Michele's bookshelf: read en-US Sat, 14 Jun 2025 06:25:18 -0700 60 Michele's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Freedom℧ (Daemon, #2) 7132363 The propulsive, shockingly plausible sequel to New York Times bestseller Daemon, the "Greatest. Techno-thriller. Period."*
*William O'Brien, former director of cybersecurity and communications systems policy at the White House

2009 saw one of the most inventive techno-thriller debuts in decades as Daniel Suarez introduced his terrifying and tantalizing vision of a new world order. Daemon captured the attention of the tech community, became a national bestseller, garnered attention from futurists, literary critics, and the halls of government-leaving readers clamoring for the conclusion to Suarez's epic story.

In the opening chapters of Freedom℧, the Daemon is well on its way toward firm control of the modern world, using an expanded network of real-world, dispossessed darknet operatives to tear apart civilization and rebuild it anew. Civil war breaks out in the American Midwest, with the mainstream media stoking public fear in the face of this "Corn Rebellion." Former detective Pete Sebeck, now the Daemon's most famous and most reluctant operative, must lead a small band of enlightened humans in a populist movement designed to protect the new world order.

But the private armies of global business are preparing to crush the Daemon once and for all. In a world of conflicted loyalties, rapidly diminishing government control, and a new choice between free will and the continuing comforts of ignorance, the stakes could not be higher: hanging in the balance is nothing less than democracy's last hope to survive the technology revolution.]]> 406 Daniel Suarez 0525951571 Michele 5 4.27 2010 Freedom℧ (Daemon, #2)
author: Daniel Suarez
name: Michele
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2012/01/01
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Testimony 39088896
At the age of fifty, former prosecutor Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to his law career, his wife, Kindle County, even his country. Still, when he is tapped by the International Criminal Court--an organization charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity--he feels drawn to what will become the most elusive case of his career. Over ten years ago, in the apocalyptic chaos following the Bosnian war, an entire Roma refugee camp vanished. Now for the first time, a witness has stepped Ferko Rincic claims that armed men marched the camp's Gypsy residents to a cave in the middle of the night--and then with a hand grenade set off an avalanche, burying 400 people alive. Only Ferko survived.

Boom's task is to examine Ferko's claims and determinine who might have massacred the Roma. His investigation takes him from the International Criminal Court's base in Holland to the cities and villages of Bosnia and secret meetings in Washington, DC, as Boom sorts through a host of suspects, ranging from Serb paramilitaries, to organized crime gangs, to the US government itself, while also maneuvering among the alliances and treacheries of those connected to the Layton Merriwell, a disgraced US major general desperate to salvage his reputation; Sergeant Major Atilla Doby,a vital cog in American military operations near the camp at the time of the Roma's disappearance; Laza Kajevic, the brutal former leader of the Bosnian Serbs; Esma Czarni, Ferko's alluring barrister; and of course, Ferko himself, on whose testimony the entire case rests-and who may know more than he's telling.

A master of the legal thriller, Scott Turow has returned with his most irresistibly confounding and satisfying novel yet.]]> 576 Scott Turow 1455553557 Michele 0 to-read 3.42 Testimony
author: Scott Turow
name: Michele
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chinese Heritage Cooking From My American Kitchen: Discover Authentic Flavors with Vibrant, Modern Recipes]]> 40607339 From growing up in Beijing to attending culinary school in California, to making her name in the restaurant world and on Top Chef, today Shirley Chung is dishing out new and dazzlingly delicious takes on Chinese cuisine. These recipes are fresh and inspired, yet approachable for home cooks. Here are a few you won’t want to Sweet-and-Sour Baby Back Ribs, Five-Spice Seared Duck Breast with Kumquat Mustard, Scallion Pancakes with Hazelnut Pesto, Seared Scallops with Spicy Black Bean Sauce, Spinach Egg Drop Soup and Beijing-Style Hot Pot.

These recipes use simple ingredients and techniques, but have the standout flavor and texture you expect from top-notch restaurants―no wok required! Plus you’ll find fascinating history and chef’s tips tucked away in the headnotes and instructions that will make you a better cook. Shirley brings the same lively energy to her book that made her a fan-favorite on Top Chef. She’ll make you excited to cook, and her recipes―each with a gorgeous photograph―will have you drooling over the pages. With Shirley in your kitchen, every meal becomes a fun and delicious celebration.

]]> 313 Shirley Chung 1624146805 Michele 0 to-read 3.90 Chinese Heritage Cooking From My American Kitchen: Discover Authentic Flavors with Vibrant, Modern Recipes
author: Shirley Chung
name: Michele
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Undertow 185641
André Deschênes is a hired assassin, but he wants to be so much more. If only he can find a teacher who will forgive his murderous past–and train him to manipulate odds and control probability. It’s called the art of conjuring, and it’s André’s only route to freedom. For the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade Company, and his floating city, Novo Haven, is little more than a company town where humans and aliens alike either work for one tyrannical family–or are destroyed by it. But beneath Novo Haven’s murky waters, within its tangled bayous, reedy banks, and back alleys, revolution is stirring. And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance. . . .]]> 368 Elizabeth Bear 0553589059 Michele 0 to-read, woman-author-scifi 3.44 2013 Undertow
author: Elizabeth Bear
name: Michele
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/21
shelves: to-read, woman-author-scifi
review:

]]> Shroud 230237860 On a planet shrouded in darkness, a stranded crew must fight for survival. But, the darkness may have plans of its own in this wildly original story from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of Children of Time.

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists – and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

 ]]> 453 Adrian Tchaikovsky Michele 0 to-read, peter-watts-rec 4.50 2025 Shroud
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Michele
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read, peter-watts-rec
review:

]]> Cher: The Memoir, Part 1 214363953
After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir.

Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center.

She is a lifelong activist and philanthropist.

As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship.

With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono—and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.

Cher: The Memoir reveals the daughter, the sister, the wife, the lover, the mother, and the superstar.

It is a life too immense for only one book.]]> 432 Cher 0008355371 Michele 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Cher: The Memoir, Part 1
author: Cher
name: Michele
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms: Two Novels]]> 15798121 Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy.
 
Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany’s shares not only the author’s philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany’s; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid “that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”
 
Other Voices, Other Rooms begins as thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father—who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl. Despite its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence, this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel revels in small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.]]> 304 Truman Capote 0812994361 Michele 0 to-read 3.78 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms: Two Novels
author: Truman Capote
name: Michele
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> Carol 10117779 The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.]]> 320 Claire Morgan 1408808978 Michele 0 to-read 4.00 1952 Carol
author: Claire Morgan
name: Michele
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[1666: Plague, War, and Hellfire]]> 28696607
Shedding light on these dramatic events and their context, historian Rebecca Rideal reveals an unprecedented period of terror and triumph. Based in original archival research drawing on little-known sources, 1666 opens with the fiery destruction of London before taking readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters.

While the central events of this significant year were ones of devastation and defeat, 1666 also offers a glimpse of the incredible scientific and artistic progress being made at that time, from Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity to the establishment of The London Gazette. It was in this year that John Milton completed Paradise Lost, Frances Stewart posed for the iconic image of Britannia, and a young architect named Christopher Wren proposed a plan for a new London—a stone phoenix to rise from the charred ashes of the old city.

With flair and style, 1666 exposes readers to a city and a country on the cusp of modernity and a series of events that altered the course of history.]]> 304 Rebecca Rideal 1250097061 Michele 0 to-read 3.77 2016 1666: Plague, War, and Hellfire
author: Rebecca Rideal
name: Michele
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler]]> 182761575
In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation.

Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war.

Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.]]> 304 Peter Pomerantsev 1541774728 Michele 0 to-read, rick-wilson-rec 4.10 2024 How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
author: Peter Pomerantsev
name: Michele
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)]]> 150247395
Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820702 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.28 2024 The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Michele
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, liviu-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Letter to the Luminous Deep (The Sunken Archive, #1)]]> 63879533
A charming fantasy set in an underwater world with magical academia and a heartwarming penpal romance, perfect for fans of A Marvellous Light and Emily Wilde's Encylopaedia of Faeries.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.

Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

A year later, E.'s sister Sophy, and Henerey's brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery of their siblings' disappearances with the letters, sketches and field notes left behind. As they uncover the wondrous love their siblings shared, Sophy and Vyerin learn the key to their disappearance - and what it could mean for life as they know it.]]> 432 Sylvie Cathrall 0356521095 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 3.66 2024 A Letter to the Luminous Deep (The Sunken Archive, #1)
author: Sylvie Cathrall
name: Michele
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, liviu-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Exodus (Archimedes Engine, #1)]]> 205670068
Forty thousand years ago, humanity fled a dying Earth. Traveling in massive arkships, these brave pioneers spread out across the galaxy to find a new home. After traveling thousands of light-years, one fleet of arkships arrived at Centauri, a dense cluster of stars with a vast array of potentially habitable planets. The survivors of Earth signaled to the remaining arkships that humanity had finally found its new home among the stars.

Thousands of years later, the Centauri Cluster has flourished. The original settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials and divided themselves into powerful Dominions. One of the most influential is that of the Crown Celestials, an alliance of five great houses that controls vast areas of Centauri. As arkships continue to arrive, the remaining humans and their descendants must fight for survival against overwhelming odds or be forced into serving the Crown Dominion.

Among those yearning for a better life is Finn, for whom Earth is not a memory but merely a footnote from humanity’s ancient history. Born on one of the Crown Dominion worlds, Finn has known nothing but the repressive rule of the Celestials, though he dreams of the possibility of boundless space beyond his home.

When another arkship from Earth, previously thought lost, unexpectedly arrives, Finn sees his chance to embrace a greater destiny and become a Traveler—one of a group of brave heroes dedicated to ensuring humanity’s future by journeying into the vast unknown of distant space.]]> 928 Peter F. Hamilton 0593357663 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.15 2024 Exodus (Archimedes Engine, #1)
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Michele
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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review:

]]> Rebel (Ascent to Empire #2) 207298045 HE NEVER WANTED TO BE A REBEL

The Five Hundred, the elite families who rule the Terran Federation, control its political power and its wealth, and they’ve grown steadily wealthier and more powerful, thanks to the war against the Terran League. War may be hard on the people who get caught in its path, but it’s very good for business, in the short term, and the Five Hundred own the shipyards that build the Navy’s ships. They own virtually all the industry that produces the weapons and matériel the war consumes so voraciously . . . and they’ve made damn sure someone else does the dying.

True, there are a few flies in the Five Hundred’s ointment.

There’s the growing hatred and resentment of the Fringe Worlds, whose children do eighty percent of the dying in the Five Hundred’s war. But the Five Hundred have made sure the Fringe knows what will happen to any system that goes ”out of compliance.”

There are the lunatic conspiracy nuts who insist that the alien Rishathan Sphere is secretly aiding the League’s military, but the Five Hundred have forced them to keep their mouths shut where it matters.

And then there’s Terrence Murphy, a man of honor who loves the Federation, who springs from the Five Hundred, yet knows it for what it is and is determined to speak for its victims. But the five hundred have dispatched ample force to deal with him and his handful of lunatic followers.

Unfortunately, the Fringe has paid enough of its children’s lives, and it no longer cares what may happen if it dares to defy the Five Hundred.

Worse, the lunatic conspiracy nuts were right, and the Rish have planned carefully for the Federation’s destruction.

And, worst of all, the Five Hundred have fatally underestimated Terrence Murphy.]]> 496 David Weber 1982193603 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.48 2024 Rebel (Ascent to Empire #2)
author: David Weber
name: Michele
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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review:

]]> Archipelago 204252177
Then, out of the blue, they send a message. The leagues are invited to visit. But why? Why now?

Ren Markov is a veteran diplomat for the idealistic Core Planets, where he acts as an agent of subversion, toppling governments and spoiling revolutions. Dispatched on a mission into the Arc, Ren discovers stunning worlds and a radical, ecologically obsessed society that is both compelling and disturbing. But he faces a terrible decision. Should he protect this strange new society, or should he fear it and allow it to be crushed?

Machiavellian plots swirl as the leagues struggle for influence and control. 'Archipelago' takes readers on a journey through interstellar politics, revolution, and the diverging ethics of a vast diaspora. Ren is in search of his very identity as he chooses between salvation and annihilation.]]> 410 H.R. Hawkins Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.15 2024 Archipelago
author: H.R. Hawkins
name: Michele
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, liviu-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)]]> 201930181
Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team.  Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure.

Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to learning to understand – and manipulate – the Carryx themselves. With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination.  He will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. This is where his story begins.]]> 422 James S.A. Corey 031652557X Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.11 2024 The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Michele
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, liviu-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Many-Threaded Tapestry (Destiny's Crucible Book 9)]]> 215055415 The future of Anyar is being woven with threads spread across the planet. Secrets revealed. Coalitions to form. An implacable enemy to resist. One thing is certain. Once again, the future of Anyar has taken a new turn.

An enigmatic alien race scattered five human castaways across the planet Anyar, far enough apart they should never meet. Castaway Joseph Colsco, now known as Yozef Kolsko, finds himself at the center of resistance to an empire with ambitions to rule the world by any means necessary. Narthon must be thwarted. Alliances must be secured. Plans must be made. Complicating Yozef’s life is that he has studiously kept secret his origin despite questions about his innovations introduced centuries early for Anyar's civilizations. Now, he is not alone with his secret. Three other castaways find their way, on their own or not, to join him on the island nation of Caedellium. Joy at the latest arrival is severely tempered by learning castaway Robin Kelly had been held by Narthon and revealed everything Yozef had kept secret. Unable to discern Narthon's intent, he is forced to decide whether to reveal the secret to family, friends, colleagues, and potential allies in resisting Narthon. Thus, he must navigate a life too complex for multiple persons—and at times seemingly impossible for him alone.

]]> 530 Olan Thorensen Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.37 A Many-Threaded Tapestry (Destiny's Crucible Book 9)
author: Olan Thorensen
name: Michele
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Deep Black (Arcana Imperii, #2)]]> 198267816 They are the lifeblood of human-occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.
And now, out in the darkness of space, something is targeting them.

Nbaro and her friends are close to locating their enemy, in this gripping sequel to the award-nominated Artifact Space, but they are running out of time - and their allies are running out of patience . . .

Written by one of the most exciting new voices in SF, this space thriller will keep readers on the edge of their seats.]]> 510 Miles Cameron 1399615068 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.23 2024 Deep Black (Arcana Imperii, #2)
author: Miles Cameron
name: Michele
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Yesterday's Paper (The Knocknashee Story, #2)]]> 216619654
Ireland's neutrality offers little shelter from the war's far-reaching impact, and across the Atlantic, Richard witnesses a nation divided on intervention. Meanwhile, in sleepy Knocknashee, a twelve-year-old mystery surrounding a stolen child resurfaces, shattering long-held beliefs.

Fate seems determined to keep Grace and Richard apart, thwarting their plans to meet, and the vast Atlantic is not the only thing separating them. From the gentle green hills of Ireland, to the busy newspaper rooms of New York, from a London bracing for war to a Paris on the brink of invasion, "Yesterday's Paper" continues the sweeping saga of Grace and Richard as they navigate love, loss, and the turbulent tides of history.

In this gripping tale of resilience and romance, the personal and the political collide, weaving an unforgettable tapestry of lives caught in the crosswinds of a world at war.]]> 355 Jean Grainger Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.57 Yesterday's Paper (The Knocknashee Story, #2)
author: Jean Grainger
name: Michele
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Old Guard (House Adamant, #2)]]> 209823724 At the beginning of everything
Hope can be born… or destroyed

For months, Princess Lorraine Adamant has fled from star system to star system in a desperate attempt to evade the minions of her uncle, the man who murdered her entire family to seize power in the Star Kingdom of Adamant.

Thanks to the crew of her ship and her loyal bodyguard, Vigo Jarret, Lorraine has finally reached her goal: the homeworld, Earth. There, she plans to lay her case before the United Worlds, the oldest and greatest of humanity’s nations.

But to an ancient democracy, the trials of an obscure kingdom are hardly relevant. Lorraine must turn her mind from war to diplomacy, to convince the homeworld to honor its oaths and save her Kingdom.

