Jen's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 15 May 2025 11:33:46 -0700 60 Jen's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Food Grown Right, in Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide to Growing Crops at Home]]> 13450075
Food Grown Right, in Your Backyard is a primer for these questions and more. In response to the rising interest in homegrown foods, the Seattle Urban Farm Co. builds vegetable gardens for everyone from busy families to restaurants. Along the way, Colin and Brad teach beginner growers from all walks of life the techniques of organic food production. In this full color, beautifully photographed guide, they prove that anyone can develop a "green thumb," as they show readers how to build a garden from the ground up, explain general garden basics, discuss the best types of crops to try, and much more, including:

* Garden size and design for any setting (no matter how small!), including container gardens
* Soil types, and watering and irrigation
* Plant life 101, and profiles of recommended vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, and berries
* Garden tools and time-saving rules
* Crop planning, tips on what to do with the harvest, and a garden calendar to keep your garden growing year-round

Q&A material, profiles of other beginner gardeners, and step-by-step instructions all come together in this unique, friendly guide that was inspired by the kinds of questions Colin and Brad hear every day on the job with the Seattle Urban Farm Co.]]> 320 Colin McCrate 1594856834 Jen 0 to-read 4.39 2012 Food Grown Right, in Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide to Growing Crops at Home
author: Colin McCrate
name: Jen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/15
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]]> <![CDATA[When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm]]> 910443 224 Layne Redmond 0609801287 Jen 0 to-read 4.35 1997 When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm
author: Layne Redmond
name: Jen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment]]> 6708 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781577314806.

To make the journey into the Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. From the very first page of Eckhart Tolle's extraordinary book, we move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air. We become connected to the indestructible essence of our Being, “The eternal, ever present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.” Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle uses simple language and an easy question-and-answer format to guide us.

A word-of-mouth phenomenon since its first publication, The Power of Now is one of those rare books with the power to create an experience in readers, one that can radically change their lives for the better.]]> 229 Eckhart Tolle Jen 0 to-read 4.16 1997 The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
author: Eckhart Tolle
name: Jen
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> The Beauty Myth 39926 368 Naomi Wolf 0060512180 Jen 0 to-read 3.90 1990 The Beauty Myth
author: Naomi Wolf
name: Jen
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life]]> 62352297
In Awe, Dacher Keltner presents a radical investigation and deeply personal inquiry into this elusive emotion. Revealing new research into how awe transforms our brains and bodies, alongside an examination of awe across history, culture, and within his own life during a period of grief, Keltner shows us how cultivating awe in our everyday life leads us to appreciate what is most humane in our human nature. And during a moment in which our world feels more divided than ever before, and more imperiled by crises of different kinds, we are greatly in need of awe. If we open our minds, it is awe that sharpens our reasoning and orients us toward big ideas and new insights, that cools our immune system’s inflammation response and strengthens our bodies. It is awe that activates our inclination to share and create strong networks, to take actions that are good for the natural and social world around us. It is awe that transforms who we are, that inspires the creation of art, music, and religion. At turns radical and profound, brimming with enlightening and practical insights, Awe is our field guide, from not only one of the leading voices on the subject but a fellow seeker of awe in his own right, for how to place awe as a vital force within our lives.]]> 336 Dacher Keltner 1984879685 Jen 0 to-read 3.61 2023 Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
author: Dacher Keltner
name: Jen
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose]]> 76334 With his bestselling spiritual guide "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle inspired millions of readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived ?in the now.? In "A New Earth," Tolle expands on these powerful ideas to show how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world. Tolle describes how our attachment to the ego creates the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness, and shows readers how to awaken to a new state of consciousness and follow the path to a truly fulfilling existence. "The Power of Now" was a question-and-answer handbook. "A New Earth" has been written as a traditional narrative, offering anecdotes and philosophies in a way that is accessible to all. Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, "A New Earth" is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life?and for building a better world.]]> 316 Eckhart Tolle 0452287588 Jen 0 to-read 4.15 2005 A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
author: Eckhart Tolle
name: Jen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> The Psychology of Money 41881472 242 Morgan Housel 0857197681 Jen 0 to-read 4.27 2020 The Psychology of Money
author: Morgan Housel
name: Jen
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> Eleanore of Avignon 203956661 Eleanore of Avignon is the story of a woman who is unwilling to bend to the limitations her society places upon her when she becomes the unlikely apprentice to the pope’s physician at the most challenging and dangerous moment in medieval European history.

Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a midwife and budding herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she knows all too well from her late mother’s fate, she must be careful to stay within her station. So, she quietly accepts her role tending to the pregnant women in her home city of Avignon; spending time with her father and beloved twin sister, Margot; and escaping to the surrounding woods to forage for herbs when she can. At the very least, she is determined to preserve the little freedom she does have by staying unwed—unlike Margot, who is about to marry a man with painful connections to their mother’s death.

Then, in a chance encounter, Elea meets Guy de Chauliac, “Guigo,” the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, who, against all odds, agrees to take her on as his apprentice. Under his tutelage, a whole new world opens to Elea—a world of status, wealth, and fascinating medical cases—but just as she starts to settle into her new position, the much-feared plague hits Europe, making Elea and Guigo's work more urgent than ever. And as if that weren’t enough, the disgraced Queen Joanna of Naples arrives in Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder—and she is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.

As the Black Death spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake—and as the queen's childbirth approaches—Elea finds herself battling what seems to be an unwinnable war. All the while, the people of Avignon are becoming more and more desperate for a scapegoat, and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost her everything.]]> 320 Elizabeth DeLozier 0593475038 Jen 0 to-read 4.28 2024 Eleanore of Avignon
author: Elizabeth DeLozier
name: Jen
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> <![CDATA[This Way to Change: A Gentle Guide to Personal Transformation and Collective Liberation―Poems, Prose, Practices]]> 182762015
Artist, poet, and activist Jezz Chung (they/them) focuses on cultural change through personal transformation. In This Way to Change , Jezz shares contemporary poetry, accessible prose, and healing practices from different therapeutic modalities to explore subjects like healing your inner child, nourishing friendships, decolonizing your thinking, deconstructing binaries, and intentional community-making. The interactive healing practices in this book include writing and reflection prompts, somatic exercises, guided meditations, and more to help readers tap into their powers of self-healing on their journey through change.

