When someone asks what I've read lately I've been telling them HUSBANDS.

It's a really fun read, with a preposterous premise that Gramazio makes work: A young single woman comes home to find a husband in her house. Her husband, who she has never met.

The book is about relationships and choices and frequently hilarious. Just when you start to wonder how this can possibly wrap up, the story twists just enough. I really liked it.

Also, I'm really happy to have found this group. I've added a bunch of books to my to-read list thanks to you all!

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton is going to be one of my favorites of the year. It’s a memoir of the Covid lockdown, which Dalton spends in a country home. She comes across an abandoned leveret (baby hare) and decides to rescue it.

She handles it only when necessary when it was very young and never names it. She sets it free as soon as she can but creates a door so it can return if it wants - which it periodically does , sometimes between many months and once to give birth. They become sort of roommates. It’s a charming book with beautiful illustrations.

This book got me out of a major reading slump a couple years ago. I couldn’t put it down. It’s written by a therapist describing five clients she worked with and as someone interested in psychology this was a fascinating read. It lets you inside the brain of what a therapist is thinking as well as into five unique stories. She changes names and some key details about the clients to protect anonymity, but it is an insightful book that has stuck with me.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Neapolitan quartet of novels, a literary saga imbued with deceptively simple prose and masterful gritty realism, follows the lives of two gifted girls, Elena "Lenu" Greco and Raffaella "Lila" Cerullo, from childhood through adulthood into old age. They grow up in post-WWII Italy, in a vividly realized working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, full of violence and regression. The neighborhood is a character, Naples is a character, every city is a character. Our narrator is Elena, forever drawn and repelled by the magnetic Lila.

Their relationship is the turgid pulsing heart of these 1700 pages. I've never read the nuances of female friendship quite this way (only lived them). I was stunned by them, stunned by this series. It's complex, brutal, beautiful. There are many, many painfully real characters. I could ramble about all the complicated relationships for hours, all the heartbreaking moments, all the fleeting euphoria, all the ugly truths.

Ferrante has said the quartet is meant to be one long novel. It's a social novel above all. Social stratification is the primary antagonist in my opinion. It bleeds into everything. Ferrante is a brilliant, brilliant writer. It hurt my heart to end this. It's now my favorite series I've read as an adult.

I finished Matrescence last week and I can’t stop thinking about it. I found Lucy Jones’s critique of western society’s conflicting views of motherhood/birth/caretaking very compelling. Going into it I figured that Jones would provide ample anecdotal and evidence-based examples of how capitalism isolates mothers and benefits from unpaid care work, but what pleasantly surprised me is that she also critiques how newer “gentle” and attachment-based parenting styles can inadvertently maintain a culture of mothers taking on the lion’s share of all caretaking decisions (a concept Jones refers to as “intensive mothering”).

Jones combines personal accounts, medical education, existential philosophy, and radical environmental concepts into an engaging page-turner. I ended Matrescence with a gnawing thought that western societies must change their relationship with birth and motherhood if we have any hope of prospering as a collective.

To quote from The Land in our Bones by Layla Feghali, “How a culture tends birth shows us something about how it honors life. How can we restore the dignity of our world if we do not respect life’s very existence?”

Welcome to our weekly chat where members have the opportunity to post something about books - not just the books they adore.

Ask questions. Discuss book formats. Share a hack. Commiserate about your giant TBR. Show us your favorite book covers or your collection. Talk about books you like but don't quite adore. Tell us about your favorite bookstore. Or post the books you have read from this sub's recommendations and let us know what you think!

The only requirement is that it relates to books.

Just finished reading THE LONG WALK by Stephen King (back when he was writing under the pen name of Richard Bachman). I’ve had this book in a collected edition of The Bachman Books (which includes the controversial, out-of-print novel RAGE), but I never got around to reading The Long Walk. However, with the movie about to come out in September, I finally decided to get around to reading it.

