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cant_i'm_booked
Pachinko | Min Jin Lee
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Mehso-so

I love the author‘s focus on her minor characters most, which gives this Korean family‘s saga (from the early 1900s Japanese colonial period of a once undivided Korea to modern day Osaka/Tokyo/Yokohama) a broad, sweeping quality, but the side-stories dead-end, which is frustrating. I appreciate this peek into the Korean-Japanese experience and how the tides of one woman‘s shame, her survival, discrimination, and globalization mold a family.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

I clearly remember being assigned Morrison‘s novel “Song of Solomon” in 8th grade English: I couldn‘t recall the story now but I can recall the feelings of nostalgia, beauty, contemplation the book drew from me (which is hard to do in a 14 year old)! This book of essays has not replicated that (I think Morrison is a better fiction writer than essayist) but it still doesn‘t take away from the pleasure of, in a way, “being in her company.”

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

A behemoth of fine journalistic writing. Shilts was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle when AIDS first began to ravage the city. The disease soon shone a spotlight on the stunning health disparities in the US as the federal government, scientific and public health institutions as well as blood banks refused to initially take seriously what they condescended as “the gay virus.” Shilts later succumbed to AIDS, seven years after publishing.

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cant_i'm_booked
A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking
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Pickpick

Content-wise, I felt this was more of a review for me, given that I had started my meanderings into cosmology/physics with Brian Greene‘s “The Elegant Universe.” But it‘s not lacking in star appeal (no pun intended)…I‘m a huge fan of Stephen Hawking, RIP. I‘d recommend this short book to anyone wanting their black holes, neutrinos and particle colliders put in introductory lay terms, from a famed theoretical physicist with a sense of humor.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

An entire psychotherapy session, published in 1951, between George Devereux (founding father of ethnopsychiatry) and Jimmy Picard, a Blackfoot Indian. Meeting Picard, a WWII veteran, at Winters VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, and using his dreaming as a tool for inner exploration, Devereux is a proponent of the full incorporation, in psychoanalytic practice, of a patient's cultural background, if one's goal is to return "the patient to himself."

Leftcoastzen Amazing cover! 2mo
17 likes1 comment
review
cant_i'm_booked
The Crow Eaters | Bapsi Sidhwa
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Pickpick

A comedic and deeply heart-felt narrative of a Parsee family and its many internal familial dramas, played out in the commercial and cosmopolitan gem that is Lahore, amidst the British empire‘s slackening grip on an India beginning to whisper independence. That‘s the rest of my 2023 books, Happy New Year everyone!

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

Started off well: a woman with a hormonal disorder encounters, from birth, the discomfitures of being too big in a town too small and narrow-minded. She turns to a forgotten quilt, sewn by a distant ancestor accused of “witchy” healing powers, to change things.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

Perhaps Im first entering into Wilde‘s works at an odd time, reading his famous prison prose De Profundis, written at the nadir of his career, before encountering any of the dramatic works that first made him a literary giant. But Im happy to get to know an older, more subdued Wilde who writes w/ humility but also (I think) no apology, acknowledging any past vices only so that they are swept aside to accommodate his spiritual awakening.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

A highly interesting read (at least for one who did her physiology project on Tummo and hangs with people who write their theses on free divers diving by the Golden Gate Bridge) and one with immediate real-life applications and permanent, life-changing benefits. Nestor surveys how mouth-breathing can be killing us and nose-breathing can save us, what wonders breath-holds and box-breathing can do for asthma, sleep apnea and nasal congestion, etc.

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cant_i'm_booked
Mexican Gothic | Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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Mehso-so

A socialite leaves her bright urban life in 1950s Mexico City to check on her newly-wed cousin, who has sent an ominous message regarding her husband and his family‘s rotting (and haunted?) mansion she is sequestered in, off in the mountainous countryside. A good effort to infuse the Gothic novel with new blood, but the book still misses its mark.

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cant_i'm_booked
The Killer Inside Me | Jim Thompson
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Pickpick

My first book by Thompson, dubbed by a critic as the “Dimestore Dostoyevsky.” And very fitting too: this paperback reads like a Central Texan “Crime and Punishment” where deputy sheriff Lou Ford is our killer, and an incredibly psychopathic one at that. As narrator, Ford lets us wade through the swamp of his dark psyche as he struggles to keep up innocent appearances in his small hometown, recently the scene of several coldblooded murders…

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

Even if the style and writing of this nonfiction book is so-so, the story behind it is gripping. Grann investigates the Osage Indian Murders at their height in 1920s northern Oklahoma, where the Osage have become the rich owners of mineral rights in a land that has just struck an oil boom. Human vultures soon come to prey upon this new wealth, introducing an onslaught of corruption and killing gone unpunished due to their victims being non-white.