Perfect]]> 224 Jezz Chung 1797226193 Jen 0 to-read 4.36 2024 This Way to Change: A Gentle Guide to Personal Transformation and Collective Liberation―Poems, Prose, Practices
author: Jezz Chung
name: Jen
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self]]> 55481231
As Martha Beck says in her book, “Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period.”

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

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

With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but also bring us to a place of genuine happiness.]]> 327 Martha N. Beck 1984881485 Jen 0 to-read 4.15 2021 The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
author: Martha N. Beck
name: Jen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?]]> 15843041
The safety zone has moved. The propaganda has been exposed, and the old promises have been broken: Conformity no longer leads to comfort. But the good news is that creativity is scarce, and more valuable than ever. So is choosing to do something unpredictable and brave: make art.

Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map.ĚýIf you do those things you’re an artist, no matter what it says on your business card.

Whether you’re a teacher, engineer, doctor, middle manager, or customer service rep, you can fly higher by bringing your best self to work. You can care about what you’re doing today and how you can improve tomorrow. Godin shows us how it’s possible, and convinces us why it’s essential.]]> 256 Seth Godin 1591846072 Jen 0 to-read 4.04 2012 The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?
author: Seth Godin
name: Jen
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> Fierce Attachments 177333
Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.

As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother.

Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.]]> 224 Vivian Gornick 0374529965 Jen 0 to-read 4.08 1987 Fierce Attachments
author: Vivian Gornick
name: Jen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> <![CDATA[The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion]]> 213395528 An acclaimed historian of science uncovers the history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today.

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often cannot recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. In The Instability of Truth, Rebecca Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, exploring the history of brainwashing techniques from those employed against POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping.

Lemov reveals that anyone can fall victim to mind control, especially in our increasingly data-driven world, and identifies invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction to create coercion and persuasion in everyday life. Offering lessons learned from mind-control episodes past and present, Lemov equips us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism.]]> 464 Rebecca Lemov 1324075260 Jen 0 to-read 3.92 The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion
author: Rebecca Lemov
name: Jen
average rating: 3.92
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]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Jen 0 to-read 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Jen
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal]]> 1368450 272 Gary E. Schwartz 0743292375 Jen 0 to-read 3.80 2007 The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal
author: Gary E. Schwartz
name: Jen
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Subtle Acts of Exclusion (Second Edition): How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions]]> 220717336 1 Tiffany Jana; Michael Baran Jen 0 to-read 3.87 Subtle Acts of Exclusion (Second Edition): How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions
author: Tiffany Jana; Michael Baran
name: Jen
average rating: 3.87
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted]]> 50743767
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter "the real world". She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.]]> 352 Suleika Jaouad 0399588582 Jen 0 to-read 4.40 2021 Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
author: Suleika Jaouad
name: Jen
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness]]> 744748 232 Maureen Murdock 0877734852 Jen 0 to-read 3.91 1990 The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness
author: Maureen Murdock
name: Jen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> The Sociopath Next Door 72536 you know?

Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?

In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.

We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.

How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.

The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.

It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.]]> 256 Martha Stout 0767915828 Jen 0 to-read 3.76 2005 The Sociopath Next Door
author: Martha Stout
name: Jen
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People]]> 20696047
In Dangerous Personalities, former FBI profiler Joe Navarro shows readers how to identify the four most common "dangerous personalities" and analyze how much of a threat each one can be: the Narcissist, the Predator, the Paranoid, and the Unstable Personality. Along the way, readers learn how to protect themselves both immediately and long-term—as well as how to recover from the trauma of being close to such a destructive force.]]> 242 Joe Navarro 1623361923 Jen 0 to-read 3.86 2014 Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
author: Joe Navarro
name: Jen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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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 Jen 0 to-read 3.93 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Jen
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGĂśrbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 305 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Jen 0 to-read 3.65 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Jen
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dante Chamber (The Dante Club, #2)]]> 36764399 From Mathew Pearl, the bestselling author of The Dante Club, a masterful tale of literature, obsession, and murder

The year is 1870. Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings disrupted Boston, a man is found murdered in the public gardens of London with an enormous stone around his neck etched with a verse from the Divine Comedy. When more mysterious murders erupt across the city, all in the style of the punishments Dante memorialized in Purgatory, poet Christina Rossetti fears her brother, the Dante-obsessed artist and writer Gabriel Rossetti, will be the next victim.

Christina enlists poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and famous scholar Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to assist in deciphering the literary clues. Together these unlikely investigators rush to unravel the secrets of Dante's verses in order to find Gabriel and stop the killings. Racing between the shimmering mansions of the elite and the dark corners of London's underworld, they descend further and further into the mystery. But when the true inspiration behind the gruesome murders is finally revealed, Christina realizes that the perpetrator has even bigger and more horrific plans than she had initially thought.

A dazzling tale of intrigue from the writer Library Journal calls "the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers," The Dante Chamber is a riveting adventure across London and through Dante. Expertly blending fact and fiction, Pearl gives us a historical mystery like no other, captivating and enthralling until the last page.]]> 357 Matthew Pearl 1594204934 Jen 0 to-read 3.39 2018 The Dante Chamber (The Dante Club, #2)
author: Matthew Pearl
name: Jen
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2018
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dante Club (The Dante Club, #1)]]> 18402
Words can bleed.

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.]]> 424 Matthew Pearl 034549038X Jen 0 to-read 3.43 2003 The Dante Club (The Dante Club, #1)
author: Matthew Pearl
name: Jen
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Boundaries & Protection 35449255 For more information, see the author's website:
Ěý

Ěý]]> 161 Pixie Lighthorse Jen 0 to-read 4.20 Boundaries & Protection
author: Pixie Lighthorse
name: Jen
average rating: 4.20
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Golden Shrine, Goddess Queen 6585736 160 Alison Roberts 0952423324 Jen 0 to-read 4.14 2008 Golden Shrine, Goddess Queen
author: Alison Roberts
name: Jen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal]]> 24886265
Anthony William, the one and only Medical Medium, has helped tens of thousands of people heal from ailments that have been misdiagnosed or ineffectively treated or that doctors can’t resolve. He’s done this by listening to a divine voice that literally speaks into his ear, telling him what lies at the root of people’s pain or illness and what they need to do to restore their health. His methods achieve spectacular results, even for those who have spent years and many thousands of dollars on all forms of medicine before turning to him. Now, in this revolutionary book, he opens the door to all he has learned in over 25 years of bringing people’s lives a massive amount of healing information, much of which science won’t discover for decades, and most of which has never appeared anywhere before.