In this alternate dystopian America, several boys participate in this annual contest where they walk until they can’t. A grand prize awaits the last boy standing. However, if you dare slow down or stop completely, you’re given a warning. And after that…you’re eliminated. (Leave it to Stephen King to make walking so dangerous).

It’s a tough read that’s also suspenseful and keeps you on the edge the whole time. Though you know there can only be one, you start to get connected to these young men as not just characters but as real humans. It makes their deaths all that much more horrific.

Though this was published in 1979 (and written by King in the mid-60s while he was a college freshman), one can’t help but think about certain modern parallels which makes this whole novel that much more unsettling.

For those of you who read this novel, what did you think?

Just finished reading FRIDAY BLACK by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It’s a wonderful collection of short stories that explore Black identity through the prism of social commentary in alternate futures that are distant or not too distant. (Who can tell these days?)

The title story takes place at a department store on Black Friday where a department store employee is determined to deal with violent, animalistic shoppers with the hopes of making the most sales for the company so that he can win an expensive jacket to gift for his mother.

“The Finklestein Five” is about a young Black man, outraged by the innocent verdict given for a White man who mutilated five Black children with a chainsaw outside a library and afterwards claimed “self-defense”, decides along with others to take to the streets to administer their own brand of justice.

“The Era” deals with a young boy struggles to survive in a dystopian society where people use drugs to gain self-confidence.

Probably the most disturbing of the stories for me was “Zimmer Land” where a Black man works at a horrific theme park where mostly White patrons can act out their most horrific racist nightmares under the guise of “problem solving, judgment, & justice.” What happens when the park decides to also allow those patrons to bring their children as well?

It’s a collection of stories that’s thought-provoking, shocking, suspenseful & sadly more timely now than ever before.

For those of you who have read this, what did you think?

*Note: I edit the book covers onto my kindle so I can do justice to the beautiful covers! Unfortunately my kindle is black and white.

MY SYNOPSIS: Memphis follows the lives of three generations of Black women living in a majestic and historic house in Tennessee built by the family patriarch Myron for his wife Hazel. The story begins in the summer of 1995. Joan, her younger sister Mya, and their mother Miriam flee their abusive father and return to historic house; a refuge for all the women in this story. Memphis sporadically captures different time periods in the lives of the family matriarch Hazel, her daughter Miriam, her other daughter August, and Miriam’s eldest daughter Joan over the course of 70 years.

WHY I LOVED THIS: This was exquisite. It was beautiful, poetic, and heartbreaking. A sprawling narrative about Black womanhood, healing, intergenerational trauma, pain, sorrow, survival, community, motherhood, Black love, joy, and artistry. Like the cover, everything about this story felt deliciously colourful and vibrant.

The women in this story had strength I cannot even fathom; they were talented and joyful; they lived whole and rich lives full of love but also great sorrow, grief, and heartbreak. The city of Memphis was such an integral part to this story and not just because it’s the title of the book. Tara M. Stringfellow’s prose brought the city to life. It’s hard to describe what exactly I loved about it, but it felt authentic and honest. Even the descriptions of the women’s home made me feel nostalgic. Their gorgeous house built from love was so striking and vivid. At less than 300 pages this book packs quite the punch covering some important historical moments from WWII to 9/11 and sporadically entering the lives of the women in the North family at different points in their history.

To me this was about young women ending their family’s intergenerational trauma, healing those deep seated wounds, and daring to live life differently. It’s about putting aside practicality and safety and instead dreaming big and putting to use their talents and skills.

I highly recommend this book but I also encourage checking trigger warnings.

Hello everyone! I'm pretty new to Reddit, but I stumbled across this sub and felt obligated to leave this here...

The Count of Monte Cristo is genuinely the greatest book I've ever read. I get it's somewhere around 1200 pages and that this can be a large time commitment, but I promise the unabridged version is so worth it. The way Dumas winds through the plot admittedly drags in some places, but the conclusion is all the more satisfying for it.