One way… or another.]]> 391 Glynn Stewart Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.56 2024 The Old Guard (House Adamant, #2)
author: Glynn Stewart
name: Michele
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, liviu-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Traitor Son (Empire of the Stars, #1)]]> 218333744 A battle-scarred knight who dreams of peace. A secret princess who knows the Empire’s darkest truths. And a marriage written in blood and betrayal.



After seven years of brutal war, Remin of Andelin has become the Empire’s greatest hero—and its most feared general. His reward may be more dangerous than any war. After a campaign he was never meant to survive, his prize is a ravaged duchy and the hand of a princess no one’s ever heard of.



Princess Ophele Agnephus has spent her life in an exile prison, the illegitimate child of the divine Emperor and a disgrace to the sacred stars. She never asked to be wed to a brutal conqueror, or to leave behind the only home she’s ever known for a cottage on a dangerous frontier. Trapped by her father’s bloody legacy, she can only choose whether she will protect secrets that could shatter the Empire—or step out of the shadows she’s lived in all her life.



Remin wants no crown, no glory. Only a home for his knights, and a future built on something better than vengeance. But in the Andelin valley, where devils stalk through the ruins of bloody conquest, even peace is a battle.



Epic in scope and intimate in heart, Traitor Son is a romantic fantasy about love in the ruins of a century of war—and the impossible dream of peace. Perfect for fans of The Witcher’s monsters, Game of Thrones’ high-stakes strategy, and Outlander’s sweeping history and unforgettable romance.



Begin an epic journey with Traitor Son—and witness the beginning of a love that could redeem an Empire.]]> 394 Melissa J. Cave Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.08 Traitor Son (Empire of the Stars, #1)
author: Melissa J. Cave
name: Michele
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe]]> 43685238 From the world-renowned physicist and bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, a captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose

In both time and space, the cosmos is astoundingly vast, and yet is governed by simple, elegant, universal mathematical laws.

On this cosmic timeline, our human era is spectacular but fleeting. Someday, we know, we will all die. And, we know, so too will the universe itself.

Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to understand it. Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe's beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless, or eternal. Through a series of nested stories that explain distinct but interwoven layers of reality-from the quantum mechanics to consciousness to black holes-Greene provides us with a clearer sense of how we came to be, a finer picture of where we are now, and a firmer understanding of where we are headed.

Yet all this understanding, which arose with the emergence of life, will dissolve with its conclusion. Which leaves us with one realization: during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the charge of finding our own meaning.

Let us embark.]]> 384 Brian Greene Michele 0 to-read 4.01 2020 Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe
author: Brian Greene
name: Michele
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2020
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett 0385550367 Michele 0 to-read 4.44 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Michele
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
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]]> Reagan: His Life and Legend 205478853
From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained an enigma—a man of profound contradictions—even to those closest to him. Believing that this inscrutability contributed to Reagan’s appeal, Max Boot sought to reveal the real man behind the mythology. Drawing on more than a hundred new interviews and thousands of newly available documents, Reagan tells the epic story of the Depression-era poor boy who transfixed the nation. Yet Boot, a one-time Republican policy advisor, offers no apologia, depicting a man with a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing. Providing revelatory insights into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.]]> 880 Max Boot 0871409445 Michele 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Reagan: His Life and Legend
author: Max Boot
name: Michele
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 49731704 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780307279286.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.]]> 542 Patrick Radden Keefe Michele 0 to-read 4.53 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Michele
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2018
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date added: 2024/10/29
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It]]> 13344951 67 Mark Cuban 0983988536 Michele 0 to-read 4.03 2011 How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It
author: Mark Cuban
name: Michele
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction]]> 12951 nouvelles, which represent the author in both his early and late phases. From the apparitions of evil that haunt the governess in “The Turn of the Screw” to the startling self-scrutiny of an egotistical man in “The Beast in the Jungle,” the mysterious turnings of human behavior are coolly and masterfully observed—proving Henry James to be a master of psychological insight as well as one of the finest prose stylists of modern English literature.

Includes “The Turn of the Screw” ‧ Daisy Miller ‧ Washington Square ‧ “The Beast in the Jungle” ‧ “The Jolly Corner”]]> 527 Henry James 0553210599 Michele 0 to-read 3.80 1937 The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction
author: Henry James
name: Michele
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Two Memoirs]]> 275758 397 Primo Levi 0671605410 Michele 0 to-read 4.35 1987 Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Two Memoirs
author: Primo Levi
name: Michele
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy]]> 205064709 From the New York Times bestselling former NATO commander comes a riveting historical novel that charts the coming-of-age of a gifted but immature young naval officer as he is tested in the crucible of World War II in the Pacific
Scott Bradley James arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, as a plebe in the class of 1941 without a terribly good idea why he wants to be a naval officer, other than that his father was a sailor, and he wants to see the world, whatever that means. Scott and his roommate become fast friends, and, after surviving scrapes of their own making, the two fetch up at Pearl Harbor. War is brewing, and their class has graduated early. They have been sent to battle stations.Admiral James Stavridis is an acclaimed novelist, a decorated military leader, and a great student of military history. He draws on it all to capture the experience of being storm-tossed by the bloody first years of the Second World War. Scott Bradley James is a talented young officer, but he has a lot to learn. And war will have a lot to teach him.

The Restless Wave offers a gripping account of the U.S. Navy’s astonishing progress through the first three years of the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor through to Midway, Guadalcanal, and the Coral Sea. A story of character under pressure in the harshest of proving grounds, it is written with careful fidelity to the truths of war that have made sea stories essential to the art of storytelling since Odysseus.]]> 400 James G. Stavridis 0593494075 Michele 0 to-read 3.87 2024 The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy
author: James G. Stavridis
name: Michele
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First and (Finally) Take Control of Your Career]]> 53265634 Indispensable reading for anyone seeking to improve their professional selves.
--Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When

An essential guide for how to snap out of autopilot and become your own best advocate, with candid anecdotes and easy-to-adopt steps, from veteran HR specialist and popular podcast host Laurie Ruettimann



Chances are you've spent the past few months cooped up inside, buried under a relentless news cycle and work that never seems to switch off. Millions of us worldwide are overworked, exhausted, and trying our hardest--yet not getting the recognition we deserve. It's time for a fix.

Top career coach and HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann knows firsthand that work can get a hell of a lot better. A decade ago, Ruettimann was uninspired, blaming others and herself for the unhappiness she felt. Until she had an epiphany: if she wanted a fulfilling existence, she couldn't sit around and wait for change. She had to be her own leader. She had to truly take ahold of life--the good, the bad, and the downright ugly--in order to transform her future.

Today, as businesses prioritize their bottom line over employee satisfaction and workers become increasingly isolated, the need to safeguard your well-being is crucial. And though this sounds intimidating, it's easier to do than you think. Through tactical advice on how to approach work in a smart and healthy manner, which includes knowing when to sign off for the day, doubling down on our capacity to learn, fixing those finances, and beating impostor syndrome once and for all, Ruettimann lays out the framework necessary to champion your interests and create a life you actually enjoy.

Packed with advice and stories of others who regained control of their lives, Betting on You is a game-changing must-read for how to radically improve your day-to-day, working more effectively and enthusiastically starting now.]]> 240 Laurie Ruettimann 1250269806 Michele 0 to-read 3.85 2021 Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First and (Finally) Take Control of Your Career
author: Laurie Ruettimann
name: Michele
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve]]> 203164397 Behavioral scientist Alison Fragale offers powerful new insights and a practical playbook for women to advance in any workplace, full of tips, tricks, and strategies to help secure that elusive corner office.

Over decades of research, speaking engagements, and mentorship, psychologist and professor Alison Fragale encountered recurring questions from high powered and early career women: How do women thread the needle of kindness and competence in the workplace? How can women earn credit for their accomplishments, negotiate better, and navigate complex office politics without losing the goodwill of their peers?

Fragale investigated and determined that many women's workplace issues boil down to the perception of others. No degree, title, or paycheck will raise a woman's workplace stature unless it also affects how other people respect and regard her. Acknowledging this roadblock, Fragale pulls back the curtain on how we can change how others see us by developing our standing as a "likeable badass." By cultivating perceptions of warmth and assertiveness, women can achieve the kind of reputation that leads to a seat at the table and a fulfilling career path.