Medical Medium Ěýreveals the root causes of diseases and conditions that medical communities either misunderstand or struggle to understand at all. It explores all-natural solutions for dozens of the illnesses that plague us,

¡ Lyme disease
¡ Fibromyalgia
¡ Adrenal fatigue
¡ Chronic fatigue syndrome
¡ Hormonal imbalances
· Hashimoto’s disease
¡ Multiple sclerosis
¡ Depression
¡ Neurological conditions
¡ Chronic inflammation
¡ Autoimmune disease
¡ Blood sugar imbalances
¡ Colitis and other digestive disorders
¡ And more

It also offers solutions for restoring the soul and spirit after illness has torn at our emotional fabric. Whether you’ve been given a diagnosis you don’t understand, or you have symptoms you don’t know how to name, or someone you love is sick, or you want to care for your own patients better,Ěý Medical Medium Ěýoffers the answers you need. It’s also a guidebook for everyone seeking the secrets to living longer, healthier lives.

"The truth about the world, ourselves, life, purpose—it all comes down to healing," Anthony William writes. "And the truth about healing is now in your hands."]]> 365 Anthony William 1401948294 Jen 0 to-read 3.99 2015 Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal
author: Anthony William
name: Jen
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark]]> 401680 The Red Book is nothing less than a spiritual fire starter -- a combustible cocktail of Hindu Tantra and Zen Buddhism, Rumi and Carl Jung, goddesses and psychics, shaken with cosmic nudges, meaningful subway rides, haircuts, relationships, sex, dreams, and intuition. Author Sera Beak's unique hybrid perspective, hilarious personal anecdotes, and invaluable exercises encourage her readers to live more consciously so they can start making clearer choices across the board, from careers to relationships, politics to pop culture and everything in between. For smart, gutsy, spiritually curious women whose colorful and complicated lives aren't reflected in most spirituality books, The Red Book is an open invitation to find your true self and start sharing that delicious truth with the world.]]> 320 Sera Beak 0787980544 Jen 0 to-read 4.13 2006 The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark
author: Sera Beak
name: Jen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation]]> 403846 Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

"It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"]]> 288 Silvia Federici 1570270597 Jen 0 to-read 4.55 2004 Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
author: Silvia Federici
name: Jen
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Magdalene Mysteries: The Left-Hand Path of the Feminine Christ]]> 49989165
• Reveals how Mary Magdalene was a sacred priestess of the ancient Womb Mysteries, connected to moon wisdom, sacred harlot archetypes, and goddesses in many traditions, including Sophia, Isis, Inanna, Asherah, Lilith, Jezebel, and Witches

• Explains how the Magdalene Mysteries have been encoded in Gnostic texts, sacred art, and literature and unveils the secret Grail heresy of the Ghent Altarpiece

• Offers rituals and practices to initiate you into the Womb magic of the ancient priestesses and access deeper dimensions of sexuality and feminine power

A sacred priestess of the ancient Womb Rites, Mary Magdalene was at the center of a great and enduring Mystery tradition, one that touched on a stream of perennial spiritual wisdom as old as humanity. Worshipped as the human embodiment of the Goddess, the earthly Sophia, her womb was the spiritual luminatrix that anointed and empowered Jesus, transforming him into the Christ. As a priestess of the Goddess, Mary Magdalene knew how to embody the light and the dark, how to harness the magic potency of sacred sexual energy, and how to cleanse, awaken, and resurrect the soul. Yet, even though she sparked the creation of a worldwide religion, her story and teachings have been forgotten.

Unveiling the lost left-hand path of the Magdalene, the Feminine Christ, authors Seren and Azra Bertrand explore how this underground stream of knowledge has been carried forward over the millennia through an unbroken lineage of Womb Shamans, Priestesses, Oracles, and Medicine Women. They explain how the Magdalene Mysteries, symbolized by the Rose, have been encoded in Gnostic codices and gospels and in the highest art, literature, and architecture of many ages, including most significantly the Ghent Altarpiece. They examine Mary Magdalene’s connection to moon wisdom, sacred harlot archetypes, and goddesses in many traditions, including Isis, Inanna, Asherah, Lilith, and Jezebel, and look at shamanic, tantric, and Cathar expressions of sacred feminine mysteries as well as the Witch and Templar roots of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

In this revelatory and magical text on the lost feminine mystery traditions of Mary Magdalene and the lineage of Sophia, the authors present encompassing theological, historical, mythological, and archetypal wisdom, with rituals and practices to initiate you into the Womb magic of the ancient priestesses and the path of the wild feminine.]]> 560 Seren Bertrand 1591433460 Jen 0 to-read 4.48 Magdalene Mysteries: The Left-Hand Path of the Feminine Christ
author: Seren Bertrand
name: Jen
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]]> <![CDATA[In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial]]> 57693411
Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed?

Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions.