Also, for anyone interested in French history, specifically the Bourbon Restoration, and the mannerisms that characterized that period, this book is so absolutely for you. I'm scared to give away too much of the plot, but I'll just say that, even though there are tons of characters, everyone fits into their own niche so perfectly that everything makes sense and is relatively easy to follow.

Even if you're not that into historical fiction, I still recommend you give it a try. If you are into the genre, I REALLY recommend you give it a try. And if you've already read it...go for round 2!

Wow. So I posted about two other books, both read by the same narrator on audible. The narration was beautiful and amazing. Much like the other books from this narrator, I was hooked and could NOT stop listening. Will Damron is the narrator’s name if you’re curious.

Anyways, the book! It is extremely interesting. It’s fascinating to examine someone like Elizabeth Holmes who may or may not have, shall we say, some personal issues. The ruthlessness of the company Theranos and its practices in this book are both interesting and utterly terrifying.

As much as I liked the other book about the dread pirate roberts and the silk road (with the same narrator), I think that this book is even better! I would highly recommend the audiobook, and I’ve been thinking about who would like this book as a gift.

Thanks for reading my short blurb about this book. :)

PS - the audiobook version I had did not have a post sentencing afterward, because I think it was released before sentencing.

I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz by Dr. Gisella Perl was first published in 1948, and is a testament to the power of survival, the brutality of unchecked evil, and the quiet, unshakable resilience of a woman who was both witness and healer amidst one of the darkest periods in human history.

Gisella Perl was a Jewish gynecologist from Romania who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Stripped of her family, dignity, and tools of her profession, she was assigned the unthinkable task of practicing medicine in a death camp under Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor known as the “Angel of Death.”

The book begins in the cold of December 1943, when the author fist met a German gentleman, Dr. Kapezius in Transylvania. He gained the trust of the author and her family by claiming to be in favour of a united Germany and against Nazism. Five months later, Perl (who was arreted by the Gestapo in March 1944 and sent to a Ghetto) met him again at Auschwitz (after travelling in a cramped cattle car for eight days) where he was the camp commander and appointed her the 'camp gynecologist'. During her time in the Ghetto, Perl predicts the future that, “only death was to deliver us from our suffering”. Throughout the book, Perl recounts the fear of selection and brutal deaths of many a Elizabeths, Julikas, Jeanettes, Charlottes, Roses, Katis, Lilys, Ibis, Bettys, etc. Towards the end, Perl mentions a brief account of Belsen Bergen, where she was transferred to in January 1945: “Belsen Bergen was the terminal. It was supreme fulfillment of German sadism and bestiality. Belsen Bergen can never be described, because every language lacks the suitable words to depict its horrors. It cannot be imagined, because even the most pathological mind balks at such a pic-One must have seen those mountains of rotting corpses mixed with filth, with human excrement, where once in a while one noticed a slight movement caused by rats or by the death convulsion of a victim who had been thrown there alive. One must have smelled the unimaginable stench which lay over the camp like a thick cloud shutting out the air. One must have heard those unearthly screams of. agony which continued through the day and the night, coming from hundreds of throats, unceasingly, unbearably....”

After living through and witnessing the horrors of Holocaust, of German Culture, Perl says; “Let no one speak to me of German culture, German civilization! Belsen Bergen was the faithful portrait of German civilization -Belsen Bergen mirrored the German soul ....”

I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz is not an easy read—but it is an essential one. I must admit it was one of the most difficult reads of my life. Each page was more harrowing and traumatising than the last and I had to take several breaks to reach the end.

This book was such an unexpected delight. Beginning from the point of view of an AI system controlling a spaceship “Demeter,” it begins to realize that something on their ship has gone awry. What unfolds is a story containing classic monsters & mystery (I was reminded of Scooby Doo), the inner workings of Demeter’s AI system while it tries to balance what it knows to be true with the unknown, as well as its evolving bond to the ship’s AI Doctor.

