en-US Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:16:20 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 58347388 The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love?

Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years.

At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it—and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.]]> 268 Hila Blum 0593539664 Ruth 0 3.65 2021
author: Hila Blum
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 42117228 A memoir of family, the Holocaust, trauma, and identity, in which Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must come to terms with the legacy of his family’s painful past and discover who he is in the wake of a life-changing revelation about his own origins.

Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines—a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is.

In the midst of piecing together a story of inherited familial trauma, Adam discovered he was only half of who he thought he was, knowledge that raised essential questions of identity. Who was he, if not his father’s son? If not part of a rich heritage of writers and public servants? Does it matter? What defines a family’s bonds? What will he pass on to his own children? To rewrite his story in truth and to build a life for his own young family, Adam had to navigate his pain to find answers and a way forward.

Throughout this journey into the past, his family’s psyche, and his own understanding of identity, Adam comes to realize that while the nature of our families’ traumas may vary, each of us is faced with the same choice. We can turn away from what we’ve inherited—or, we can confront it, in the hopes of moving on and stopping that trauma from inflicting pain on future generations. The stories Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways the past can haunt our future, the resilience that can be found on the other side of trauma, and the good that can come from things that are unspeakably bad. ]]> 288 Adam P. Frankel 0062258605 Ruth 0 4.04 2019
author: Adam P. Frankel
name: Ruth
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 39901314
In the context of a happy life, a messy desk or crowded coat closet is a trivial problem–yet Gretchen Rubin has found that getting control of the stuff of life makes us feel more in control of our lives generally. By getting rid of things we don’t use, don’t need, or don’t love, as well as things that don’t work, don’t fit, or don’t suit, we free our mind (and our shelves) for what we truly value.

In this trim book filled with insights, strategies, and sometimes surprising tips, Gretchen tackles the key challenges of creating outer order, by explaining how to “Make Choices,” “Create Order,” “Know Yourself–and Others,” “Cultivate Helpful Habits,” and, of course, “Add Beauty.”

When we get our possessions under control, we feel both calmer and more energetic. With a sense of humor, and also a clear sense of what’s realistic for most people, Gretchen suggests dozens of manageable steps for creating a more serene, orderly environment–one that helps us to create the lives we yearn for.]]> 208 Gretchen Rubin Ruth 0 to-read 3.54 2019
author: Gretchen Rubin
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 Ruth 5 3.67 2014
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/09/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 15893653 "I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature." - from Heroines

On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor" and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds.

"ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential."

By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.]]> 312 Kate Zambreno 1584351144 Ruth 5 4.14 2012
author: Kate Zambreno
name: Ruth
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/07/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 16280051
From the best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying and The Dew Breaker: a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.

Claire Limyè Lanmè - Claire of the Sea Light - is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life.

But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbor, lover, and friend, while revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one another. Embracing the magic and heartbreak of ordinary life, it is Edwidge Danticat's most spellbinding, astonishing book yet.]]> 238 Edwidge Danticat 030727179X Ruth 5 3.66 2013
author: Edwidge Danticat
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/07/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 6219656
“The Lottery” stands out as one of the most famous short stories in American literary history. Originally published in The New Yorker, the author immediately began receiving letters from readers who demanded an explanation of the story’s meaning. “The Lottery” has been adapted for stage, television, radio and film.
]]> 30 Shirley Jackson 1563127873 Ruth 0 4.07 1948
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Ruth
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 89723 302 Shirley Jackson 0374529531 Ruth 0 4.04 1949
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Ruth
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret.

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features an afterword by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Ruth 0 3.91 1962
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 89717 “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. . . .”

Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Luke, the adventurous future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past. As they begin to cope with chilling, even horrifying occurrences beyond their control or understanding, they cannot possibly know what lies ahead. For Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.]]> 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Ruth 0 3.84 1959
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 22125258
Link has won an ardent following for her ability to take readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe with each new story. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded in sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.]]> 336 Kelly Link 0804179689 Ruth 5 3.67 2015
author: Kelly Link
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/24
date added: 2016/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 5508793 255 Gene Stratton-Porter 1604594497 Ruth 0 to-read 4.05 1909
author: Gene Stratton-Porter
name: Ruth
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1909
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1920481 540 Constance Fenimore Woolson 0405100590 Ruth 0 to-read 3.97 1880
author: Constance Fenimore Woolson
name: Ruth
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1880
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>