Likeable Badass is equal parts behavioral science and life hacks, weaving together rigorous research with actionable advice and impactful stories from a diverse array of women. This is a warm, heartening book written for women of all stripes, as well as their allies, who want evidence-based, practical strategies for success, served with a side of inspiration and humor.]]> 256 Alison Fragale 0385549148 Michele 0 to-read 4.29 Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve
author: Alison Fragale
name: Michele
average rating: 4.29
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rating: 0
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]]> Planet of Clay 58341926 144 Samar Yazbek 1642860972 Michele 0 to-read, poingu 3.57 2021 Planet of Clay
author: Samar Yazbek
name: Michele
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read, poingu
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]]> Chouette 58769648 An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis.

Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.

Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.]]> 251 Claire Oshetsky 0063066696 Michele 5 to-read 3.84 2021 Chouette
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: Michele
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> Welcome to Braggsville 23751628
Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D'aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond. Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until one disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends: Louis, a "kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen from Chicago. They dub themselves the "4 Little Indians."

But everything changes in the group's alternative history class, when D'aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, recently rebranded "Patriot Days." His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires Candice to suggest a "performative intervention" to protest the reenactment. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the 4 Little Indians descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences.]]> 368 T. Geronimo Johnson 0062302140 Michele 0 to-read 3.33 2015 Welcome to Braggsville
author: T. Geronimo Johnson
name: Michele
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> A Little Lumpen Novelita 23263712 A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women.


“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager—“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”—she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness at night, and drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can drift lower…



Electric, tense with foreboding, and written in jagged, propulsive short chapters, A Little Lumpen Novelita—one of the first novels Roberto Bolano ever published—delivers a surprising, fractured tale of taking control of one’s fate.]]> 129 Roberto Bolaño 0811223361 Michele 0 to-read 3.61 2002 A Little Lumpen Novelita
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Michele
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> Summer (Seasons Quartet #4) 38924292 The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer.

2 June--It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn't have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, that your thoughts haven't grasped it yet, and that it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neither exists nor doesn't exist.

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.

At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.]]> 413 Karl Ove Knausgård 0399563407 Michele 0 to-read 4.13 2016 Summer (Seasons Quartet #4)
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Michele
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> In the Country: Stories 25641558 In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.]]> 305 Mia Alvar 0385352840 Michele 0 to-read 4.09 2015 In the Country: Stories
author: Mia Alvar
name: Michele
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> Hell House 6564706
Dr. Lionel Barrett, the physicist, accompanied by the mediums, travel to the Belasco House in Maine, which has been abandoned and sealed since 1949 after a decade of drug addiction, alcoholism, and debauchery. For one night, Barrett and his colleagues investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townfolks refer to it as the Hell House.]]> 302 Richard Matheson 1429913649 Michele 0 to-read 3.78 1971 Hell House
author: Richard Matheson
name: Michele
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> Book of Numbers: A Novel 25392295 NATIONAL BESTSELLER ‧ “A wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The NetanyahusNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL “Shatteringly powerful . . . I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.”—Harold Bloom The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication. Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual. Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do. Praise for Book of Numbers“The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet.”—Rolling Stone “A startlingly talented novelist.”—The Wall Street Journal“Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen’s literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books]]> 594 Joshua Cohen 0812996925 Michele 0 to-read 3.01 2015 Book of Numbers: A Novel
author: Joshua Cohen
name: Michele
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants]]> 39693837
Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II — whose commission he leaves unfinished — and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants — constructed from real historical fragments — is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.]]> 125 Mathias Énard 0811227057 Michele 0 to-read 3.94 2010 Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants
author: Mathias Énard
name: Michele
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The story of the plants and animals that time has left behind]]> 12831337 402 Richard Fortey 0307957411 Michele 0 to-read 3.97 2011 Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The story of the plants and animals that time has left behind
author: Richard Fortey
name: Michele
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> The Red-Haired Woman 34088341 274 Orhan Pamuk 0451494431 Michele 0 to-read 3.78 2016 The Red-Haired Woman
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Michele
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> The Twelfth Department 18158166
Shortly after Yuri’s arrival, however, Korolev receives an urgent call from his boss—it seems an important man has been murdered, and Korolev is the only detective they’re willing to assign to this sensitive case. In fact, Korolev realizes almost immediately that the layers of sensitivity and secrecy surrounding this case far exceed his paygrade. And the consequences of interfering with a case tied to State Security or the NKVD can be severe—you might lose your job, if you’re lucky. Your whole family might die if you’re not. Korolev is suddenly faced with much more than just discovering a murderer’s identity; he must decide how far he’ll go to see justice served . . . and what he’s willing to do to protect his family.

In The Twelfth Department, William Ryan's portrait of a policeman struggling to survive in one of the most volatile and dangerous eras of modern history is mesmerizing.


]]> 352 William Ryan 1250032059 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.33 2013 The Twelfth Department
author: William Ryan
name: Michele
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> I Am No One 28683055 A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched? As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious as to make him an enemy of the state. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is "no one," as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.— Included in NPR's Best of 2016 Book Concierge  ]]> 323 Patrick Flanery 1101905867 Michele 0 to-read 3.20 2016 I Am No One
author: Patrick Flanery
name: Michele
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz]]> 30623130
In 1944, on the morning of her twenty-third birthday, Isabella Leitner and her family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp. There, she and her siblings relied on one another’s love and support to remain hopeful in the midst of the great evil surrounding them.

In Fragments of Isabella , Leitner reveals a glimpse of humanity in a world of darkness. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a celebration of the strength of the human spirit as it passes through fire,” this powerful and luminous Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir, written thirty years after the author’s escape from the Nazis, has become a classic of holocaust literature and human survival.
 
This ebook features rare images from the author’s estate.]]> 105 Isabella Leitner 1504036662 Michele 0 4.23 1978 Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz
author: Isabella Leitner
name: Michele
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read, women-authors, women-author-nonfiction, holocaust, wwii
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Naked God (Night's Dawn, #3)]]> 45260 1174 Peter F. Hamilton 0333725034 Michele 5 4.21 1999 The Naked God (Night's Dawn, #3)
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Michele
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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]]> The Mare 26254797 Veronica, here is Mary Gaitskill’s most poignant and powerful work yet—the story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.
 
Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul, who wonder what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet’s  encounter with the horses at the stable down the road—especially with an abused, unruly mare called Fugly Girl. With strong supporting characters—Velvet’s abusive mother, an eccentric horse trainer, a charismatic older boy who awakens Velvet’s nascent passion—The Mare traces Velvet’s journey between the vital, violent world of the inner city and the world of the small-town stable.
 
In Gaitskill’s hands, the timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with a timely story of people from different races and classes trying to meet one another honestly. The Mare is raw, heart-stirring, and original.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 432 Mary Gaitskill 1101870621 Michele 0 to-read 3.83 2015 The Mare
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Michele
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> The Sand Sea 53445772 "An astounding epic novel of J.R.R. Tolkien proportions!"
— Steven Pressfield, Bestselling author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art

Raiders of the Lost Ark playing A Game of Thrones

The Sand Sea takes place on an alternative Earth roiled by war and conquest that mirrors our own Gilded Age. The treasure that ignites greed and folly in this parallel world is not petroleum, but beserite—a mineral of immeasurable value.

Captivated by an ancient prophecy and the call of adventure, inexperienced nobleman and scholar Peter Harmon (think of a young Winston Churchill-like naif) joins an expedition to stake his nation’s claim to a global empire.

Harmon’s destination is a vast and inhospitable desert halfway around the world, dominated by the iron-fisted Grand Vizer Jemojeen Jongdar. A tyrant on a mission to secure the ancient and supernatural Staff of the Ram, the Lion, and the Serpent, Jongdar knows the truth that others can only imagine: The one who controls the staff will possess the power to rule the world.

Before he can seize his destiny, Jongdar must find and destroy the one person capable of thwarting his ambition, the rightful heir to the Sand Sea realm, an innocent woman named Selena Savanar.

Can the brave and indomitable Selena accept her true destiny and rally her people in the eye of a gathering storm? To do so will require her to outwit the man who burned her father alive and left her an orphan and beggar a lifetime ago. Or will Peter Harmon and the cadre of opportunists he rides with conquer the divided empire?

