reading
my life’s library
Items in this hypelist
Books
Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo · 2015
Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart · 2022
The Picture of Dorian Grey
Oscar Wilde · 2012
Just Kids
Patti Smith · 2010
<p> It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. </p> <p> Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. </p> <p> <i>Just Kids</i> begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. </p>
Giovanni’s Room
Baldwin, James
Swimming Home
Deborah Levy · 2012
The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong · 2025
Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar · 2024
I'll Give You the Sun
Jandy Nelson · 2014
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson · 2015
The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai · 2018
<b>PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST<br><b>NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST<br></b>A <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018<br><i>LOS ANGELES TIMES</i> BOOK PRIZE WINNER<br><b>ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER</b><br>THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER<br><br>Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler • <b>One of the <i>New York Times</i>’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century</b><br><br>“A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” <i>—The New York Times Book Review</i><br><br>A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris</b><br><br>In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.<br><br>Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.<br><br><b>Named a Best Book of 2018 by <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>,<i> NPR</i>, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, <i>The Boston Globe</i>, <i>Entertainment Weekly</i>, <i>Buzzfeed</i>, <i>The Seattle Times</i>, <i>Bustle</i>, <i>Newsday</i>, <i>AM New York</i>, <i>BookPage</i>, <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i>, <i>Lit Hub</i>, <i>Publishers Weekly</i>, <i>Kirkus Reviews</i>, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library </b>
Migrations
Charlotte Mcconaghy · 2021
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
The Overstory
Richard Powers · 2019
Writers & Lovers
Lily King · 2021