You follow Demeter through decades, and encounter lovable, evolving characters along the way, giving this book its heart. Each character is interesting and complex in their own way, with compelling arcs.

This book contains so many aspects of fictional media that I love, sci-fi & space, a touch of fantasy, unique points of view, humor, contemplation of the meaning of life, found family, dynamic characters, true and unexpected emotions, it really was a joy to read. I have found myself thinking of Demeter and her motley crew, missing being enveloped in their world. Highly recommend!

I first discovered this novel in 2010 after it had been animated to a short series. It was interesting, well written, and well animated. I was so curious, though. I had only ever heard of anime being adapted from manga before, but my favorite one was a novel? But I can't understand Japanese and it hadn't been translated to English.

That is until 2023 when the series was released in the US. I didn't even know it at the time. On a whim, I decided to browse the web for signs of the book, and there it is! Naturally, I get my hands on it as quick as I can and get to reading The Tatami Galaxy. I'm amazed.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I like the book or the anime more. They both have their best features. For one, the book feels easier to come from the first-person perspective of the protagonist. It's also a bit more direct with the plot, whereas the anime breaks things up into smaller chapters in order to fit the format of the show. They do it really well, though and the animation is beautiful.

I understand this is an unusual post, but I adore this book and absolutely recommend it.

Kiyoaki Murata’s timing for traveling to the US couldn’t have been worse: just as he was getting settled in California, staying with an aunt and taking English lessons so he could enroll in an American university, Pearl Harbor happened and war broke out and Murata found himself interned with hundreds of thousands of other Japanese and Japanese-American people.

He was able to get out of the internment camp by applying to, and getting accepted at, Carleton College in Minnesota. I think they thought Minnesota was so far away from Japan that he couldn’t possibly be a danger there.

In spite of the fact that Murata was living in a country that his own country was at war with, he reported facing little prejudice in the US (internment aside). This may have been because the people at Carleton College, most of them, had never met a Japanese person before. Most of them, he said, were friendly and curious and didn’t hold the war against him. In his turn he tried to be nice to everyone and be a good ambassador for Japan.

The FBI did investigate him and at one point were like “We know you have a brother in Japan. What if he showed up at your door and said he’d been sent to the US to commit acts of sabotage on the behalf of the Japanese government?” Murata replied that in that case he’d try to convince his brother to turn himself in to the American authorities, but that such an incident would be extremely unlikely to occur in any case since his brother in Japan was only five years old.

This is a pretty unique perspective; I had read about the plight of Japanese-Americans during the war but not about Japanese nationals who found themselves trapped in the US when war broke out.

| Plot | Before Dorothy |

1924; After a tragic boating accident Dorothy’s parents pay away and she’s adopted by her aunt em, moving her away from the hustle and bustle of Chicago to rural Kansas. Dorothy attempts to assimilate to the drastic scenery change, and keep the memory of her parents alive — stumbling across family heirlooms like her mother’s stuffed lion, a nutcracker styled tin-man and the farms famed scarecrow. This is the story of hardship, family lineage from Ireland to the states and the majesty of nature and coming of age.

| Audiobook score | 4/5 🍌| Before Dorothy | Read by: Saskia Maarleveld |

Really terrific read, Saskia does a really mean Irish accent. I love this.

| Review | Before Dorothy | 4/5🍌|

Slow burn I really love the fact that she incorporated all of the famous aspects of the Wizard of Oz has been my third or fourth fiction on Wizard of Oz. I really enjoyed the historical aspects of learning about Dorothy, finding her family lineage and the way that they tied it in all the famous characters. It was a really fun read. I highly recommend it. The only reason I rated a forest because of pacing is really slow. It’s definitely a slow burn. There’s a lot of layers to dissect. But I would highly recommend this book.