With the mythic structure of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in a world as rich and real as George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, The Sand Sea is an immersive experience made to order for epic fantasy fans and anyone who enjoys grand-scale historical fiction.]]> 1043 Michael McClellan 1645010228 Michele 0 to-read, liviu-rec 4.22 2020 The Sand Sea
author: Michael McClellan
name: Michele
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[This America: The Case for the Nation]]> 43862308 This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.



With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past.



Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration.



Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.”



A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.]]> 160 Jill Lepore 1631496417 Michele 0 to-read, remnick-rec 4.03 2019 This America: The Case for the Nation
author: Jill Lepore
name: Michele
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[These Truths: A History of the United States]]> 43726521 New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?


These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.]]> 960 Jill Lepore 0393357422 Michele 0 to-read, political 4.38 2018 These Truths: A History of the United States
author: Jill Lepore
name: Michele
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, political
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]]> Hope Against Hope 106459 442 Nadezhda Mandelstam 0375753168 Michele 0 to-read, remnick-rec 4.38 1970 Hope Against Hope
author: Nadezhda Mandelstam
name: Michele
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)]]> 251001 224 Kwame Anthony Appiah 039332933X Michele 0 to-read, remnick-rec 3.60 2006 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)
author: Kwame Anthony Appiah
name: Michele
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
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]]> On Freedom 203956715 A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On TyrannyTimothy Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times.” As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for.Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.]]> 368 Timothy Snyder 0593728726 Michele 0 to-read 4.29 2024 On Freedom
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Michele
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> Open Season (Joe Pickett, #1) 244102
As Joe digs deeper into the murders, he soon discovers that the outfitter brought more than death to his backdoor: he brought Joe an endangered species, thought to be extinct, which is now living in his woodpile. But if word of the existence of this endangered species gets out, it will destroy any chance of InterWest, a multi-national natural gas company, building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep. The closer Joe comes to the truth behind the outfitter murders, the endangered species and InterWest, the closer he comes to losing everything he holds dear.]]> 278 C.J. Box 042518546X Michele 0 to-read 3.93 2001 Open Season (Joe Pickett, #1)
author: C.J. Box
name: Michele
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Curtis Stone's What's For Dinner? Simple Recipes for Every Night of the Week]]> 15798643 320 Curtis Stone 0449015874 Michele 0 to-read 4.06 Curtis Stone's What's For Dinner? Simple Recipes for Every Night of the Week
author: Curtis Stone
name: Michele
average rating: 4.06
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself]]> 10127008
The relentless pursuit of high self-esteem has become a virtual religion—and a tyrannical one at that. Our ultracompetitive culture tells us we need to be constantly above average to feel good about ourselves, but there is always someone more attractive, successful, or intelligent than we are. And even when we do manage to grab hold of high self-esteem for a brief moment, we can't seem to keep it. Our sense of self-worth goes up and down like a ping-pong ball, rising and falling in lockstep with our latest success or failure.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to self-esteem that many experts believe is a better and more effective path to happiness: self-compassion. The research of Dr. Kristin Neff and other leading psychologists indicates that people who are compassionate toward their failings and imperfections experience greater well-being than those who repeatedly judge themselves. The feelings of security and self-worth provided by self-compassion are also highly stable, kicking in precisely when self-esteem falls down. This book powerfully demonstrates why it's so important to be self-compassionate and give yourself the same caring support you'd give to a good friend.

This groundbreaking work will show you how to let go of debilitating self-criticism and finally learn to be kind to yourself. Using solid empirical research, personal stories, practical exercises, and humor, Dr. Neff—the world's foremost expert on self-compassion—explains how to heal destructive emotional patterns so that you can be healthier, happier, and more effective. Engaging, highly readable, and eminently accessible, this book has the power to change your life.]]> 320 Kristin Neff 0061733512 Michele 0 to-read 4.11 2011 Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
author: Kristin Neff
name: Michele
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Bobby Flay Fit: 200 Recipes for a Healthy Lifestyle: A Cookbook]]> 33656178 Cook, eat, and be fit with 150 recipes from Bobby Flay, whose approach to healthy eating is all about flavor—not eliminating anything from your diet.
 
With a profession that has him constantly developing and tasting new recipes, chef Bobby Flay does not eschew any foods: bread, bacon, and butter are still all on the table. His secret to staying healthy is to have on hand an arsenal of low-calorie flavor bombs—like rubs, relishes, and marinades—to transform lean proteins, whole grains, and fresh produce into craveworthy meals at home. In Bobby Flay Fit, Bobby shares smoothies and juices, breakfast bowls, snacks to fuel workouts, hearty salads, nourishing soups, satisfying dinners, and lightened-up desserts. With fitness tips and a look into the chef’s daily healthy routines, this cookbook is for those who want to eat right without overhauling their pantries or sacrificing taste.]]> 256 Bobby Flay 0385345933 Michele 0 to-read 3.63 2017 Bobby Flay Fit: 200 Recipes for a Healthy Lifestyle: A Cookbook
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Brunch at Bobby's: 140 Recipes for the Best Part of the Weekend: A Cookbook]]> 22693817 At long last, Bobby shares his simplest, most sought-after recipes—while still delivering his signature intense flavors.
 
Bobby Flay may be best known for his skills at the grill, but brunch is his favorite meal of the week. In Brunch @ Bobby’s he includes 140 recipes starting with the lip-smacking cocktails, both spiked and virgin, that we have come to expect from him, along with hot and iced coffees and teas. He then works his way through eggs; pancakes, waffles, and French toast (including flavored syrups and spreads); pastries (a first) and breads; salads and sandwiches; and side dishes. Pull up a seat and enjoy a Sangria Sunrise, Carrot Cake Pancakes with Maple-Cream Cheese Drizzle, Sautéed Bitter Green Omelets, and Wild Mushroom-Yukon Gold Hash. This is how Bobby does brunch.]]> 256 Bobby Flay 0385345895 Michele 0 to-read 4.19 2015 Brunch at Bobby's: 140 Recipes for the Best Part of the Weekend: A Cookbook
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> Bobby Flay's Grill It! 2255989
Whether you’ve picked up corn at a local farmstand or chicken breasts at the supermarket, a fantastically flavorful, ridiculously simple grilled feast is right at your fingertips with Bobby Flay’s Grill It! Packed with the innovative marinades, sauces, vinaigrettes, and rubs that have helped make Bobby a celebrity chef and leading restaurateur, this beautiful cookbook will help you transform basic ingredients into grilled masterpieces year-round.

Bobby knows how you shop and cook and knows you think “I want burgers tonight”–not “I want to do a main course on the grill.” As a result, the book is conveniently organized by ingredient, with chapters covering juicy beef steaks and succulent shrimp, of course, as well as perhaps less traditional grill fare such as asparagus, fruit, lamb, scallops, potatoes, and squash, so you can expand your backyard repertoire. Bobby teaches you how to grill each staple perfectly while also offering an arsenal of ideas for how to transform your favorite ingredients into something inventive and satisfying such as Grilled Chicken Thighs with Green Olives and Sherry Vinegar-Orange Sauce or Grilled Steak with Balsamic-Rosemary Butter.

A truly comprehensive grill guide, Bobby Flay’s Grill It! also includes:

    * Bobby’s take on charcoal versus gas grills (and how to pick one whatever your preference and budget)
    * A list of indispensable grilling tools
    * A guide to stocking the perfect grill pantry
    * A resource guide for high-quality ingredients, supplies, and accessories

Simply put, Bobby Flay’s Grill It! is Bobby at his best. No matter what you choose to grill (or what looks best when you actually get to the store), Bobby helps you create an easy meal that is fresh, flavorful, and fun to cook. This is the new, must-have guide to becoming a grilling guru in your own right.]]> 288 Bobby Flay 0307351424 Michele 0 to-read 4.19 2008 Bobby Flay's Grill It!
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Bobby Flay's Burgers, Fries, and Shakes]]> 6261197
Though he doesn’t believe in messing with delicious certified Angus chuck (just salt and pepper on the patty–no “meatloaf” burgers here), Bobby loves adding flavorful relishes and condiments to elevate the classic burger. Once you’ve learned what goes into making that burger (from how to shape it so it cooks up perfectly to melting the cheese just so), go to town with Bobby's favorite combinations of additions. Try the Cheyenne Burger, which gets slathered with homemade barbecue sauce and then piled high with bacon and shoestring onion rings, or the Santa Fe Burger, topped with a blistered poblano, queso sauce, and crumbled blue corn tortilla chips. And although Bobby’s personal preference is for beef, turkey can be substituted in any burger, and a handful of salmon and tuna burger recipes are included for those looking for leaner options.

