My 5 ☆’s in books
Items in this hypelist
novels
Sweet Bean Paste
Durian Sukegawa · 2017
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Satoshi Yagisawa · 2023
<b>The Japanese bestseller: a tale of love, new beginnings, and the comfort that can be found between the pages of a good book.</b><br><br>When twenty-five-year-old Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle Satoru's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above his shop.<br><br>Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, the Morisaki Bookshop is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building, the shop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books. It is Satoru's pride and joy, and he has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife left him five years earlier.<br><br>Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the shop.<br><br>And as summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.<br><br><b>Quirky, beautifully written, and movingly profound, <i>Days at the Morisaki Bookshop</i> will appeal to readers of <i>Before The Coffee Gets Cold, The Cat Who Saved Books</i>, and anyone who has had to recover from a broken heart.</b><br><b></b><br><b>PRAISE FOR DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSHOP:</b><br>'Brims with genuine charm . . . evokes powerful feelings that any book lover will recognize' <b>Japan Times</b><br>'Ozawa's translation gracefully captures the author's whimsical and tender voice. Yagisawa has the right touch for lifting a reader's mood' <b>Publishers Weekly</b><br>'Readers will want to linger in this world' <b>Booklist</b><br>'A familiar romance about books and bookstores, told with heart and humor' <b>Kirkus</b><br>'A slender book, but one rich in experience, exactly like the tiny, crammed Morisaki bookshop itself' <b>New York Journal of Books </b><br><b></b>
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
Michiko Aoyama · 2023
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr · 2014
<b>*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy <i>(Stranger Things)</i> starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*</b><br> <br><b>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant <i>New York Times</i> bestseller and <i>New York Times Book Review </i>Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.</b><br><br>Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.<br> <br>In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.<br> <br>Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i> is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (<i>Los Angeles Times</i>).
Severance
Ling Ma · 2018
The Secret History
Donna Tartt · 2011
<b><b><b>A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK <b>• ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • </b>INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "a<b>n accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (<i>Village Voice</i>)</b>, f<b>rom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <i>The Goldfinch.<br><br></i></b></b></b>One of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years</b><br><br>Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.<br><br><b>“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —<i>The New York Times</i></b>
Find Me
André Aciman · 2019
Call Me by Your Name
André Aciman · 2008
<p><b>Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time OscarTM Nominee James Ivory<br><br>The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay<br></b><b><br>A <i>New York Times</i> Bestseller<br>A <i>USA Today</i> Bestseller <br>A <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Bestseller<br>A <i>Vulture</i> Book Club Pick </b><br><br><b>An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time</b><br><br>Andre Aciman's <i>Call Me by Your Name</i> is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.<br><br>Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Ficition<br><br>A <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book of the Year • A <i>Publishers Weekly </i>and <i>The Washington Post </i>Best Book of the Year • A <i>New York </i>Magazine "Future Canon" Selection • A <i>Chicago Tribune</i> and <i>Seattle Times</i> (Michael Upchurch's) Favorite Favorite Book of the Year</p>
The Summer Book
Tove Jansson · 2022
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion · 2024
persuasion
Jane Austen · 2021
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1918
Austen’s most celebrated novel tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a bright, lively young woman with four sisters, and a mother determined to marry them to wealthy men. At a party near the Bennets’ home in the English countryside, Elizabeth meets the wealthy, proud Fitzwilliam Darcy. Elizabeth initially finds Darcy haughty and intolerable, but circumstances continue to unite the pair. Mr. Darcy finds himself captivated by Elizabeth’s wit and candor, while her reservations about his character slowly vanish. The story is as much a social critique as it is a love story, and the prose crackles with Austen’s wry wit.
Emma, a Novel
Jane Austen · 1857
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney · 2021
<p><b>AN INSTANT #1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b><i><br>Beautiful World, Where Are You</i> is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of <i>Normal People </i>and <i>Conversations with Friends</i>.</b><br><br>Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.<br><br>Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?</p>
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1994
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 2003
Happy Place
Emily Henry · 2024
<b>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER ∙ A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise novel from #1 <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author Emily Henry.<br><br>“The beach-read master hooks us again."—<i>People</i></b><br><br>Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.<br><br>They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.<br><br>Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.<br><br>Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week…in front of those who know you best?
