka, "The First Long Train Journey" by Kafka and Brod (which was initially intended to be the first chapter of a book), and an Epilogue by Brod. This collection was translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.]]> 52 Franz Kafka joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.00 1918 In the Penal Colony
author: Franz Kafka
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1)]]> 62047992 150 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278677 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.64 2010 Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1)
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist]]> 197363973 The sequel to the Sunday Times and international-bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by International Booker Prize-shortlisted Anton Hur

When Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist, her hope was to create a reference for herself. She never imagined she would reach so many people, especially young people, with her reflections. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki became a runaway bestseller in South Korea, Indonesia, and the U.S., and reached a community of readers who appreciated depression and anxiety being discussed with such intimacy. Baek's struggle with dysthymia continues in I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki. And healing is a difficult process; the inner conflict she experiences in treatment becomes more complex, more challenging. With this second book, Baek Sehee reaches out to hold the hands of all those for whom grappling with everyday despair is part of a lifelong project, part of the journey.]]> 224 Baek Se-hee 1639732306 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.53 2019 I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist
author: Baek Se-hee
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Young Mungo 58891551
Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.]]> 390 Douglas Stuart 0802159559 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.37 2022 Young Mungo
author: Douglas Stuart
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself]]> 1963638 The Untethered Soul offers simple yet profound answers to these questions.

Whether this is your first exploration of inner space, or you’ve devoted your life to the inward journey, this book will transform your relationship with yourself and the world around you. You’ll discover what you can do to put an end to the habitual thoughts and emotions that limit your consciousness. By tapping into traditions of meditation and mindfulness, author and spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer shows how the development of consciousness can enable us all to dwell in the present moment and let go of painful thoughts and memories that keep us from achieving happiness and self-realization.

Copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) The Untethered Soul begins by walking you through your relationship with your thoughts and emotions, helping you uncover the source and fluctuations of your inner energy. It then delves into what you can do to free yourself from the habitual thoughts, emotions, and energy patterns that limit your consciousness. Finally, with perfect clarity, this book opens the door to a life lived in the freedom of your innermost being.]]> 183 Michael A. Singer joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.18 2007 The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
author: Michael A. Singer
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/15
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]]> The Glass Castle 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.33 2005 The Glass Castle
author: Jeannette Walls
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/14
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]]> All the Light We Cannot See 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 531 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 joanna namoc 5 4.30 2014 All the Light We Cannot See
author: Anthony Doerr
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/06/10
date added: 2025/06/10
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this hit me like a quiet storm. doerr’s writing is all light and shadows— soft, sharp, unforgettable
]]> The Old Man and the Sea 2165 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the most enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novel confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.]]> 96 Ernest Hemingway 0684830493 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.82 1952 The Old Man and the Sea
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/10
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]]> Die, My Love 36098957 Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity.

It's not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?]]> 128 Ariana Harwicz 1999722787 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.47 2012 Die, My Love
author: Ariana Harwicz
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/05
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]]> White Nights 1772910 82 Fyodor Dostoevsky joanna namoc 4 4.11 1848 White Nights
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1848
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
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]]> Ghosts 221200339
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]> 320 Dolly Alderton 0241988683 joanna namoc 3 3.81 2020 Ghosts
author: Dolly Alderton
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> Bright Young Women 101124639 A Richard & Judy Book Club Pick
New York Times Bestseller
A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist

Bright Young Women is an unflinching thriller based on Ted Bundy's heinous crimes, as two women search for justice in the wake of his brutal murders. From Jessica Knoll, author of the New York Times bestseller and #1 Netflix movie Luckiest Girl Alive.

'A compelling, almost hypnotic read' - Lisa Jewell, bestselling author of None of This is True

Tallahassee, 1978. Sorority president Pamela Schumacher wakes to a shocking scene of implausible violence and death, and is drawn into a mystifying crime that grips the nation for decades . . .

In Seattle, Tina Cannon connects her best friend's disappearance to the Tallahassee tragedy, and is convinced that a single man is responsible.

Determined to find justice, the two join forces as their search for answers leads to a final, shocking confrontation . . .

'Knoll deconstructs the myth of a criminal mastermind, revealing the women he seeks to destroy as the truly brilliant ones' – Flynn Berry, author of Northern Spy

'A sharp examination of our culture's obsession with serial killers and true crime' – Harper's Bazaar, Best Books of the Year

'Knoll sets about dismantling every last Bundy myth with a controlled but palpable rage' – Catherine Ryan Howard, author of Run Time]]> 384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.97 2023 Bright Young Women
author: Jessica Knoll
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> Of Mice and Men 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.”