With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.]]> 320 Mona Chollet 125027141X Jen 0 to-read 3.86 2018 In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
author: Mona Chollet
name: Jen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)]]> 16054217 The #1 New York Times bestselling series finale and sequel to A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night

Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]> 561 Deborah Harkness 0670025593 Jen 0 4.15 2014 The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Jen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Regrettably, I am About to Cause Trouble]]> 63946988 370 Amie McNee 0645190535 Jen 0 to-read 3.89 2022 Regrettably, I am About to Cause Trouble
author: Amie McNee
name: Jen
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> <![CDATA[We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something]]> 214537765 From creative phenom Amie McNee, the creator of @InspiredtoWrite, a manifesto on the vital, human importance of creating, with guidance for all artists in all endeavors, whether they're beginning or need a fresh start

In We Need Your Art, Amie McNee calls artists and aspiring artists of all kinds to do the work they’re meant to create.Ěý

Using her own experiences and the inspiration she’s shared with her legions of followers on Instagram, Amie guides you on why we need your art and how you can make it happen—starting with a two-week reset plan to help you kick-start your creative habit. This isn’t about writing your great novel in a month or painting a masterpiece in a flurry of inspiration. Rather, this process is about practicing small, sustainable creative steps every day over time—five hundred words of writing each day, a pencil sketch every evening—so that you avoid burnout, produce consistent, reliable content on your own terms, and begin to see yourself as an artist.Ěý

With frank and empowering conversations on the many issues creatives face, including impostor syndrome, perfectionism, procrastination, and the inner critic, as well as invitations to coronate yourself and celebrate your ambition, Amie provides the framework and encouragement you need to begin to take your art seriously. Each chapter also includes journal prompts that help you apply what you have learned to your new life.

We Need Your Art is a revolutionary reprogramming of everything we have been taught and told about being a creative, removing the shame and fear we may feel at dubbing ourselves artists and inviting us to create proudly, with celebration. This book is a warm hug, a pep talk, the wise teacher you always wanted, the loving parent you needed, and the fire in your belly that you need to get roaring.]]> 272 Amie McNee 0593833007 Jen 0 to-read 4.49 We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something
author: Amie McNee
name: Jen
average rating: 4.49
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]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1)]]> 36454667 Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.

It was not his war.
On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders.
But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.
Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.]]> 753 Christopher Ruocchio 0756413028 Jen 0 to-read 4.01 2018 Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1)
author: Christopher Ruocchio
name: Jen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena]]> 6037263
Although much is now known about the brain, relatively little has been determined about where consciousness comes What is the source of the "I" in our internal monologue? How does something as nonmaterial as consciousness arise from something material like the brain? Dr. Diane Powell, a Johns Hopkins–trained neuroscientist, has brilliantly reassessed the meaning and nature of consciousness by exploring research on the workings of psychic phenomena. Over the past few decades several well-designed and rigorously supervised experiments have documented the existence of telepathic interconnection, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and out-of-body experiences. Mainstream science has largely ignored these data because they all defy the traditional model of consciousness as being solely the product of brain chemistry. Building from these experiments, Powell constructs a new theory of consciousness. I ntegrating concepts from physics, neuroscience, and other disciplines, she offers an insightful and intriguing explanation of ESP, provocatively claiming that the existence of psychic abilities expands our understanding and appreciation of consciousness. Psychic abilities are also consistent with findings in modern For example, psychokinesis implies that consciousness is a type of force field, while precognition suggests that the past, present, and future exist concurrently. Eye-opening in its conclusions and exciting in its implications, The ESP Enigma will challenge your preconceived notions and expand your mind.]]> 288 Diane Hennacy Powell 0802716067 Jen 0 to-read 4.05 2008 The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena
author: Diane Hennacy Powell
name: Jen
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Eagle and the Raven (Rediscovered Classics)]]> 817393 704 Pauline Gedge 155652708X Jen 0 to-read 4.19 1978 The Eagle and the Raven (Rediscovered Classics)
author: Pauline Gedge
name: Jen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, ,i>TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Jen 0 to-read 4.35 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Jen
average rating: 4.35
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]]> <![CDATA[A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy]]> 195790788
Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles—a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.”

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

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.]]> 304 Tia Levings 1250288282 Jen 0 to-read 4.30 2024 A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
author: Tia Levings
name: Jen
average rating: 4.30
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Jen 0 to-read 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Jen
average rating: 4.46
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rating: 0
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]]> Revolutionary Road 48328 355 Richard Yates Jen 0 to-read 3.92 1961 Revolutionary Road
author: Richard Yates
name: Jen
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> THE VOID 203698038 251 Mandana Boroojeni Jen 0 to-read 0.0 THE VOID
author: Mandana Boroojeni
name: Jen
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Jen 0 to-read 4.21 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Jen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/11
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]]> Women Living Deliciously 207297290 In this bold, illustrated guide, bestselling author and podcaster Florence Given encourages women to rediscover their joy, reject toxic wellness culture, and redefine feminism for themselves.

Women Living Deliciously wants us to fall in love with our lives. It will help women uncover the sense of awe and wonder that has been buried by the layers of shame, perfectionism and self-objectification that get piled on us by the patriarchy. For too long we have internalized the belief that our bodies are things to be looked at—instead of lived in. That it’s embarrassing to fully express ourselves. That we cannot trust the parts of ourselves that are so full of desire.

This book will unpack the many barriers women face when trying to access joy so that they can discover the delicious life that’s theirs for the taking.

International-bestselling author Florence Given wants to restore your lust for life and your sense of agency, giving you the courage and permission to inch closer to the wildly expansive life that you FULLY deserve—not in the future, not when you’re perfect, not when you’re prettier—but right now.]]> 304 Florence Given 1668067129 Jen 0 to-read 4.08 Women Living Deliciously
author: Florence Given
name: Jen
average rating: 4.08
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> The Life Impossible 198281740
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…”

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.]]> 324 Matt Haig 0593489276 Jen 0 to-read 3.45 2024 The Life Impossible
author: Matt Haig
name: Jen
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Project Hail Mary 54493401
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?]]> 476 Andy Weir 0593135202 Jen 0 to-read 4.49 2021 Project Hail Mary
author: Andy Weir
name: Jen
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> <![CDATA[We Solve Murders (We Solve Murders, #1)]]> 203956647 A brand new series. An iconic new detective duo. And a puzzling new murder to solve...

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 059365322X.]]> 400 Richard Osman Jen 0 to-read 4.06 2024 We Solve Murders (We Solve Murders, #1)
author: Richard Osman
name: Jen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story…

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Jen 0 to-read 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Jen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Jen 0 to-read 3.51 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Jen
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power]]> 28048 Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.