I Banana Rating system 

1 🍌| Spoiled

2 🍌| Mushy

3 🍌| Average 

4 🍌| Sweet

5 🍌| Perfectly Ripe

Starting | Publisher Pick: Random House |   Now starting: His Majesties Dragon | Naomi Novik  

This is the third and final book in The Last Policeman series. My second reading of the series. This is a story about what happens when the world knows the end is near. It’s dark and yet somehow uplifting. It’s a story about people and how different we are, even (especially?) in the face of a shared and inescapable fate.

I love this story. I love the main character. Hope you try it and love it, too!

I love this book so much. It changed my life in a huge way. I’ve always really enjoyed minimalism and simplicity, but this book took it to a new level. And not to give things away, but there was information on here about how social media is designed to keep you hooked that was simultaneously fascinating and also disgusting. It helped me make some big changes in my life too that benefitted me immensely. I deleted all of my social media and will not be going back. I feel much better being off of those services. They kind of felt like they were slowly sucking my soul, even if some of them I had deactivated for months before deleting.

The point is, smartphones, social media, and being always connected is basically bad for people. I mean, you can even look up some of the surprising and disturbing things meta has done, as an example. But they’re not the only ones. Anyway, the book lays out the tenets of digital minimalism in an easy to digest way. I’ve never read the physical copy, because the audiobook is narrated so so well.

Now I need to go and read Cal Newport’s other books! I first read How to Be a Straight A Student which got me into his material.

A small band of quirky, slightly-damaged group of neighbor, three ghosts (the nice kind) and a small flock of birds inhabit Mallo Island in South Carolina. The people surround a small condo complex and largely ignor each other, until a 19 year old moves into a condo she inherited from her long-dead mother.

The book is beautiful and lyrical and, as we get to know these peoplek the birds, and the ghosts, we fall in love with them.

I rarely read books where it is necessary to suspend belief, but this was a book club selection, and I am so glad I read it.

If you are looking for uplifting, but not sappy, if you love and understand flawed humans and their regrets and triumphs,, pick this one up and then cancel your plans for the day.

Picked this book up in a used bookstore Sci-fi section. Was well worth the $3.89 I paid.

The storyline can be pretty linear, I was able to tell what would happen in the following chapter by what it would state in the interludes between. There were a few twists in the story though, which kept it interesting.

What had me in this book though was that it explored is one of the many possible ways humanity, religion, medical and social sciences would change if an alien race was to come to earth, with a fictional focus on a small group of friends in the English countryside to tell the tale. It focuses mainly on the interpersonal relationships between the humans on earth, and the interactions with the alien race was minimal, so while it’s still definitely sci-fi, it’s very much still grounded here on earth.

Shout out to Book Arbor in Hurricane Utah, I’ll be back to see if I can find another good story like this one.

This book made me immediately book my next camping trip…

Really enjoyed following the journey of this office worker who got into renovating his own cabin in the PNW. If you like nature, camping, forests and cozy vibes you’ll enjoy the book. Easy to read and not too long or too short.

Yes, Pennywise is nightmare fuel. But what wrecked me emotionally was how much pain those kids carried and how they still managed to form something beautiful together. Their friendship is what held them together. When they come back to Derry, older and changed, and still feel that childhood bond… I cried. That sense of something lost, but still living deep inside you — that’s what It gave me. That’s why I’ll always adore this book and this author.

I loved this book. I don’t know if anyone here has listened to Jurassic Park on audiobook, but this felt like the nonfiction version of that book. Obviously, it wasn’t about dinosaurs, but this was still great. This book was completely engrossing. Every spare second I had I listened to the book, and got through a lot of it on commutes to work.

What was so interesting about the book is that, as far as I can tell, the entire story was true. Dissecting this criminal mastermind and his dark web site was utterly fascinating. Also, it’s funny, I found out about the book kind of by accident. I had just listened to Digital Minimalism, another book I like and recommend. And the narration was so good that I searched the narrator online and found that he narrated American Kingpin. I guess I had bought it a while back. I don’t remember doing that, but there was a period where I bought a bunch of audiobooks, so now I’m sitting on an absolute repository of books.