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]> 107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 joanna namoc 4 3.89 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/20
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did not see the ending coming. i'm severely traumatised
]]> The Metamorphosis 485894 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes."

With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."]]> 201 Franz Kafka 0553213695 joanna namoc 5 3.92 1915 The Metamorphosis
author: Franz Kafka
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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this book might not click unless you've experienced the kind of dissociation from reality Kafka is describing—alienation, anxiety, and seeking meaning in a universe that seemingly lacks any
]]> Cat’s Cradle 135479 Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...]]> 306 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.17 1963 Cat’s Cradle
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.65 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk joanna namoc 4 3.90 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> Conversations with Friends 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth.]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 joanna namoc 5
Loved how it unraveled the tale of mundane realities and frustratingly real aspects of relationships. Definitely a page turning novel about simplicities and difficulties in life, to which we could all relate and provokes internal questions.

Had to omit a star just cause I didn’t quite like the ending, but as usual a great book by Sally Rooney! I’m already buzzing for the series to come out.]]> 3.72 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
My 2nd sally rooney book! Took me a while to finish cause I had to juggle reading this while working approx 12 hours a day. Literally lost a lot of sleep for this but every second was hella worth it. That’s how much this book resonated with me.

Loved how it unraveled the tale of mundane realities and frustratingly real aspects of relationships. Definitely a page turning novel about simplicities and difficulties in life, to which we could all relate and provokes internal questions.

Had to omit a star just cause I didn’t quite like the ending, but as usual a great book by Sally Rooney! I’m already buzzing for the series to come out.
]]> <![CDATA[The City and Its Uncertain Walls]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.67 2023 The City and Its Uncertain Walls
author: Haruki Murakami
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> The Left Hand of Darkness 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin joanna namoc 4 4.11 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> Lapvona 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.53 2022 Lapvona
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> The Unknown Ajax 311095 320 Georgette Heyer 0099474360 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.05 1959 The Unknown Ajax
author: Georgette Heyer
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162
Vinnare av Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

Vinnare av James Tait Black Prize 2023

Demon Copperhead kommer till världen på ett badrumsgolv i en husvagn. Hans artonåriga mamma ligger utslagen av droger och är knappt vid medvetande. Så börjar Demon sitt liv, redan på förhand dömd till en tillvaro kantad av fosterhemsplaceringar, utsatthet och missbruk.

I Lee County, Virginia, i Appalachernas sydliga delar växer Demon upp. Här är fattigdomen lika självklar som luften man andas och här marknadsför läkemedelsindustrin skoningslöst sina opioider mot de redan utsatta. Missbruket växer till en epidemi som slår hårt mot hela samhället.

Utan några andra tillgångar än sitt kopparfärgade hår, sin krassa humor och sin starka överlevnadsinstinkt, tar sig Demon Copperhead igenom barndomen och ungdomsåren. Han bärs av drömmen som hållit honom uppe ända sedan han var liten: att en dag få se havet. Frågan är vad som krävs för att den ska bli sann.

Demon Copperhead är en storslagen och drabbande roman om kärlek, förlust och allt däremellan. Den är också en skoningslös blick på det samhälle som än i dag tillåter de allra svagaste att gå under.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.44 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Lives of Church Ladies]]> 51582376 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year” arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.]]> 179 Deesha Philyaw 1949199738 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.13 2020 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
author: Deesha Philyaw
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple, #1)]]> 16331 288 Agatha Christie 1579126251 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.06 1930 Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple, #1)
author: Agatha Christie
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1930
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> The Seagull 79649
When it first opened in St Petersburg in 1896, The Seagull survived only five performances after a disastrous first opening night. Two years later it was revived by Nemirovich-Danchenko at the newly-founded Moscow Art Theatre with Stanslasky as Trigorin and was an immediate success. Checkhov's description of the play was characteristically self-mocking: "A comedy - 3F, 6M, four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love".
Michael Frayn's translation was commissioned by the Oxford Playhouse Company.]]> 65 Anton Chekhov 0413771008 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.93 1895 The Seagull
author: Anton Chekhov
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1895
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Way We Live Now 149785 776 Anthony Trollope 1853262552 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.08 1875 The Way We Live Now
author: Anthony Trollope
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1875
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Grand Sophy 261689 328 Georgette Heyer 0099465639 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.14 1950 The Grand Sophy
author: Georgette Heyer
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers, #1)]]> 627614 456 Alan Furst 0375760008 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.94 1988 Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers, #1)
author: Alan Furst
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> The Bookbinder of Jericho 61410172 A young British woman working in a book bindery gets a chance to pursue knowledge and love when World War I upends her life in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick The Dictionary of Lost Words.