After you’ve mastered the burger, discover Bobby’s secrets to cooking up the best French fries–whether they’re fried, grilled, or oven roasted, or made from spuds, sweet potatoes, or even plantains–as well as homemade potato chips and onions rings. Wash it all down with a creamy shake, from Fresh Mint—Chocolate Speckled Milkshake to Blackberry Cheesecake Milkshake (or a spiked adult variation).

With the opening of Bobby’s Burger Palace in Lake Grove, New York, on Long Island–and with more locations to come–Bobby has achieved burger, fry, and shake bliss in the world. For outdoor summer bashes and casual weeknight meals that even the kids will get excited about, Bobby Flay’s Burgers, Fries & Shakes will share that bliss and remind you just why the burger is such a beloved American original.]]> 160 Bobby Flay 0307460630 Michele 0 to-read 4.25 2009 Bobby Flay's Burgers, Fries, and Shakes
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Bobby Flay's Throwdown!: More Than 100 Recipes from Food Network's Ultimate Cooking Challenge: A Cookbook]]> 8167200 you ready?
 
Every week on Throwdown!, celebrity chef and restaurateur Bobby Flay goes head-to-head with cooks who have staked their claim as masters of an iconic dish—buffalo wings, chicken cacciatore, or sticky buns, for example—even though he may never have cooked these things before. The results are always entertaining—and delicious. In his first-ever cookbook collaboration with Food Network, Bobby shares the recipes and fun from his popular show.
 
For each episode, both Bobby’s recipe and his challenger’s are included, comprising a cross-country tour of regional specialties and good-hearted competitive spirit. Travel to San Antonio for puffy tacos, Philadelphia for cheesesteaks, Harlem for fried chicken and waffles, and Charleston for coconut cake. Try both dishes to pick your favorite, or challenge friends and family to a battle of your own. Either way, you’ll find tons of fantastic flavors in this best-of-the-best book from the first seven seasons of Throwdown!.
 
The ultimate companion cookbook to one of America’s favorite food shows, Bobby Flay’s Throwdown! lets home cooks and fans in on the action, featuring favorite Throwdown! moments and behind-the-scenes peeks alongside beautiful, all-new color food photography created just for this book. So if Bobby Flay ever strolls into your backyard asking “Are you ready for a Throwdown?” you definitely will be!
]]> 272 Bobby Flay 0307719162 Michele 0 to-read 4.07 2010 Bobby Flay's Throwdown!: More Than 100 Recipes from Food Network's Ultimate Cooking Challenge: A Cookbook
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook: Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen]]> 405536 Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook, the celebrity chef invites you to join him in the kitchen of his famous restaurant to learn the secrets of his of his signature contemporary Southwestern cuisine.

Here are 150 recipes for the drinks, appetizers, soups, salads, main dishes, sides, sauces, desserts, and brunch dishes that have earned Bobby his reputation for creating innovative combinations and big, rich flavors, including:

- Grilled Asparagus and Goat Cheese Quesadillas with Tomato Jam and Cilantro Yogurt
- Queso Fundido with Roasted Poblano Vinaigrette
- Sweet Potato and Roasted Plantain Soup with Smoked Chile Crema
- Grilled Shrimp Brushed with Smoked Chile Butter and Tomatillo Salsa
- Seared Tuna Tostado with Black Bean Mango Salsa
- Coffee-Rubbed Filets Mignons with Ancho-Mushroom Sauce
- Spicy Coconut Tapioca with Mango and Blackberries

Complete with a guide no tequila lover should be without, a list of must-haves for the Southwestern pantry, menu suggestions for festive occasions with friends and family, Bobby's pointers on basic cooking techniques, and 100 full-color photographs, Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook helps you re-create the fun and flavors of Mesa Grill in your own kitchen.]]> 288 Bobby Flay 0307351416 Michele 0 to-read 4.12 2007 Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook: Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen
author: Bobby Flay
name: Michele
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Cook with Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook: A Cookbook]]> 52623732 Through 150 decadent and smart recipes, the Food Network icon explores how the relationships with her family have shaped her as a chef and home cook.

"Each recipe overflows with love and purpose, technique and soul, and, most of all, genuine joy for nourishing the people in your life who matter most."--Gail Simmons, food expert, TV host, and author of Bringing it Home

Growing up with a legendary cookbook-editor mother and a food-obsessed father, Alex Guarnaschelli has always loved to cook. Now, with a daughter of her own, food and cooking mean even more to Alex--they are a way for her to share memories, such as shopping in Little Italy with her father for cured meats and aged cheeses, and tasting the recipes her mom would make from the cookbooks of the iconic authors she worked with.

And, more than anything, cooking is what Alex and her daughter, Ava, most love to do together. In Cook with Me, Alex revives the recipes she grew up with, such as her mom's chicken with barbecue sauce and her dad's steamed pork dumplings, offers recipes for foods that she wishes she grew up with, such as comforting and cheesy baked ziti, and details dishes new to her repertoire, including sheet pan pork chops with spicy Brussels sprouts and a roasted sweet potato salad with honey and toasted pumpkin seeds. From meatballs two ways (are you a Godfather or a Goodfellas person?) to the blueberry crumble her mom made every summer, Alex shares recipes and insights that can come only from generations of collective experience. These recipes reflect the power that food has to bring people together and is a testament to the importance of sustaining traditions and creating new ones.]]> 336 Alex Guarnaschelli 0593135083 Michele 0 to-read 3.96 Cook with Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook: A Cookbook
author: Alex Guarnaschelli
name: Michele
average rating: 3.96
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Old-School Comfort Food: The Way I Learned to Cook: A Cookbook]]> 16156291
Alex Guarnaschelli grew up in a home suffused with a love of cooking, where soufflés and cheeseburgers were equally revered. The daughter of a respected cookbook editor and a Chinese cooking enthusiast, Alex developed a passion for food at a young age, sealing her professional fate. Old-School Comfort Food shares her journey from waist-high taste-tester to trained chef who now adores spending time in the kitchen with her daughter, along with the 100 recipes for how she learned to cook—and the way she still loves to eat.

Here are Alex’s secrets to great home cooking, where humble ingredients and familiar preparations combine with excellent technique and care to create memorable meals. Alex brings her recipes to life with reminiscences of everything from stealing tomatoes from her aunt’s garden and her first bite of her mother’s pâté to being one of the few women in the kitchen of a renowned Parisian restaurant and serving celebrity clientele in her own successful New York City establishments. With 75 color photographs and ephemera, Old-School Comfort Food is Alex’s love letter to deliciousness.]]> 304 Alex Guarnaschelli 0307956555 Michele 0 to-read 3.87 2013 Old-School Comfort Food: The Way I Learned to Cook: A Cookbook
author: Alex Guarnaschelli
name: Michele
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Home Cook: Recipes to Know by Heart—A Cookbook]]> 33897494 The all-in-one cooking bible for a new generation with 300 recipes for everything from simple vinaigrettes and roast chicken to birthday cake and cocktails.

For Alex Guarnaschelli--whose mother edited the seminal 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking, which defined the food of the late twentieth century--a life in food and cookbooks was almost predestined. Now an accomplished chef and author in her own right (and mom to a young daughter), Alex pens a cookbook for the way we eat today. For generations raised on vibrant, international flavors and supermarkets stocked with miso paste, harissa, and other bold condiments and ingredients, here are 300 recipes to replace their parents' Chicken Marbella, including Glazed Five-Spice Ribs, Roasted Eggplant Dip with Garlic Butter Naan, Roasted Beef Brisket with Pastrami Rub, Fennel and Orange Salad with Walnut Pesto, Quinoa Allspice Oatmeal Cookies, and Dark Chocolate Rum Pie.]]> 368 Alex Guarnaschelli 030795658X Michele 0 to-read 4.09 2017 The Home Cook: Recipes to Know by Heart—A Cookbook
author: Alex Guarnaschelli
name: Michele
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> A Natural 30335538
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success.

Leah, the captain’s wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.