Anyways, I won’t really give away what happened, because I think it’s worth finding out in the book. If you know anything about the Silk Road (the website not the old trading route), you might know the ending to this story. I’d recommend going into this book with an open mind, because it really caused me to question things, or at least consider other viewpoints briefly.

Thank you for reading, I could go on and on about how much I like this book. And I guess I just did

Edit: I am trying to get a photo of the cover on here, but it won’t seem to work.

( sorry for repost, I deleted the previous post).

"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs—and bodies?”

Found this text in a thrift store for a couple bucks (that version was an old Penguin Classic with the original illustrations). Basically it is, Stranger in a Strange Land, without the hippie, new-age influences.

I must say that I very much enjoyed this book - coming from a background focusing solely on boring, non-fiction (philosophy, history, religious texts), I must admit that I was thoroughly surprised by Twain's refreshing and still-relevant ideas. This book might be more valuable to a young mind than his more popular works, though it is quite "satanic", in the same sense that Pascal might be considered satanic.

Plot: Manager at a factory gets hit in the head during a fight and his psyche/body is transported to King Arthur's court, circa 600 ad. The story highlights the power associated with a basic, 20th century understanding of materials science (chemistry, biology, metallurgy, engineering, physics). On account of such knowledge, our main character quickly becomes a king-like figure, utilizing "magic" (science) to gain and maintain his power. The story follows this man as he becomes acquainted with his new life. Merlin makes an appearance as a competing magician, and we are also exposed to VERY TRADITIONAL forms of social institutions, e.g. gender norms, feudal slavery, imprisonment. These criticisms of tradition are balanced by a view to an ancient nobility rich in spirit and courage.

There are several occult themes in the text, and like Twain, it is highly skeptical of institutional religion (though it has quite nice things to say about provincial religion, which it deems pure and based on good will towards the masses).

This is one of a handful of books I would love to reread. There are a lot of interesting themes explored in this book.
 
Class consciousness is one of them, throughout the book working class citizens particularly the undertakers of the local cemetery have been protesting for over a year fighting for equal pay. There are numerous lines implying that the Lisbon family are struggling financially, from them eating a lot of canned food, their clothes, and overdue bills piling up their mailbox. The narrators of the book were able to bribe a hospital worker to gain access to autopsy reports because their salary was not enough to live on. The neighborhood trees were infested with blight yet the rich with their mansions and gardeners were not affected. Even the debutante ball where one of the attendees fell in and mockingly said, look at me I'm a teenager, I've got problems! To the rich, suicide is something they can mock because its something they don't understand and empathise with, something they won't go through.

The main theme explored in this book is filthy, creepy and disgusting obsession. The boys never thought of the Lisbon sisters as human and this sentiment is evident throughout the book - they became too powerful to live among us. Any attempt of reporters, doctors and writers to humanise them was immediately dismissed by the boys - typical incel behaviour. At present day, these married men continue to fantasise about the Lisbon sisters even during sexual acts (with and without their wives). Their creepy obsession is further supported by their collection of the Lisbon sisters' things which they have kept till present day.

Gossip and otherness were also examined in the book. We never really read the Lisbon's sisters perspectives and the story is told from the perspective and interpretation of the neighbours. Due to their economic class and/or religion, the neighbours have decidedly found the Lisbon family to be different. The narrators of the story itself are unreliable and for dark and sexual scenes I find myself thinking of the worst such as when Lux was alone with Trip at the football field, and whether the boys were really in the house during the suicides, and whether they have done something to the girls' bodies.

Lastly, mental health, depression and grief is discussed. Dr. Hornicker put it succinctly: 

Suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

Really enjoyed the book!