Beach Read
Emily Henry · 2020
Book Lovers
Emily Henry · 2022
<b><b>An insightful, delightful, instant #1 <i>New York Times</i> bestseller from the author of <i>Funny Story</i>.</b> <br><br>“One of my favorite authors.”—Colleen Hoover<br><br></b><i>One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming...</i><br><br>Nora Stephens' life is books—she’s read them all—and she is <i>not</i> that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora <i>is</i> a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.<br><br>Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.<br><br>If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
Beartown
Fredrik Backman
Mr Salary
Sally Rooney · 2019
<p> <b>Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. </b> <br> <i> <br> My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.</i> <br> <br> Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable. <br> <br> Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.</p>
Normal People
Sally Rooney · 2020
<b>NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • “A stunning novel about the transformative power of relationships” (<i>People</i>) from the author of <i>Conversations with Friends,</i> “a master of the literary page-turner” (J. Courtney Sullivan).</b><br> <br><b>“[A] novel that demands to be read compulsively, in one sitting.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br><b>ONE OF <i>ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY</i>’S TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE</b><br><br><b>TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>People, Slate,</i> The New York Public Library, <i>Harvard Crimson</i></b><br><br>Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.<br><br>A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.<br><br><i>Normal People</i> is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.<br> <br><b>WINNER: The British Book Award, The Costa Book Award, The An Post Irish Novel of the Year, <i>Sunday Times </i>Young Writer of the Year Award</b><br><br><b>BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, Time,</i> NPR, <i>The Washington Post, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, Vox, The Paris Review, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country</i></b>
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney · 2017
<b>NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Normal People</i> . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—<i>Entertainment Weekly</i><br> <br>SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE <i>TIME</i> 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE <i>SUNDAY TIMES</i> (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF <i>BUZZFEED</i>’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Vogue, Slate</i> • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Elle</i></b><br><br>Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.<br><br>Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, <i>Conversations with Friends</i> is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.<br><br><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD</b><br><br>“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”<b>—Celeste Ng, <i>Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast</i></b><br><br>“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”<b>—Curtis Sittenfeld, <i>The Week</i></b><br><br>“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”<b>—<i>New York</i></b><br><br>“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”<b>—Alexandra Schwartz,</b> <b><i>The New Yorker</i></b><br><br>“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”<b>—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)</b>
My Dark Vanessa
Kate Elizabeth Russell · 2020
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides · 2011
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith · 2009
classics
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1993
<p>Rilke's timeless letters about poetry, sensitive observation, and the complicated workings of the human heart.</p> <p>Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them. </p>
These Precious Days
Ann Patchett · 2021
White Nights
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1923
Dostoyevsky was epileptic. 'White nights' is the term that he used to describe the experience - part ecstatic, part torture - of his epileptic fits.-- N.Ward "Twelve of the Fifty-One Shocks of Antonin Artaud, New Theatre Quarterly, 1999, vol. 15, p. 127
memoirs
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner · 2021
<b>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER LIST</b><br><br>In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. <br><br>As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.<br><br>Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, <i>Crying in H Mart</i> is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton · 2018
<p><b>A celebration of our female friendships, of our messy years, and of growing up together. Glittering with wit, heart, and humour, it’s a book to share with every woman you’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend.</b><br><br><i>“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”</i><br><br>I know that love can be loud and jubilant. It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE AMAZING” over the band. It’s laughing until you wheeze. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is yours.<br><br>I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting.<br><br>I know that love happens under the splendour of fireworks and sunsets, but also happens when you’re lying on blow-up airbeds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport.<br><br>*****<br><br><b>WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:</b><br><br>‘A book every girl in her 20s needs to read’<br><br><b>‘I’ll never stop recommending this book’</b><br><br>‘This is my comfort book! I LOOOOVE THIS BOOK TO MY CORE’<br><br><b>‘I wish I could read it for the first time again’</b><br><br><i>A Sunday Times bestseller, September 2022<br>TikTok Book Awards Winner, August 2023</i></p>
In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado · 2019
