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The Strange Library ★★★☆☆
Strange, short, and well made, and I’m still not sure what it was about.
I haven’t read much
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So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men ★★★★☆
Three short stories, very few words, and not one of them wasted.
Claire Keegan uses words like rice grains in
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Sleeping Giants ★★★☆☆
A strong premise, a clever format, and a middle that loses its grip.
The format is the best thing here.
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The Message ★★★★★
You cannot read Ta-Nehisi Coates for fun. In The Message, he moves from Senegal to the 2020 reckoning and to Palestine, and draws one line through all three. A difficult, necessary book.
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Rules of Civility ★★★★☆
There’s something about Amor Towles’s writing that I could read forever.
Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose, it comes
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How to Survive America ★★★★☆
Angry, and better researched than you’d expect from a comedian.
I feel bad for D.L. Hughley. He wrote
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Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best ★★★★★
Duckworth answered the criticism of 'Grit', which raised this book's quality. I’m a big fan
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The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World ★★★★☆
Useful, but more scholarly and longer than I like for casual reading.
One warning first: this book is not about
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Meditations for Mortals ★★★★☆
A worthy follow-up to a book I loved enough to gift to people.
Four Thousand Weeks got under my
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Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better ★★★★☆
Epstein makes a strong case for operating within constraints, although he repeats his points more often than needed.
I liked
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How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening ★★★★☆
This serves as a solid introductory guide to communication. The audiobook proved to be an appropriate format for the material.
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And Then There Were None ★★★★★
The bar for Christie is high, and this clears it.
It's relentless. Once the island closes in, the
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The Order of Time ★★★★☆
This book altered my view of a topic I believed I understood.
It is a more approachable version of Hawking&
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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
I came to this sideways, after reading about ancient Egypt and learning that its empire, which lasted three millennia, was
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How To Be Idle ★★★★★
This book found me at the right age to actually appreciate it.
If I'd read this in my
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Blood Test: A Comedy ★★☆☆☆
A disappointing read. It starts with an interesting almost-scifi premise but eventually peters out to be a disappointing read.
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The Names ★★★★★
Wonderfully written. Although it's more about choices, the names Cora choses for each of the three parallel lives,
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How Fiction Works ★★★☆☆
It was a little too academic for casual reading. Also, it focused on the works of classic literature most of