A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.]]> 352 Ross Raisin 1910702668 Michele 0 to-read 3.66 2017 A Natural
author: Ross Raisin
name: Michele
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Thousand Names (The Shadow Campaigns, #1)]]> 15810910
Captain Marcus d’Ivoire, commander of one of the Vordanai empire’s colonial garrisons, was resigned to serving out his days in a sleepy, remote outpost. But that was before a rebellion upended his life. And once the powder smoke settled, he was left in charge of a demoralized force clinging tenuously to a small fortress at the edge of the desert.

To flee from her past, Winter Ihernglass masqueraded as a man and enlisted as a ranker in the Vordanai Colonials, hoping only to avoid notice. But when chance sees her promoted to command, she must win the hearts of her men and lead them into battle against impossible odds.

The fates of both these soldiers and all the men they lead depend on the newly arrived Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, who has been sent by the ailing king to restore order. His military genius seems to know no bounds, and under his command, Marcus and Winter can feel the tide turning. But their allegiance will be tested as they begin to suspect that the enigmatic Janus’s ambitions extend beyond the battlefield and into the realm of the supernatural—a realm with the power to ignite a meteoric rise, reshape the known world, and change the lives of everyone in its path.]]> 513 Django Wexler 0451465105 Michele 0 to-read 4.03 2013 The Thousand Names (The Shadow Campaigns, #1)
author: Django Wexler
name: Michele
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Essential New York Times Cookbook: The Recipes of Record]]> 53681187
The James Beard Award–winning and New York Times best-selling compendium of the paper’s best recipes, revised and updated.

Ten years after the phenomenal success of her once-in-a-generation cookbook, former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser returns with an updated edition for a new wave of home cooks. She has added 120 new but instantly iconic dishes to her mother lode of more than a thousand recipes, including Samin Nosrat’s Sabzi Polo (Herbed Rice with Tahdig), Todd Richards’s Fried Catfish with Hot Sauce, and J. Kenji López-Alt’s Cheesy Hasselback Potato Gratin. Devoted Times subscribers as well as newcomers to the paper’s culinary trove will also find scores of timeless gems such as Purple Plum Torte, David Eyre’s Pancake, Pamela Sherrid’s Summer Pasta, and classics ranging from 1940s Caesar Salad to modern No-Knead Bread. Hesser has tested and adapted each of the recipes, and she highlights her go-to favorites with wit and warmth. As Saveur declared, this is a “tremendously appealing collection of recipes that tells the story of American cooking.”]]> 1032 Amanda Hesser 132400228X Michele 0 to-read 4.22 The Essential New York Times Cookbook: The Recipes of Record
author: Amanda Hesser
name: Michele
average rating: 4.22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century]]> 8101270 New York Times food columnist, brings her signature voice and expertise to this compendium of influential and delicious recipes from chefs, home cooks, and food writers. Devoted Times subscribers will find the many treasured recipes they have cooked for years—Plum Torte, David Eyre's Pancake, Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta—as well as favorites from the early Craig Claiborne New York Times Cookbook and a host of other classics—from 1940s Caesar salad and 1960s flourless chocolate cake to today's fava bean salad and no-knead bread.

Hesser has cooked and updated every one of the 1,000-plus recipes here. Her chapter introductions showcase the history of American cooking, and her witty and fascinating headnotes share what makes each recipe special. The Essential New York Times Cookbook is for people who grew up in the kitchen with Claiborne, for curious cooks who want to serve a nineteenth-century raspberry granita to their friends, and for the new cook who needs a book that explains everything from how to roll out dough to how to slow-roast fish—a volume that will serve as a lifelong companion.]]> 960 Amanda Hesser 0393061035 Michele 0 to-read 4.12 2010 The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century
author: Amanda Hesser
name: Michele
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Crash 70241 Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.]]> 224 J.G. Ballard 0312420331 Michele 0 3.62 1973 Crash
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Michele
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read, 1001-books-to-read, poingu
review:

]]> Mysterious Setting 199547777 A madcap, darkly comic novel about the strange fate of a tone-deaf girl who just wants to sing, from a Japanese literary star

“Abe's superpower is to transform everything he touches into exciting literature.” — Kotaru Isaka, author of Bullet Train

This surreal, twisty novel presents a provocative portrayal of sibling competition and the exploitation of social outcasts.

Shiori knows at heart that she’s a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she won’t let that stop her living a life dedicated to music. Even when her dominant older sister, Nozomi, forces Shiori to accept that her wild singing provokes only revulsion, she decides to forge a career as a lyricist instead.

At eighteen, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream. Isolated and struggling in this unfamiliar city, Shiori seeks connection online, where her trusting outlook leaves her vulnerable to exploitation – with potentially explosive results.

This page-turning literary fiction from a Japanese star is perfect for fans of the wild worlds and unforgettable creations of Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata.]]> 225 Kazushige Abe 1805330497 Michele 0 to-read, poingu 3.43 2006 Mysterious Setting
author: Kazushige Abe
name: Michele
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read, poingu
review:

]]> His & Hers 59119616 There are two sides to every story: yours and mine, ours and theirs, His & Hers. Which means someone is always lying.

When a woman is murdered in Blackdown, a quintessentially British village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Detective Jack Harper is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation. Someone isn’t telling the truth, and some secrets are worth killing to keep.

His & Hers is a twisty, smart, psychological thriller. A gripping tale of suspense, told by expertly-drawn narrators that will keep readers guessing until the very end.]]> 314 Alice Feeney Michele 0 4.16 2020 His & Hers
author: Alice Feeney
name: Michele
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Glorious Exploits 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Michele 0 to-read, poingu 4.14 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Michele
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read, poingu
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women — and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—Turned
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Michele 0 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Michele
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read, 1001-books-to-read, post-election-reading-list
review:

]]> Blindsight (Firefall, #1) 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,” recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist – an informational topologist with half his mind gone – as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]> 384 Peter Watts 0765312182 Michele 5
]]> 4.01 2006 Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
author: Peter Watts
name: Michele
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2013/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: aliens, creep-fest, sentience, great-audio-version, favorites, science-fiction, vampires
review:
My favorite book ever at this point. It just had a lot going on all the time. A lot that made me think, creeped me out, and gave me a sense of wonder. This is the hardest of hard sci-fi in the area of sentience. Great alien stuff and first contact stuff, and more, and more.


]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of Spades and Other Stories]]> 97381 The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The Introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.]]> 336 Alexander Pushkin 0192839543 Michele 0 to-read 4.15 1841 The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Michele
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1841
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Quartet in Autumn 227002 186 Barbara Pym 0330326481 Michele 0 to-read 3.90 1978 Quartet in Autumn
author: Barbara Pym
name: Michele
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Заповедник - Авторский сборник]]> 18114429 В декабре 2018 года на широкие экраны страны выходит фильм «Заповедник», снятый режиссером Анной Матисон. Главную роль в фильме исполнит Сергей Безруков.]]> 528 Sergei Dovlatov Michele 0 to-read 4.31 1983 Заповедник - Авторский сборник
author: Sergei Dovlatov
name: Michele
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Faith (The Story of Civilization, #4)]]> 78166 1196 Will Durant 0965000753 Michele 0 to-read, jim-rec 4.38 1950 The Age of Faith (The Story of Civilization, #4)
author: Will Durant
name: Michele
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read, jim-rec
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book On Pie: Everything You Need to Know to Bake Perfect Pies]]> 48930277
Look no further than The Book on Pie for the only book on pie you'll ever want or need.

Erin Jeanne McDowell, New York Times contributing baker extraordinaire and top food stylist, wrote the book on pie, a comprehensive handbook that distills all you'll ever need to know for making perfect pies. The Book on Pie starts with the basics, including ways to mix pie dough for extra flaky crusts, storage and freezing, recipe size conversions, and expert tips for decorating and styling, before diving into the recipes for all the different kinds of pies: fruit, custard, cream, chiffon, cold set, savory, and mini. Find everything from classics like Apple Pie and Pumpkin Pie, to more inspired recipes like Birthday-Cake Pie and Caramel Pork Pie with Chile and Scallions.