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cant_i'm_booked
Study is Hard Work | William Howard Armstrong
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Pickpick

Written by a brilliant children‘s book author, scholar, history professor and Connecticut sheepherder, this concise, eloquent lecture of a book was meant to instill values in high schoolers that would steer them toward writing succinctly, testing fluidly, learning avidly and thinking well. But as the popularity of this work attests to, adults who read Armstrong are all the better equipped too, in facing life‘s demands after academia.

13 likes1 stack add
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cant_i'm_booked
The Leopard | Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
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Pickpick

A rich historical portrait of a dying Sicilian aristocracy, hastened by Garibaldi‘s armies sweeping through Italy in the name of national unification. di Lampedusa writes of the dazzling luxuriance of the Salina family and its patriarch, the Prince (based on di Lampedusa‘s own great-grandfather) who is all too aware of the impending forces of change, relegating him and his class to the dusty corners of history. Burt Lancaster; 1963 film version.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

A Jon Kabat-Zinn book from 1994. Not that that should be seen as any sign of outdated-ness: I‘ve been meditating for a while now and sometimes you can lose track of the “why” ~> this book, full of tips/tricks for looking at the everyday as anything but mundane, puts the “mindful” back into my mindfulness meditation. Watch “Healing and the Mind,” an old TV series that spotlights his breathing classes for patients w/ chronic pain = really inspiring.

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cant_i'm_booked
The History of Philosophy | A. C. Grayling
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Pickpick

For anyone toddling into beginning philosophy, this book is pure enlightenment. Took me months to get through this, but what a pleasurable few months it was! You‘re chewing over and rereading each page, from the Presocratics to Continental Philosophy, a selection of the most eminent Western thinkers (emphasis on “Western”). Adding my own revered philosopher here to the mix, background record “My Philosophy” by Boogie Down Productions (KRS-ONE).

The_Book_Ninja “So….you‘re a philosopher?” 6mo
14 likes1 comment
review
cant_i'm_booked
A House for Mr. Biswas | V.S. Naipaul
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Pickpick

A richly polished and moving portrait, written without one speck of superfluous sentimentality. We follow Mr. Mohun Biswas, from his humble birth to a humble death on the island of mid-20th century Trinidad, as he moves amongst a vast myriad of houses, all occupied by an equally vast and comic cast of characters, seeking a house of his own. Background record: “Hits of the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band: Trinidadian Reggae Style Music” (1973).

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

In an attempt to ford the loneliness of wanting an otherwise occupied lover and missing her young son away on a camping trip, divorcee Ellen embarks on a retreat to coastal France in search of sun, sex and other forms of self-obliterating hedonism in the high heat of late summer. As many “wicked” books often end, tragedy strikes.

12 likes1 stack add
review
cant_i'm_booked
Wisconsin Death Trip | Michael Lesy, Charles Van Schaick
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Pickpick

A historian‘s selection of photographs, taken of the small town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin and its inhabitants between the years of 1885 and 1900. Lesy pairs the photos with articles taken from the town newspaper, chronicling countless accounts of the eerie, dismal and shocking. This is a photo essay/compendium that shows the malaise of rural America entering modernity, a book garnering a cult-like following ever since its 1973 publication.

jlhammar I thought this was so fascinating! And haunting. 8mo
cant_i'm_booked @jlhammar I'm glad I have a fellow appreciator of this book! It's truly unique, I spent months looking for it before I realized my public library had a paperback copy. 8mo
12 likes2 comments
review
cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

Read this in time for the release of Christopher Nolan‘s movie “Oppenheimer.” As far as non-fiction graphic books are concerned, “Trinity” is grimly excellent: portraying the science, history, war-time politics and immense moral quandary behind the construction of a weapon that has ushered us into the Atomic Age. Background record “Loving Explosion” is by The Eliminators, a 1970s funk-soul band from the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

A dark ode to the powerful bonds of sisterhood. Practical Korede must look out for her baby sister Ayoola, a spoiled beauty who attracts many men, only to end up killing them when she loses interest. Complicating things further, Ayoola soon catches the interest of Korede‘s crush: a handsome Lagos doctor. A fun setting for some sibling rivalry; otherwise, the breezy plot doesn‘t bite very deep. Poolside w/ coffee from Naked Lounge in Sacramento!