Originally published in 2004, now with a new foreword and afterword, Solnit’s influential book shines a light into the darkness of our time in an unforgettable new edition.]]> 192 Rebecca Solnit 1841956600 Jen 0 to-read 4.01 2004 Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Jen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> My Ántonia 17150 219 Willa Cather 1583485090 Jen 0 to-read 3.82 1918 My Ántonia
author: Willa Cather
name: Jen
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile]]> 263254 The First Five Pages

Editors always tell novice writers that the first few pages of a manuscript are crucial in the publishing process -- and it's true. If an editor or agent (or reader) loses interest after a page or two, you've lost him or her completely, even if the middle of your novel is brilliant and the ending phenomenal. Noah Lukeman, an agent in Manhattan, has taken this advice and created a book that examines just what this means, and I have to tell you, it's one of the best I've read.

I've written (and seen published) pretty close to a dozen novels in as many years -- some are still to be published and will be out shortly; others are already out of print after four years. But I wish I had read Lukeman's book, The First Five Pages, when I began writing fiction.

I'm glad I did now. It has helped, immediately. I'm already embarrassed about some of the goofs I made in my writing -- and I've been revising recent prose with his advice in mind.

First off, Lukeman is a literary agent who once was an editor, and his editorial eye is sharp. If every novelist and short story writer in this country had Lukeman as an editor, we'd have a lot more readable prose out there.

He writes:

Many writers spend the majority of their time devising their plot. What they don't seem to understand is that if their execution -- if their prose -- isn't up to par, their plot may not even be considered.


This bears repeating, because in all the books I've read on writing, this is an element that is most often forgotten in the rush to come up with snappy ideas and sharp plot progressions. You can always send a hero on a journey, after all, but if no reader wants to follow him, you've wasted your time.

In a tone that can be a bit professorial at times, Lukeman brings what prose is -- and how it reads to others -- into sharp focus. He deals with dialogue, style, and, most importantly, sound.

Sound.

How does prose sound?

It must have rhythm, its own kind of music, in order to draw the reader into the fictive dream. Lukeman's tips and pointers are genuinely helpful, and even important with regard to the sound of the prose itself.

Lukeman also brings in on-target exercises for writers of prose and the wonderful advice for novelists to read poetry -- and often.

Those first five pages are crucial, for all concerned. But forget the editor and agent and reader. They are important for you, the writer, because they determine the sharpness of your focus, the completeness of your vision, the confidence you, as a writer, need to plunge into a three- or four- or five-hundred-page story.

The First Five Pages should be on every writer's shelf. This is the real thing.P#151;Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg is the author of numerous novels and stories, including The Halloween Man and the collection The Nightmare Chronicles. In addition, Clegg is the author of the world's first publisher-sponsored Internet email novel, Naomi.]]> 208 Noah Lukeman 068485743X Jen 0 to-read 3.97 2000 The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
author: Noah Lukeman
name: Jen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> Unapologetically Human 20360355 433 Roman Newell Jen 0 to-read 5.00 2013 Unapologetically Human
author: Roman Newell
name: Jen
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship]]> 42976058
Ece Temelkuran heard reasonable people in Britain say it the night of the Brexit vote.

She heard reasonable people in America say it the night Trump’s election was soundtracked by chants of ‘Build that wall.’

She heard reasonable people in Turkey say it as Erdoğan rigged elections, rebuilt the economy around cronyism, and labelled his opposition as terrorists.

How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies the early-warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world, in order to define a global pattern, and arm the reader with the tools to root it out.

Proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing – and too often paralysing – political questions of our time, Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of ‘real people’, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and clear-sighted argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy.

No longer can the reasonable comfort themselves with ‘it couldn’t happen here.’ It is happening. And soon it may be too late.]]> 289 Ece Temelkuran 000829402X Jen 0 to-read 4.06 2019 How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
author: Ece Temelkuran
name: Jen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel]]> 22320456 461 Carl Safina 0805098887 Jen 0 to-read 4.40 2015 Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
author: Carl Safina
name: Jen
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology]]> 145654403
Come, claim your wings.

Lift your life above the earth,

return to the land of your father’s birth.

What exactly is it to be Black in America?

Well, for some, it’s learning how to morph the hatred placed by others into love for oneself; for others, it’s unearthing the strength it takes to continue to hold one’s swagger when multitudinous factors work to make Black lives crumble. For some, it’s gathering around the kitchen table as Grandma tells the story of Anansi the spider, while for others it's grinning from ear to ear while eating auntie’s spectacular 7Up cake.

Black experiences and traditions are complex, striking, and vast—they stretch longer than the Nile and are four times as deep—and carry more than just unimaginable pain—there is also joy.

Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them.

Edited by Taylor Byas, Erica Martin, and Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner Amber McBride, Poemhood will simultaneously highlight the duality and nuance at the crux of so many Black experiences with poetry being the psalm constantly playing.]]> 160 Amber McBride 006322528X Jen 0 to-read 4.19 2024 Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology
author: Amber McBride
name: Jen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> This Tender Land 25813942
After committing a terrible crime, Odie and Albert are forced to flee for their lives along with their best friend, Mose, a mute young man of Sioux heritage. Out of pity, they also take with them a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy. Together, they steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi in search for a place to call home.

Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphan vagabonds journey into the unknown, crossing paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an en­thralling, bighearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.]]> 450 William Kent Krueger 1476749299 Jen 0 to-read 4.35 2019 This Tender Land
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Jen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Fathoms: The World in the Whale]]> 52765413 Fathoms: The World in the Whale blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? Will our connection to these storied animals be transformed by technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendour, and fragility of life? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover the plastic pollution now pervading the whale’s undersea environment.

In the spirit of Rachel Carson and Rebecca Solnit, Giggs gives us a vivid exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis.]]> 352 Rebecca Giggs 198212069X Jen 0 to-read 3.89 2020 Fathoms: The World in the Whale
author: Rebecca Giggs
name: Jen
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> The Tiger Rising 37187 The National Book Award finalist from the best-selling author of Because of Winn-Dixie—now in paperback

Walking through the misty Florida woods one morning, twelve-year-old Rob Horton is stunned to encounter a tiger—a real-life, very large tiger—pacing back and forth in a cage. What's more, on the same extraordinary day, he meets Sistine Bailey, a girl who shows her feelings as readily as Rob hides his. As they learn to trust each other, and ultimately, to be friends, Rob and Sistine prove that some things—like memories, and heartaches, and tigers—can't be locked up forever.]]> 128 Kate DiCamillo 0763618985 Jen 4 3.83 2001 The Tiger Rising
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Jen
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> The Magician's Elephant 6345760
When a fortuneteller's tent appears in the market square of the city of Baltese, orphan Peter Augustus Duchene knows the questions that he needs to ask. Does his sister still live? And if so, how can he find her? The fortuneteller's mysterious answer (an elephant! An elephant will lead him there!) sets off a chain of impossible events.]]> 201 Kate DiCamillo 0763644102 Jen 0 to-read 3.85 2009 The Magician's Elephant
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Jen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> Because of Winn-Dixie 357664
Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship—and forgiveness—can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm.

