book waiting list
books i don’t own , but truly want to read, when i find the time
Items in this hypelist
stand-alone
The Henna Wars
Adiba Jaigirdar · 2020
<p><b>"Impossible to put down." - <i>Kirkus</i>, starred review </b><br><br>Nishat doesn’t want to lose her family, but she also doesn’t want to hide who she is, and it only gets harder once a childhood friend walks back into her life. Flávia is beautiful and charismatic, and Nishat falls for her instantly. But when a school competition invites students to create their own businesses, both Flávia and Nishat decide to showcase their talent as henna artists. In a fight to prove who is the best, their lives become more tangled—but Nishat can’t quite get rid of her crush, especially since Flávia seems to like her back. <br><br>As the competition heats up, Nishat has a decision to make: stay in the closet for her family, or put aside her differences with Flávia and give their relationship a chance.</p>
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 2021
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
Michelle Zauner · 2021
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 2021
I'm Glad My Mom Died
Jennette McCurdy · 2022
the idiot
Elif Batuman · 2018
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction<br/><br/>“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ<br/><br/>“Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair<br/><br/>A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.<br/><br/>The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.<br/><br/>At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.<br/><br/>With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.<br/><br/>Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions
It All Comes Back to You
Farah Naz Rishi · 2021
Sorry for the Inconvenience: A Memoir
Farah Naz Rishi · 2024
“Incredible…this story ripped my heart in two, had me grabbing for the tissues, and then put me back together again.” ―Mindy Kaling<br/>From a Pakistani American author comes a bracing memoir about tradition, upending expectations, and the volatility of family, friendship, and, inevitably, love.<br/>Pakistani American Farah Naz Rishi’s first year of college was perfectly, thankfully, uneventful. After all, she was in college to learn and forge a path of self-sufficiency, especially after her last relationship fell apart―dashing her mother’s aspirations for an early marriage. What could Farah expect, anyway? For the ideal guy to just conveniently waltz into her life? Life isn’t a love story.<br/>Enter Stephen, a Jamaican student with an open smile and a disarmingly laid-back attitude. It’s not love at first sight. And there’s no way Farah’s mother would approve of him as marriage material. But they have something better: an inexplicable connection. Through a series of impossible tragedies, grief, and trying to find her place in the world, Stephen is always there as Farah’s confidant, champion, and, most of all, best friend. Anything more could ruin a perfectly good thing…Right?<br/>Spanning thirteen years of complex family dynamics and a surprising kinship, Farah Naz Rishi’s story explores the unpredictability of love―familial, platonic, and romantic, but never truly instant.
You've Reached Sam
Dustin Thao · 2021
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop: A Novel
Satoshi Yagisawa • 2023
Nomade
Humeyra Cetinel • 2023
One Day
David Nicholls • 2009
Warrior Girl Unearthed
Angeline Boulley • 2023
With the rising number of missing Indigenous women, her family's involvement in a murder investigation, and grave robbers profiting off her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry takes matters into her own hands to solve the mystery and reclaim her people's inheritance.
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 2013
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
R. F. Kuang • 2022
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of The Poppy War “Absolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out.” -- Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide… Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
Yellowface: A Novel
R. F. Kuang • 2023
series
anne of green gables
Lucy Maud Montgomery · 2018
An Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir · 2015
<b>BOOK ONE IN THE <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLING SERIES • One of <i>Time Magazine’</i>s 100 Best Fantasy and 100 Best YA Books of All Time • People's Choice Award winner • Bustle's Best Young Adult Book <br> </b><br> <b>“This novel is a harrowing, haunting reminder of what it means to be human—and how hope might be kindled in the midst of oppression and fear.” — <i>The Washington Post<br> </i></b><br><b>The beloved and bestselling fantasy series that “glows, burns, and smolders.” (<i>Huffington Post</i>). <br></b><br> <b>Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.</b><br><br> Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.<br> <br> It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.<br> <br> But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy.<br> <br> There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself. <br><br><b>ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR FROM The Wall Street Journal • Buzzfeed • LA Weekly • Bustle • Paste Magazine • Indigo • Suspense Magazine • The New York Public Library • Popsugar • Hypable</b>