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cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

Poet and essayist Abdurraqib interweaves the contributions of major Black artists (Wu-Tang Clan, Aretha Franklin, Don Cornelius of Soul Train, Merry Clayton, FUPU, Joe Tex, Josephine Baker and a host of others) into the shaping of American entertainment, as well as his own upbringing and his own understanding of Black love, creativity, friendship, anger, and resilience. A little too much poetic sentimentality for me…more history!

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

A really unique read - Labatut seamlessly meshes historical fact and some fiction into a riveting set of stories, each detailing a particular troubled genius who contributed to the golden age (and its dark consequences) of quantum mechanics, with side forays into chemistry, mathematics, religion, and psychology. Eg, what to think of Fritz Haber, who harnessed nitrogen to fertilize/feed the world but also introduced poison gas to modern warfare?

16 likes1 stack add
review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

I wanted to like this book - what with a young female protagonist who reads everything (from old Hollywood biographies to anarchic texts to physics tomes), and uses her vast stores of bookish knowledge to set about investigating the mysterious suicide of her favorite teacher on a camping trip. But….it‘s perhaps this same abundance of literary reference dotting every other sentence that made this novel feel a bit too heavy-handed and over-the-top.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

This book was devastating for the fact that its largely autobiographical: the author‘s account of abysmal poverty as he grows up within a family attempting to make ends meet as itinerant workers/serfs, his older sisters sold into servitude for cruel landowners, his parents trying to fend off the miseries of locust swarms, dysentery and starvation, all while Syria navigates the end of the French Mandate and its wobbly first years of independence.

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cant_i'm_booked
An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser
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Pickpick

An immensely sad book (hence the “tragedy”) based on a real crime that took place in 1906, a young man drowning his pregnant girlfriend in a secluded Adirondack lake. Dreiser takes a long hard look at the unforgiving cultural and religious machinations demarcating social class and the lure of material wealth that eventually destroys these two young people‘s lives (the young man is eventually sent to the electric chair).

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cant_i'm_booked
Mating Birds | Lewis Nkosi
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Mehso-so

A young black man is imprisoned for allegations of rape of a white woman in apartheid South Africa. As he sits in his prison cell awaiting execution, he recollects to a Swiss psychoanalyst his boyhood, his parents, his ambitions to become his country's preeminent writer: a life disrupted by an infatuation he develops for a woman suntanning on a segregated beach.

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cant_i'm_booked
The Peregrine | John Alec Baker
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Pickpick

A beautifully written book, full of one man‘s journal entries narrating his obsessive search for, and observations of, wintering peregrines in the marshy fenland of eastern England. Baker‘s keen eye teaches us patience and discernment, where we slowly learn to pick apart the beautiful patterns that underlie every wildlife scene: an activity so meditative and captivating, its hard to wrench yourself away as dusk falls at the end of each entry.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

Everyone knows “I think, therefore I am” but after a full read-through of Descartes‘s Meditations in philosophy class, I wanted to know more about his work and life. I am fascinated by his emphasis that we should doubt our sensory views of the world for they are only a semblance of what he believes is the “true form” of the universe: a mathematical one, invisible initially, but eventually graspable by the rational human mind.

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

A 1986 autobiography spanning the life/career of the Father of Rock n‘ Roll, Chuck Berry‘s prose is true to form in that it‘s more half poetry-half song lyric. Berry relates his St. Louis upbringing, early blues inspirations and first recordings at Chicago‘s Chess Records before the newly minted rock n‘ roll really picks up. Even racism, his infidelities and several prison stints don‘t break his stride: “I would sing the blues if I had the blues.”

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

I elect this required reading. WNP Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings, an avid English naturalist and diarist. Sadly, Cummings did not have very long to live (we now know he had multiple sclerosis). It‘s his written ruminations on death, on scientific ambitions cut short, and a great love for Literature, Nature and his wife/child that make this one of the greatest journals published. He died in 1919 at the age of 30.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

This book had been sitting on my shelf since middle-school…very happy I finally pulled it down to give it a read. A boy (who is described as being on the autism spectrum in publicity surrounding this book, but not explicitly stated by the book itself) sets about attempting to discover who killed his neighbor‘s black poodle. A mystery novel, yes, but one with a brilliant mathematically-minded detective possessing a wholly unique perspective.