“Williams spins an immersive and compelling tale, sweeping us back to the Oxford she painted so expertly in The Dictionary of Lost Words.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

It is 1914, and as the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, women must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who live on a narrow boat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press.

Ambitious, intelligent Peggy has been told for most of her life that her job is to bind the books, not read them—but as she folds and gathers pages, her mind wanders to the opposite side of Walton Street, where the female students of Oxford’s Somerville College have a whole library at their fingertips. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has: to spend her days folding the pages of books in the company of the other bindery girls. She is extraordinary but vulnerable, and Peggy feels compelled to watch over her.

Then refugees arrive from the war-torn cities of Belgium, sending ripples through the Oxford community and the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can educate herself and use her intellect, not just her hands. But as war and illness reshape her world, her love for a Belgian soldier—and the responsibility that comes with it—threaten to hold her back.

The Bookbinder is a story about knowledge—who creates it, who can access it, and what truths get lost in the process. Much as she did in the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams thoughtfully explores another rarely seen slice of history through women’s eyes.]]> 432 Pip Williams 1922806625 joanna namoc 5 4.05 2023 The Bookbinder of Jericho
author: Pip Williams
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens 58894458
Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney – populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights – a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.

But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to story-telling and how our stories shape who we are.]]> 384 Shankari Chandran 1761150316 joanna namoc 3 4.12 2022 Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens
author: Shankari Chandran
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town]]> 52849897 A captivating, lyrical and deeply discerning portrait of life in the Cornish town of Newlyn, the largest working fishing port in Britain, from a brilliant debut writer.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child - the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land's End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn't seem like a place that would welcome strangers.

Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour. Out on the water, miles from the coast, she learns how fishing requires you to confront who you are and what it is that tethers you to the land. But she also realises that this proud and compassionate community, sustained and defined by the sea for centuries, is under threat, living in the lengthening shadow cast by globalisation.

An evocative journey of personal discovery replete with the poetry and deep history of our fishing communities, Dark, Salt, Clear confirms Lamorna Ash as a strikingly original new voice.]]> 310 Lamorna Ash 1526600013 joanna namoc 5 4.00 2020 Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
author: Lamorna Ash
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> The Dictionary of Lost Words 49354511 Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.]]> 384 Pip Williams 1925972593 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.96 2020 The Dictionary of Lost Words
author: Pip Williams
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.02 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602638 joanna namoc 4 3.76 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)]]> 55399 Vast legions of gods, mages, humans, dragons and all manner of creatures play out the fate of the Malazan Empire in this first book in a major epic fantasy series from Steven Erikson.

The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen's rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins.

For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his squad of Bridgeburners, and for Tattersail, surviving cadre mage of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the many dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, yet holds out. It is to this ancient citadel that Laseen turns her predatory gaze.

However, it would appear that the Empire is not alone in this great game. Sinister, shadowbound forces are gathering as the gods themselves prepare to play their hand...

Conceived and written on a panoramic scale, Gardens of the Moon is epic fantasy of the highest order--an enthralling adventure by an outstanding new voice.]]> 666 Steven Erikson 0765348780 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.92 1999 Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)
author: Steven Erikson
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Death of Ivan Ilych 18386
How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.]]> 86 Leo Tolstoy joanna namoc 5 4.13 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilych
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1886
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> The Shining (The Shining, #1) 11588
As winter closes in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seems to develop a life of its own. It is meant to be empty. So who is the lady in Room 217 and who are the masked guests going up and down the elevator? And why do the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive?

Somewhere, somehow, there is an evil force in the hotel – and that too is beginning to shine.]]> 497 Stephen King 0450040186 joanna namoc 4 4.28 1977 The Shining (The Shining, #1)
author: Stephen King
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> The Capital of the World 17898757 19 Ernest Hemingway joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.47 1936 The Capital of the World
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> David Copperfield 58696 882 Charles Dickens joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.03 1850 David Copperfield
author: Charles Dickens
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1850
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Giovanni’s Room 406235 178 James Baldwin joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.38 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)]]> 186074
The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature.