Kate DiCamillo's beloved, best-selling debut novel is now available in a paperback digest edition.

Kate DiCamillo's first published novel, like Winn-Dixie himself, immediately proved to be a keeper—a New York Times bestseller, a Newbery Honor winner, the inspiration for a popular film, and most especially, a cherished classic that touches the hearts of readers of all ages. It's now available in a paperback digest format certain to bring this tale's magic to an even wider circle of fans.]]> 182 Kate DiCamillo 0763616052 Jen 0 4.09 2000 Because of Winn-Dixie
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Jen
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> Tales of the Peculiar 29358487 Before Miss Peregrine gave them a home, the story of peculiars was written in the Tales.

Wealthy cannibals who dine on the discarded limbs of peculiars. A fork-tongued princess. The origins of the first ymbryne. These are but a few of the truly brilliant stories in Tales of the Peculiar—known to hide information about the peculiar world—first introduced by Ransom Riggs in his Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series.

Riggs now invites you to share his secrets of peculiar history, with a collection of original stories, as collected and annotated by Millard Nullings, ward of Miss Peregrine and scholar of all things peculiar.]]> 170 Ransom Riggs 0399538534 Jen 0 to-read 4.14 2016 Tales of the Peculiar
author: Ransom Riggs
name: Jen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ‘80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Jen 0 to-read 4.39 2017 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Jen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> Starling House 65213595 A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can't stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot.

Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.

As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.

If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.]]> 320 Alix E. Harrow 1250799058 Jen 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Starling House
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Jen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ten Thousand Doors of January]]> 43521657
Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.]]> 374 Alix E. Harrow 0316421995 Jen 0 to-read 3.99 2019 The Ten Thousand Doors of January
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Jen
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> The Veiled Woman 36436092 'What did she expect of him? What was her quest? Did she have an unfulfilled desire?'

Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers of erotic fiction.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 56 AnaĂŻs Nin 0241339545 Jen 0 to-read 3.50 2018 The Veiled Woman
author: AnaĂŻs Nin
name: Jen
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within]]> 44905 336 Natalie Goldberg 1590303164 Jen 0 to-read 4.21 1986 Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Jen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> Moonglow 26795307 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

ĚýMoonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.

ĚýFrom the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.]]> 430 Michael Chabon 0062225553 Jen 0 3.77 2016 Moonglow
author: Michael Chabon
name: Jen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Instructions for Traveling West: Poems]]> 186872488 Ěý
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.
Ěý
So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West —a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?Ěý
Ěý
A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging.ĚýThese poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.
Ěý
Expansive and heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope—the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that “joy is not a trick.”]]> 160 Joy Sullivan 0593597613 Jen 3 4.38 Instructions for Traveling West: Poems
author: Joy Sullivan
name: Jen
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss]]> 42372550
And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds--the natural one and our own--"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin."

Illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.]]> 231 Margaret Renkl 1571313788 Jen 0 to-read 4.30 2019 Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
author: Margaret Renkl
name: Jen
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> What We Owe to Each Other 278553
Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.]]> 432 T.M. Scanlon 067400423X Jen 0 to-read 3.84 1999 What We Owe to Each Other
author: T.M. Scanlon
name: Jen
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]> 9717 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.]]> 314 Milan Kundera 0571224385 Jen 0 to-read 4.12 1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
author: Milan Kundera
name: Jen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0) 22323 Johnny Mnemonic to the technofetishist blues of Burning Chrome.

Johnny Mnemonic (1981)
The Gernsback Continuum (1981)
Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977)
The Belonging Kind (1981) with John Shirley
Hinterlands (1981)

Red Star, Winter Orbit (1983) with Bruce Sterling
New Rose Hotel (1984)
The Winter Market (1985)
Dogfight (1985) with Michael Swanwick
Burning Chrome (1982)]]> 226 William Gibson 0060539828 Jen 0 to-read 4.07 1986 Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0)
author: William Gibson
name: Jen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)]]> 22320
Still, Cayce is her father's daughter, and the danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, ex-security expert, probably ex-CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center on September 11 one year ago, and is presumed dead. Win taught Cayce a bit about the way agents work. She is still numb at his loss, and, as much for him as for any other reason, she refuses to give up this newly weird job, which will take her to Tokyo and on to Russia. With help and betrayal from equally unlikely quarters, Cayce will follow the trail of the mysterious film to its source, and in the process will learn something about her father's life and death.]]> 367 William Gibson 0425198685 Jen 0 to-read 3.87 2003 Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)
author: William Gibson
name: Jen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sacred Book of the Werewolf]]> 3212912 336 Victor Pelevin 0670019887 Jen 0 to-read 3.82 2004 The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
author: Victor Pelevin
name: Jen
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility]]> 43616354 The Fifth Vital Master Your Cycles and Optimize Your Fertility brings together over 1,000 meticulously researched scientific references in a textbook-quality guide to understanding your menstrual cycle. Ěý In this book you’ll What a normal cycle looks like; The best way to chart your cycle and increase your fertility awareness; How best to manage critical aspects of your health, including better sleep, exercise and a healthier diet; Natural methods for managing period pain and PMS; How to successfully avoid pregnancy without the pill; and How to plan ahead if you do want to get pregnant. The Fifth Vital Sign aims to better connect women with their menstrual cycles, to break the myth that ovulation is only important when you're ready to have a baby. Ěý READ THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR HEALTH AND FERTILITY Whether children are a part of your future plans or not, your health matters. Start learning more now, and take control of your health. Ěý ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Hendrickson-Jack is a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner. She teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and overall health monitoring. In her work, Lisa draws heavily from the current scientific literature and presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization.]]> 368 Lisa Hendrickson-Jack 1999428013 Jen 0 to-read 4.36 2019 The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility
author: Lisa Hendrickson-Jack
name: Jen
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
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]]> <![CDATA[How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective]]> 34381451 191 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 1608468550 Jen 0 to-read 4.49 2017 How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
name: Jen
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> The Story of Edgar Sawtelle 2731276
Grief-stricken and bewildered, Edgar tries to prove Claude played a role in his father's death, but his plan backfires—spectacularly. Forced to flee into the vast wilderness lying beyond the farm, Edgar comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three yearling dogs who follow him. But his need to face his father's murderer and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs turn Edgar ever homeward.