Suet624 Great review for a great book.
12mo
20 likes1 comment
review
cant_i'm_booked
A Behanding in Spokane | Martin McDonagh
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Mehso-so

Full of dark and twisted humor, very Martin McDonagh-esque! A killer, after losing his hand on a Spokane railroad track, has been searching for years to recover it. His luck may be turning when he agrees to meet up at a small-town motel with a young couple who aver they have the missing hand. Makes me wish I could‘ve seen the actual play in 2010, starring Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

According to Helen Scales, the ocean deep is far from the abyssal wasteland we think it is. As sperm whales plunge thousands of feet down to chase giant squid, exquisitely beautiful bioluminescent jellies sift through inky black water as deep sea octopuses, gigantic isopods and hairy-armed yeti crabs trundle along the undulating ocean bottom, inhabiting dark trenches and hydrothermal vents (purported to be the beginnings of all cellular life).

review
cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

Part memoir, part poetic and historical inquiry into the uneasy relationship humans have had with teaching cadavers, the author writes about her first-year medical school course in gross anatomy, where she is paired with a female cadaver she names “Eve.“ The author's ensuing semester-long dissection of Eve cements her respect and gratitude to Eve as “mentor:“ an apt title for a woman whose donated body has enriched the education of many doctors.

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cant_i'm_booked
Inherent Vice | Thomas Pynchon
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Pickpick

My favorite Pynchon by far: a hilarious, zany L.A. noir about a private investigator investigating a kidnapped real estate mogul at the behest of his ex-girlfriend. Though I am in awe of the writing and sheer breadth of knowledge that makes up Gravity‘s Rainbow, I honestly enjoyed more this light-hearted, cannabis-infused, and unapologetically SoCal romp; “Pynchon Lite” as fans likes to say.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

If you can settle in to the lilting patois, spoken by over half of the book‘s 75 characters, in narrating a jumbled retelling of the epic history behind Jamaica‘s troubled years, you‘re in for an extraordinarily rich experience. A Brief History takes fictional freedom in investigating who were, and what became of, the seven mysterious gunmen who attempted to assassinate Bob Marley right before his Smile Jamaica peace concert on Dec. 5, 1976.

SamAnne This is sitting next to my book stand. On my list for this year. 14mo
cant_i'm_booked @SamAnne that‘s awesome, I‘m curious what you think of it! 14mo
11 likes2 comments
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cant_i'm_booked
The Changeling | Victor LaValle
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Panpan

I started this book excited, having heard good things about it: a book collector in New York City embarks upon a surreal trip into ancient folklore after his wife disappears following a horrendous event involving their newborn infant. It‘s an ambitious mix of fantasy, urban realism and the psychological trials of new parenthood, but a mix that didn‘t cohere well enough to make a truly good story.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

A spectacular cross-study of horror, where Jones considers the various objects/phenomena (both the imagined and the very much real) that've inspired human fright over the centuries before finally given life and color via the novel, the movie reel, television and finally the Internet. If you'd like to know more about the grimness of early fairy tales to Italian mondo/exploitation films to ecological horror and even Freud, I highly recommend this.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

Great selection of creepy stories, collected into one volume in 1957 by Don Congdon, more famously known as Ray Bradbury‘s literary agent (I read Bradbury‘s short-story “The Illustrated Man” for the first time in this book). Other favorites include “The Chaser” by John Collier, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen and “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki (H.H. Munro). Background record “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

A good collection of short-stories, written by the co-father of verismo, or Italian realism. Frequent breaks are needed, though, from the near-constant depictions of back-breaking poverty, onslaughts of cholera and tuberculosis, and familial health/wealth being made or broken by the capricious weather of the harsh Sicilian countryside. Lust and jealousy are major themes here: someone is either being called a "cuckold" or "tramp" every other page.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

One of my all-time favorite books: a cultural celebration of swimming and the centuries of literature inspired by it. It‘s invigorated me enough to go plunge into the frigid San Francisco Bay every morning. Sprawson‘s only book, but it should count as five, it being packed with incredibly erudite dives into the author‘s lifelong fascination with water and “the swimmer” archetype. Background record: “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

BarbaraBB My all time favorite record ❤️ 1y
15 likes2 stack adds1 comment
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cant_i'm_booked
Middlemarch | George Elliot
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Pickpick

Done with a crazy school semester, picked up right where I left off on my “real” reading (sorry, not sorry, you fusty ol‘ biology textbooks). I adore this book: Eliot has a way of prying off the lids to all her characters‘ heads and gently examining the contents. Written 150 years ago, Middlemarch offers the humbling realization that you‘re just another chapter in a never-ending human story of vice, virtue and finding that one great love.