Erin also suggests recommended pie doughs and toppings with each recipe for infinitely customizable pies: Mix and match Pumpkin Spice Pie Dough and Dark Chocolate Drippy Glaze with the Pumpkin Pie, or sub in the Chive Compound-Butter Crust for the Croque Madame Pielets . . . the possibilities are endless. With helpful tips, photographic guides, and inspirations—pie-deas—it's almost like having Erin in the kitchen baking pies with you.]]> 352 Erin Jeanne McDowell 0358229286 Michele 0 to-read 4.63 The Book On Pie: Everything You Need to Know to Bake Perfect Pies
author: Erin Jeanne McDowell
name: Michele
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rousseau and Revolution (The Story of Civilization, #10)]]> 78165 From: ]]> 1092 Will Durant 1567310214 Michele 0 4.27 Rousseau and Revolution (The Story of Civilization, #10)
author: Will Durant
name: Michele
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read, award-winner, women-authors, women-author-nonfiction
review:

]]> Cherry 569989 256 matt-thorne 0297829092 Michele 0 to-read 3.16 Cherry
author: matt-thorne
name: Michele
average rating: 3.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance – award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film – Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future – and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team – well trained but eccentric – has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch” somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 Michele 0 to-read 3.59 2024 Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Michele
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Scrapper 26310397 A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Powerful” (Publishers Weekly).   Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone”—an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue.   Briefly, Kelly is celebrated as a hero. But even after he has brought the boy to safety, he is driven to secretly avenge this crime and solve the mystery behind the kidnapping—a task that will take him deeper into the zone, and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.   From the acclaimed author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?  ]]> 321 Matt Bell 1616955228 Michele 0 to-read 3.30 2015 Scrapper
author: Matt Bell
name: Michele
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)]]> 18801 In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust’s narrator describes living in his mother’s Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 957 Marcel Proust 0375753117 Michele 0 to-read 4.38 1923 The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Michele
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1923
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Avenue of Mysteries 25399932 John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory.In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you. Lupe doesn’t know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future? As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.]]> 481 John Irving 1451664184 Michele 0 to-read 3.61 2015 Avenue of Mysteries
author: John Irving
name: Michele
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence]]> 56465 Unwarranted fear is a curse.
Learn how to tell the difference.

A date won't take "no" for an answer. The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust—and act on—our gut instincts.

In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger—before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including how to act when approached by a stranger, when you should fear someone close to you, what to do if you are being stalked, how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls, the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person, and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.
]]> 352 Gavin de Becker 0747538352 Michele 0 to-read 4.16 1997 The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
author: Gavin de Becker
name: Michele
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind]]> 200503082 A sharp and timely book about the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling

Best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons used against foreign adversaries into tools used in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and reaching its apotheosis with disinformation during twenty-first–century elections.

The nation’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling, fashioned by operatives who drew on their experiences in the ad industry and as science-fiction writers. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, it has found its way into the hands of culture warriors, in conflicts from school-board fights over LGBTQ+ students to campaigns against feminist viewpoints. Stories Are Weapons delivers a powerful counter-narrative, as Newitz highlights the process of psychological disarmament, speaking with Indigenous archivists preserving their histories in new ways, activist storytellers, and technology experts transforming social media.]]> 246 Annalee Newitz 0393881512 Michele 0 to-read 3.92 2024 Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
author: Annalee Newitz
name: Michele
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Devil By Name (Fever House, #2)]]> 202102065 No one expected the apocalypse would be broadcast via phone call. But in this chilling sequel to Fever House, anyone who managed to survive that doomsday call has a harrowing answer to the question, “Where were you when the Message came through?”

Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.

In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift—which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.

Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters’ paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.

Everything starts and ends in the fever house.

]]> 400 Keith Rosson 0593595785 Michele 0 to-read 4.21 2024 The Devil By Name (Fever House, #2)
author: Keith Rosson
name: Michele
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Fever House (Fever House, #1) 66087060 A small-time criminal. A has-been rock star. A shadowy government agency. And a severed hand whose dark powers threaten to destroy them all.

When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster. . . .

But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.

When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.

Can you resist the hand? Find an excerpt from the next Fever House novel at the end of the book.]]> 417 Keith Rosson 0593595750 Michele 0 to-read 4.01 2023 Fever House (Fever House, #1)
author: Keith Rosson
name: Michele
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy]]> 49219653 The New York Times bestselling author of Trumpocracy poses the essential question facing America today: How do we recover from the most corrupt, incompetent, and cruel presidency in modern history?

Donald Trump rose to power by offering the wrong answers to the right questions.

While the economy continued its growth trajectory under his administration, drug overdoses skyrocketed, the migrant crisis at the Southern border drastically escalated, the US trade deficit widened, and the federal deficit exploded. Distrust festers between the cultures and races of modern America; young men and women live increasingly apart; the United States has isolated itself from former friends and allies. After Trump is gone, these troubles will remain—and await the next demagogue to exploit the troubles of the modern American nation.

One of our most astute commentators, David Frum has closely observed American politics for more than four decades from vantage points in media and government. In Great Again, he revisits the many mistakes, corruptions, and lost opportunities of the past three years—to offer hope for the better nation we can be. Eloquent and practical, Great Again condemns the wrongs done by Trump’s rage and racism—and shows a way forward that liberals and conservatives can walk together.]]> 261 David Frum 0062978411 Michele 0 to-read, political 3.97 2020 Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
author: David Frum
name: Michele
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: to-read, political
review:

]]> <![CDATA[100 Ways to Improve Your Writing: Proven Professional Techniques for Writing With Style and Power]]> 702619 176 Gary Provost 0451627210 Michele 0 to-read 3.97 1985 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing: Proven Professional Techniques for Writing With Style and Power
author: Gary Provost
name: Michele
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Wanted Man (Jack Reacher, #17)]]> 13359069
An hour behind them, a man lies stabbed to death in an old pumping station. He was seen going in with two others, but he never came out. He has been executed, the knife work professional, the killers vanished. Within minutes, the police are notified. Within hours, the FBI descends, laying claim to the victim without ever saying who he was or why he was there.

All Reacher wanted was a ride to Virginia. All he did was stick out his thumb. But he soon discovers he has hitched more than a ride. He has tied himself to a massive conspiracy that makes him a threat—to both sides at once.

In Lee Child’s white-hot thriller, nothing is what it seems, and nobody is telling the truth. As the tension rises, the twists come fast and furious, keeping readers guessing and gasping until the explosive finale.]]> 405 Lee Child Michele 0 to-read 3.89 2012 A Wanted Man (Jack Reacher, #17)
author: Lee Child
name: Michele
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> La Ligne de fuite 30822640 Inspiré par le regard visionnaire de Joseph Conrad et la prose survoltée de Jack Kerouac, Robert Stone décrit une Amérique qui ne croit plus en ses valeurs, tout en constatant l’échec de la contre-culture qui devait la régénérer.
Dans ce grand roman noir obsédé par la vitesse et la défonce, les ombres tutélaires de Ken Kesey et de Neal Cassady passent puis s’éloignent avant de se confondre à jamais avec leur propre légende.]]> 369 Robert Stone 2823609431 Michele 0 to-read 3.25 1974 La Ligne de fuite
author: Robert Stone
name: Michele
average rating: 3.25
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The End of History and the Last Man]]> 57981 The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.]]> 464 Francis Fukuyama 0743284550 Michele 0 to-read 3.61 1992 The End of History and the Last Man
author: Francis Fukuyama
name: Michele
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Could Be So Good 62365905 Casey McQuiston meets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in this mid-century romdram about a scrappy reporter and a newspaper mogul's son--perfect for Newsies shippers.

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city's biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can't let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy.

Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely able to run his life--he's never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he'll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.

Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can't deny. But what feels possible in secret--this fragile, tender thing between them--seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they're willing to fight.]]> 384 Cat Sebastian 0063272768 Michele 0 to-read 4.24 2023 We Could Be So Good
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Michele
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
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date added: 2024/04/27
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]]> You Should Be So Lucky 196774347 We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.]]> 400 Cat Sebastian 0063272806 Michele 0 to-read 4.26 2024 You Should Be So Lucky
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Michele
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sweet Forever (D.C. Quartet #3)]]> 320247 298 George P. Pelecanos 1852427361 Michele 0 to-read 3.97 1998 The Sweet Forever (D.C. Quartet #3)
author: George P. Pelecanos
name: Michele
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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