David Wroblewski is a master storyteller, and his breathtaking scenes—the elemental north woods, the sweep of seasons, an iconic American barn, a fateful vision rendered in the falling rain—create a riveting family saga, a brilliant exploration of the limits of language, and a compulsively readable modern classic.]]> 566 David Wroblewski 0061374229 Jen 0 to-read 3.64 2008 The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
author: David Wroblewski
name: Jen
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> Familiaris 200262412 The follow-up to the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling modern classic The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Familiaris is the stirring origin story of the Sawtelle family and the remarkable dogs that carry the Sawtelle name.

It is spring 1919, and John Sawtelle's imagination has gotten him into trouble ... again. Now John and his newlywed wife, Mary, along with their two best friends and their three dogs, are setting off for Wisconsin's north woods, where they hope to make a fresh start—and, with a little luck, discover what it takes to live a life of meaning, purpose, and adventure. But the place they are headed for is far stranger and more perilous than they realize, and it will take all their ingenuity, along with a few new friends—human, animal, and otherworldly—to realize their dreams.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, mysterious and enchanting, Familiaris takes readers on an unforgettable journey from the halls of a small-town automobile factory, through an epic midwestern firestorm and an ambitious WWII dog training program, and far back into mankind's ancient past, examining the dynamics of love and friendship, the vexing nature of families, the universal desire to create something lasting and beautiful, and of course, the species-long partnership between Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris.]]> 979 David Wroblewski Jen 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Familiaris
author: David Wroblewski
name: Jen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Torch (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 15849470
"Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!" is the advice Teresa Rae Wood shares with the listeners of her local radio show, Modern Pioneers , and the advice she strives to live by every day. She has fled a bad marriage and rebuilta life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they received unexpected news that Teresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.]]> 432 Cheryl Strayed 0345805615 Jen 0 to-read 3.59 2006 Torch (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Cheryl Strayed
name: Jen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/09
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]]> The Lights: Poems 65215738
The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.]]> 128 Ben Lerner 0374279217 Jen 0 to-read 3.84 The Lights: Poems
author: Ben Lerner
name: Jen
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> To 2040 63850523 It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe—in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do.

Jorie Graham’s fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in question punctuated as “AreĚýwe / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.” In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian,Ěýpart cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence singsĚýlouder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant “the American experiment will end in 2030.” Graham shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them.Ěý

In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views ofĚýreshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climateĚýcrisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to theĚýfuture, with a habit of looking back, To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her ownĚýmortality—in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first “claw full of hair” placedĚýgently on a green shower ledge. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. “Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me.” And, from the title poem, “what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?”]]> 95 Jorie Graham 1619322692 Jen 0 to-read 4.04 To 2040
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]]> <![CDATA[Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence]]> 61340202 176 Homero Aridjis 0811231739 Jen 0 to-read 4.39 Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence
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]]> The Saint of Bright Doors 61884985
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.]]> 356 Vajra Chandrasekera 1250847389 Jen 0 to-read 3.63 2023 The Saint of Bright Doors
author: Vajra Chandrasekera
name: Jen
average rating: 3.63
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]]> <![CDATA[Witch King (The Rising World, #1)]]> 61885085 "You idiot. I'm the demon."
Kai's having a long day in Martha Wells' Witch King...

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.

But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?

Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.

He’s not going to like the answers.]]> 415 Martha Wells 1250826799 Jen 0 to-read 3.60 2023 Witch King (The Rising World, #1)
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name: Jen
average rating: 3.60
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]]> <![CDATA[All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)]]> 32758901 "As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.]]> 144 Martha Wells Jen 0 to-read 4.10 2017 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)
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]]> The Pivot Year 138301904 This is the year you change your life.

If you’re in a pivot period—if you’re still bridging the space between where you are and where you want to be—remember that the person you’re becoming is already within you. The journey is convincing your mind to act consistently on what your heart already knows it wants to do.

The Pivot Year is a book of 365 daily meditations on finding the courage to become who you’ve always wanted to be, from the internationally bestselling author of 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, The Mountain Is You, and more.]]> 368 Brianna Wiest 1949759628 Jen 0 to-read 4.11 2023 The Pivot Year
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name: Jen
average rating: 4.11
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]]> Priestdaddy 31920820
When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity—and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.]]> 336 Patricia Lockwood 1594633738 Jen 0 to-read 3.84 2017 Priestdaddy
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Jen
average rating: 3.84
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]]> <![CDATA[The Power of One (The Power of One, #1)]]> 122 544 Bryce Courtenay 034541005X Jen 0 4.35 1989 The Power of One (The Power of One, #1)
author: Bryce Courtenay
name: Jen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1989
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]]> Here be Dragons 6977718
Ralph Whitlock has found almost 200 places in England, Scotland and Wales where there is evidence of a dragon tradition. He describes every one in a comprehensive Gazetteer, and also provides in his long introduction an examination of dragon legends throughout history and in other lands. He examines, too, the ways in which the Church made use of dragon lore to put across its ideas - an intriguing example of the meeting of pagan and Christian.