A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.]]> 662 Patrick Rothfuss 075640407X joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.52 2007 The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)
author: Patrick Rothfuss
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Three Women 42201100 A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

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

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

Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.]]> 306 Lisa Taddeo 1451642296 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.71 2019 Three Women
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Carrie 10592
Make a date with terror and live the nightmare that is...Carrie
--back cover]]> 272 Stephen King 1416524304 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.00 1974 Carrie
author: Stephen King
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Goldfinch 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 joanna namoc 3 3.95 2013 The Goldfinch
author: Donna Tartt
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1)]]> 46000520
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

Alternate cover edition can be found here .]]> 382 Richard Osman joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.84 2020 The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1)
author: Richard Osman
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> We Could Be Something 146310958
Part falling-in-love story.

Part falling-apart story.

Harvey's dads are splitting up. It's been on the cards for a while, but it's still sudden. Woken-by-his-father-to-catch-a-red-eye sudden. Now he's restarting His Life In A New City, Living Above A Cafe With The Extended Greek Family He Barely Knows.

Sotiris is a rising star. At seventeen, he's already achieved his dream of publishing a novel. When his career falters, a cute, wise-cracking bookseller named Jem upends his world.

Harvey and Sotiris's stories converge on the same street in Darlinghurst, in this beautifully heartfelt novel about how our dreams shape us, and what they cost us.]]> 416 Will Kostakis 1761180177 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.64 2023 We Could Be Something
author: Will Kostakis
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Call of Cthulhu 15730101 The Call of Cthulhu is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world.]]> 43 H.P. Lovecraft joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.95 1928 The Call of Cthulhu
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 joanna namoc 4 3.63 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)]]> 61431922
"Suspenseful, sexy, and with incredibly entertaining storytelling, the first in Yarros' Empyrean series will delight fans of romantic, adventure-filled fantasy." ―Booklist, starred review

"Fourth Wing will have your heart pounding from beginning to end... A fantasy like you've never read before." ―#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout


Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from #1 New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Yarros

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general―also known as her tough-as-talons mother―has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter―like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda―because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.

The Empyrean series is best enjoyed in order.
Reading Order:
Book #1 Fourth Wing
Book #2 Iron Flame
Book #3 Onyx Storm]]> 517 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 joanna namoc 4 4.54 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/07/03
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]]> Bobok 1462282 22 Fyodor Dostoevsky 141911042X joanna namoc 4 3.22 1873 Bobok
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1873
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/07/03
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]]> Mr Salary 34234631 My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.

Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.

Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.]]> 33 Sally Rooney 0571351956 joanna namoc 4 3.72 2016 Mr Salary
author: Sally Rooney
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
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]]> The English Understand Wool 59468833 Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.02 2022 The English Understand Wool
author: Helen DeWitt
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang joanna namoc 4 3.83 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country]]> 124961437 A fearless, powerfully written on-the-ground account of a nation careening into violent autocracy—told through harrowing stories of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens—from a journalist of international renown

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.”

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”

A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist.]]> 428 Patricia Evangelista 0593133137 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.22 2023 Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country
author: Patricia Evangelista
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. Just as Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing — the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit — that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.11 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Grapes of Wrath 18114322
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.]]> 536 John Steinbeck 067001690X joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.08 1939 The Grapes of Wrath
author: John Steinbeck
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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]]> 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 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.44 1952 East of Eden
author: John Steinbeck
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> Kafka on the Shore 4929 Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.

Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky.

There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.]]> 467 Haruki Murakami joanna namoc 5 4.13 2002 Kafka on the Shore
author: Haruki Murakami
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
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my 6th murakami read and this might be the strangest book i've ever picked up! perhaps i'll write a proper review soon but i'd have to digest it for now 😳
]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 352 Coco Mellors 0593723767 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> A Thousand Splendid Suns 128029
“Just as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.”—Newsweek

New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.]]> 372 Khaled Hosseini 1594489505 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.45 2007 A Thousand Splendid Suns
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
 
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence – a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.21 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited]]> 651943
Are YOU Abused? Stalked? Harassed? Victimized? Confused and Frightened? Were you brought up by a Narcissistic or Psychopathic Parent? Married to a Narcissist or a Psychopath - or Divorcing One? Afraid your children will turn out to be narcissists or psychopaths? Want to cope with this pernicious, baffling condition?