Leftcoastzen Love your review! 1y
batsy Beautiful review of one of my very favourite books! 1y
Cuilin ❤️ one of my favorites. Great review. 1y
24 likes3 comments
review
cant_i'm_booked
Incest Diary | Anonymous
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Pickpick

Just a really difficult book to read (obviously). Beautifully written, but the content makes you want to put the book down very often. It must've taken tremendous courage to relate such painful details about something so taboo. She relates how her being abused leaked into almost every aspect of her psyche, how it split her mind of what was beautiful and desirous, molding her as a teenager and as a young woman forming her own new relationships.

17 likes1 stack add
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cant_i'm_booked
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Mehso-so

A graphic novel based on the author's experience working on an acute psychiatric ward for several years. Empathetic, educative, and often stark in its realism, it's an introduction to the forces behind a person's particular mental illness and the trials and stigma they often must endure. Depression, dementia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, and others, are each treated with a compassionate chapter that begs for our better understanding.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

I've been on a volcano kick since watching Fire of Love, a 2022 documentary about the volcanologist couple Maurice and Katia Krafft. This slim book is an aesthetic pleasure, chock-full of photos and paintings. Some of the world's most famous volcanoes are described, both in their uneasy sleeps and fiery eruptions, the author connecting such blasts to their impact on humanity's artistic and literary imagination over the centuries.

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cant_i'm_booked
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction | Loretta Ross, Rickie Solinger
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Pickpick

Let‘s just say the timing was right to crack this open. A critically informative read removed from a purely pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy, Loretta Ross instead reframes women‘s reproductive rights within a human rights framework, a radical re-contextualization that demands not only reproductive health but a total reworking of all social determinants that plague, especially, poor women of color. It's not a right if not ALL women have access to it.

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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

It‘s a credit to the wild and eventful life Langston Hughes had lived, for the poet to be asked to already write an autobiography, still in his thirties. Hughes tells of his early life as a curious young man, taking up work as a seaman on merchant ships to Africa, Havana and Europe, working as a waiter in the Black concert halls of Paris and finding his poetic voice, mingling with the literati and other cultural icons of the Harlem Renaissance.

12 likes1 stack add
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cant_i'm_booked
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Pickpick

So glad I finally decided to tackle some of the classics penned by this sci-fi master. I can definitely see, now, how so many elements in current science fiction was built upon his short stories and novels. I‘m curious about PKD‘s life as well: if anyone knows a good biography, let me know. It‘d be interesting to know more of the man behind this golden age of sci-fi. For now, I guess I‘ll finally let myself be convinced to watch “Blade Runner.”

vivastory I've read Do Androids Dream & Ubik. Loved both of them & have been meaning to read the other 2 novels collected in this vol. I see that an hr long documentary on Dick that was released a few yrs ago is available for free on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS7WeWG2ITo
2y
vivastory Ah, I see now that you asked for biography, not documentary recommendations. I haven't read the following bio. but it's blurbed by Art Spiegelman & Jonathan Lethem (a massive fan of PKD) 2y
cant_i'm_booked @vivastory Hey, I'm totally down for a solid doc too, thank you so much for this and the Spiegelman/Lethem rec. :) Lols, as for fandom, I figured that out too: in this Library of American edition, Lethem was credited for selecting the stories and adding all the footnotes. 2y
OutsmartYourShelf I really liked the Amazon tv show of TMitHC but heard that the book version wasn‘t as good. 2y
cant_i'm_booked @OutsmartYourShelf TMitHC was fun to read, but it was probably my least favorite of the four novels included here. It did make me want to watch the Amazon TV version, so thank you for the reminder. :) 2y
14 likes5 comments
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cant_i'm_booked
A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area | Rachel Brahinsky, Alexander Tarr
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Pickpick

As an SF resident, this sent me into a flurry of note-taking. The authors take pains to steer your attention to the un-touristy, long-forgotten corners of the Bay which make up an unbelievably fascinating human geography and complicated cultural stratigraphy. Must read for anyone wanting to know their city better (psst it‘s a whole series too; I want the NOLA one next). Background jazz record: “San Francisco Scene” by the George Shearing Quintet.