The text is illustrated by 59 engravings and photographs, and will be an important source for folklorists as well as providing hours of fascination for would-be dragon-hunters.]]> 165 Ralph Whitlock 0043980074 Jen 0 to-read 3.43 1983 Here be Dragons
author: Ralph Whitlock
name: Jen
average rating: 3.43
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]]> Summerland 16705 werefox sitting on his chest, Ethan learns he's ripe for a "fantastic destiny" in the Summerlands -- part of a connected, hidden world, where small American Indian-like ferishers play ball, and evil Coyote is thirsty to destroy the universe. Ethan agrees to the job, but when his father is kidnapped, his mission becomes more personal than he bargained for. With a team of ragtag players called Big Chief Cinquefoil's Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club -- including the feisty pitcher Jennifer T., Thor Wignutt (a boy who's not quite a boy), a she-Sasquatch named Taffy, and the Anaheim Angels' Rodrigo BuendĂ­a -- Ethan treks through the Summerlands playing against incredible creatures and an impending time limit, hoping to reach his dad. Little does he know, however, that his abilities will be tested in the biggest baseball showdown of all time.



Chabon successfully weaves an American-made fantasy, incorporating Native American lore, tall tales, and our nation's greatest pastime to make a modern-day tale of good versus evil.

]]> 500 Michael Chabon 0606292551 Jen 0 3.56 2002 Summerland
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name: Jen
average rating: 3.56
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]]> The Likely World 49771542 368 Melanie Conroy-Goldman 1597098086 Jen 0 to-read 4.39 The Likely World
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]]> <![CDATA[The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year]]> 123087784 The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.”

With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.]]> 270 Margaret Renkl 1954118465 Jen 0 to-read 4.17 2023 The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
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]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon]]> 35852435 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

The author of the New York Times bestseller You Are the Placebo, as well as Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and Evolve Your Brain, draws on research conducted at his advanced workshops since 2012 to explore how common people are doing the uncommon to transform themselves and their lives.

Becoming Supernatural marries the some of the most profound scientific information with ancient wisdom to show how people like you and me can experience a more mystical life.

Readers will learn that we are, quite literally supernatural by nature if given the proper knowledge and instruction, and when we learn how to apply that information through various meditations, we should experience a greater expression of our creative abilities; that we have the capacity to tune in to frequencies beyond our material world and receive more orderly coherent streams of consciousness and energy; that we can intentionally change our brain chemistry to initiate profoundly mystical transcendental experiences; and how, if we do this enough times, we can develop the skill of creating a more efficient, balanced, healthy body, a more unlimited mind, and greater access to the realms of spiritual truth. Topics include:

• Demystifying the body’s 7 energy centers and how you can balance them to heal
• How to free yourself from the past by reconditioning your body to a new mind
• How you can create reality in the generous present moment by changing your energy
• The difference between third-dimension creation and fifth-dimension creation
• The secret science of the pineal gland and its role in accessing mystical realms of reality
• The distinction between Space-Time vs. Time-Space realities

And much more...]]> 375 Joe Dispenza 1401953107 Jen 0 to-read 4.24 2017 Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon
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]]> <![CDATA[Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good]]> 40549668
Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde’s invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara’s exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects— from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—creating new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.

Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!]]> 441 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849353263 Jen 0 to-read 4.24 2019 Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
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name: Jen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
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]]> <![CDATA[Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0)]]> 29633913
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.]]> 280 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849352607 Jen 0 to-read 4.27 2017 Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0)
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name: Jen
average rating: 4.27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center]]> 127305688
In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—reveal the freedom and challenges of embracing a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't just the stuff of daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but possible in real life.

Based on years of original reporting and drawing on striking social science research, Cohen argues that we make romantic relationships more fragile by expecting too much of them, while we undermine friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the "loneliness epidemic," Cohen makes the case that one model of a flourishing adulthood—lifelong romantic partnership—isn't enough. A rousing and incisive book, The Other Significant Others challenges us to ask what we want from our relationships—not just what we’re supposed to want—and transforms how we define a fulfilling life.]]> 320 Rhaina Cohen 1250280915 Jen 0 to-read 3.92 2024 The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center
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]]> The Once and Future Witches 49504061
But when the Eastwood sisters--James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna--join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote-and perhaps not even to live-the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There's no such thing as witches. But there will be.]]> 517 Alix E. Harrow 0316422045 Jen 0 to-read 4.01 2020 The Once and Future Witches
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name: Jen
average rating: 4.01
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]]> The Book of Longings 52698452 “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus.”

Raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee, Ana is rebellious and ambitious, a relentless seeker with a brilliant, curious mind and a daring spirit. She yearns for a pursuit worthy of her life, but finds no outlet for her considerable talents. Defying the expectations placed on women, she engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes secret narratives about neglected and silenced women. When she meets the eighteen-year-old Jesus, each is drawn to and enriched by the other’s spiritual and philosophical ideas. He becomes a floodgate for her intellect, but also the awakener of her heart.

Their marriage unfolds with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, James and Simon, and their mother, Mary. Here, Ana’s pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to the Roman occupation of Israel, partially led by her charismatic adopted brother, Judas. She is sustained by her indomitable aunt Yaltha, who is searching for her long-lost daughter, as well as by other women, including her friend Tabitha, who is sold into slavery after she was raped, and Phasaelis, the shrewd wife of Herod Antipas. Ana’s impetuous streak occasionally invites danger. When one such foray forces her to flee Nazareth for her safety shortly before Jesus’s public ministry begins, she makes her way with Yaltha to Alexandria, where she eventually finds refuge and purpose in unexpected surroundings.

Grounded in meticulous historical research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus’s life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring account of one woman’s bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place, and culture devised to silence her.]]> 416 Sue Monk Kidd 052542976X Jen 0 to-read 4.21 2020 The Book of Longings
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]]> The Secret History of Witches 52404899 An ancient and dangerous power is being handed down from mother to daughter through some of the most consequential historic events of the last two centuries.

After Grandmére Ursule gives her life to save her tribe, her magic seems to die with her. Even so, her family keeps the Old Faith, practicing the spells and rites that have been handed from mother to daughter for generations. Until one day, Ursule’s young granddaughter steps into the circle, and magic flows anew.

From early 19th century Brittany to London during the Second World War, five generations of witches fight the battles of their time, deciding how far they are willing to go to protect their family, their heritage, and ultimately, all of our futures.]]> Louisa Morgan Jen 0 to-read 3.87 2017 The Secret History of Witches
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name: Jen
average rating: 3.87
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]]>