OR: Are You a Narcissist or a Psychopath - or suspect that You may be one ...

This book will teach you how to Cope, Survive, and Protect Your Loved Ones!

"Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" is based on correspondence since 1996 with hundreds of people diagnosed with Narcissistic and Antisocial Personality Disorders (narcissists and psychopaths) and with thousands of their suffering family members, friends, therapists, and colleagues.

The first ever book about narcissistic abuse, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Re-Visited offers a detailed, first hand account of what it is like to have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It contains new insights and an organized methodological framework. The first part of the book comprises more than 100 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding relationships with abusive narcissists and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

What is a personality disorder? When the personality is rigid to the point of being unable to change in reaction to changing circumstances - we say that it is disordered. Such a person takes behavioral, emotional, and cognitive cues exclusively from others. His inner world is, so to speak, vacated. His True Self is dilapidated and dysfunctional. Instead he has a tyrannical and delusional False Self. Such a person is incapable of loving and of living. He cannot love others because he cannot love himself. He loves his reflection, his surrogate self. And he is incapable of living because life is a struggle towards, a striving, a drive at something. In other words: life is change. He who cannot change cannot live.

The narcissist is an actor in a monodrama, yet forced to remain behind the scenes. The scenes take center stage, instead. The Narcissist does not cater at all to his own needs. Contrary to his reputation, the Narcissist does not "love" himself in any true sense of the word.

He feeds off other people, who hurl back at him an image that he projects to them. This is their sole function in his world: to reflect, to admire, to applaud, to detest - in a word, to assure him that he exists. Otherwise, the narcissist feels, they have no right to tax his time, energy, or emotions.

The posting of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Re-Visited on the Web has elicited a flood of excited, sad and heart rending responses, mostly from victims of Narcissists but also from people suffering from the NPD. This is a true picture of the resulting correspondence with them.

This book is not intended to please or to entertain. NPD is a pernicious, vile and tortuous disease, which affects not only the Narcissist. It infects and forever changes people who are in daily contact with the Narcissist. In other words: it is contagious. It is my contention that Narcissism is the mental epidemic of the twentieth century, a plague to be fought by all means.

This tome is my contribution to minimizing the damages of this disorder.]]> 680 Sam Vaknin 8023833847 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.17 1999 Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited
author: Sam Vaknin
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/23
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]]> The Secret History 70897
Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.]]> 629 Donna Tartt 0140167773 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.23 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/21
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]]> Exciting Times 50175419 An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer

Ava moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children—she’s been assigned the grammar classes because she lacks warmth—and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment.

When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. Ignoring her feminist leanings and her better instincts, Ava finds herself moving into Julian’s apartment, letting him buy her clothes, and, eventually, striking up a sexual relationship with him. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands.

Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. Ava has been carefully pretending that Julian is nothing more than an absentee roommate, so when Julian announces that he’s returning to Hong Kong, she faces a fork in the road. Should she return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?

Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.]]> 243 Naoise Dolan 0062968742 joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.19 2020 Exciting Times
author: Naoise Dolan
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Strange New Things]]> 20697435
It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings—his Bible is their "book of strange new things." But Peter is rattled when Bea's letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea's faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter.

Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us.

Marked by the same bravura storytelling and precise language that made The Crimson Petal and the White such an international success, The Book of Strange New Things is extraordinary, mesmerizing, and replete with emotional complexity and genuine pathos.]]> 500 Michel Faber 055341884X joanna namoc 0 to-read 3.65 2014 The Book of Strange New Things
author: Michel Faber
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> Jane Eyre 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

A gothic masterpiece of tempestuous passions and dark secrets, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis in Penguin Classics.

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.15 1847 Jane Eyre
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1847
rating: 0
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]]> Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 594 Ann Napolitano joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.12 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

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

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

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

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.13 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2) 90202302
Although Violet’s body is weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she has her wits—and a will of iron. Leadership forgets the most important lesson Basgiath taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules. But determination to survive won’t be enough this year, because Violet knows the secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.32 2023 Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/20
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]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of a mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.]]> 417 Gabriel García Márquez joanna namoc 0 to-read 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: joanna namoc
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/20
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]]>