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Blood Red Blues by Teddy Hayes5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Devil gets a crash course in Harlem social studies, but doesn’t get much traction in his investigation until he teams up with a stand-up young cop named Al Mack. The Tease Me victim is a Japanese diplomat named Yamaguchi the girl he was with, an Amazonian beauty known as China Blue, hasn’t been seen since. When the former FBI agent appeals to Devil to do some legwork on the crime, it’s an offer the new local businessman can’t refuse. Meanwhile, at the nearby Tease Me Club, hotbed of drug dealing and prostitution, a brutal murder spawns big headlines and bigger headaches for local political boss Deke Robinson. Manager Honey Lavelle and the rest of the staff at the Be-Bop become a second family in no time. ![]() ![]() The Agency’s glass ceiling, a diagnosis of sickle cell anemia, and the recent death of his beloved Amanda all make his return an easy decision. When avuncular Ernest Barnett is killed in his 125th Street bar, the Be-Bop Tavern, his son Devil, a wet-ops agent for the CIA, comes home to run the popular watering-hole. An ex-CIA agent returns to his Harlem roots and solves a murder. ![]()
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What the hell did i just read5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Yes, it works with e-books, too, I don't have time to explain how. ![]() To quote the Bible, "Learning the truth can be like loosening a necktie, only to realize it was the only thing keeping your head attached." No, don't put the book back on the shelf - it is now your duty to purchase it to prevent others from reading it. Though, to be fair, "They" are probably right about this one. It's the story "They" don't want you to read. Now, New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin is back with What the Hell Did I Just Read, the third installment of this black-humored thriller series. John Dies at the End's "smart take on fear manages to tap into readers' existential dread on one page, then have them laughing the next" ( Publishers Weekly) and This Book is Full of Spiders was "unlike any other book of the genre" ( Washington Post). ![]()
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Lawless tm frazier5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() “But do you? It’s kind of important.” It was actually very important. “Don’t think I ever stopped,” I admitted. ![]() She grabbed a small blanket from over the couch and slung it over her shoulder. “You got any weed?” I asked again, trying not to look at her tit but in the process managing to only look at her tit. Baby attached to it or not, a bare tit is still a bare tit and although I knew my feelings for Ray had never been anything real, she was still fucking beautiful…and her tit was still out. I always thought it would be something gross, but I was wrong. ![]() I’d never seen anyone breastfeed a baby before. “I wasn’t breastfeeding before,” Ray said, and that’s when I noticed the little bundle of pink pressed up against Ray’s bare tit. “I don’t know, Bear, do you know how to knock?” Ray asked, shooting daggers at me with her eyes. “You got any weed?” I asked Ray who was on the couch in the living room. ![]()
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A gentle madness5/29/2023 ![]() We live in Lahore but have driven north across the plains, through arid tribal terrain, to my father’s ancestral village, Babri Banda, in the Northwest Frontier. From high above, somewhere in the darkening sky, East Pakistan is about to bomb us – the country is at war with itself. I have an ear infection, am burning up with a fever. There is one memory that shoots through the aperture, into the present, with particular ferocity.ġ971: Mother, Father, Ayah and I are driving to the Kohat Military Hospital. Past and present skim close, brushing arms like almost-lovers strolling in a desert park. We feed our memories as if they are guests at tea, pay homage to them. The sounds are family lore, stories I’ve heard so many times that I can’t free my memory from their telling, nor can I simply live in a present that isn’t sieved through their mythology. No matter where I’ve lived since – Dubai, Dallas, Minneapolis, Jeddah or New York – fragments from those years merge and dissolve into the now so that walking down a street, or waiting underground for the subway to screech to a halt, I often feel as if I’ve accidentally slipped inside a video installation layered with disjunctive sound and imagery. ![]() The country came with me: it moved in, set up home, breathing inside me a stream of remembrances that, for twenty-eight years, have inflected the most minute details of my present life. ![]() My heart, I thought, would never recover. ![]() When I was twelve, my parents decided to leave Pakistan and move our family to Abu Dhabi. ![]()
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Giovanni boccaccio dekameron5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Most of the stories are silly, some are sad and none are focused on the plague. In another, a heartbroken woman grows basil in a pot that contains her lover’s severed head. In one story, a nun mistakenly wears her own lover’s trousers on her head, as a wimple. What do these young people do, after fleeing unspeakable suffering and horror? They eat, sing songs and take turns telling one another stories. ![]() Wild pigs sniff and tear at the rags of corpses, then convulse and die themselves. Some appear healthy at breakfast but by dinner are sharing a meal, it is said, with their ancestors in another world. The afflicted develop lumps in their groins or armpits, then dark spots on their limbs. ![]() It’s 1348, in the time of the bubonic plague. Ten young people decide to quarantine outside Florence. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() She all but imprisons her beautiful, dimwitted daughter, Consuelo, because she wants her to marry the Duke of Marlborough and not the older, less well-heeled Winty Rutherfurd. She may feel bad about letting her lady’s maid go because she is black, or for shunning one of her friends because he penned a silly book, but she does it anyway. She hasn’t a scintilla of a sense of humor. Therese Anne Fowler’s biographical novel isn’t about careless people, but people who care too much about the wrong stuff.Īlva Vanderbilt Belmont married for money, as did just about everyone else in her set. In comparison to our current crop of dingy squillionaires and robber barons, the Vanderbilts, Belmonts and Astors were so much more entertaining, with their monstrous Fifth Avenue chateaux and even more monstrous “cottages,” their frivolous costume balls, their genteel contempt for the hoi polloi and their obsession with bloodlines, both their own and those of their thoroughbred racehorses. ![]()
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![]() Lusa arrives in this world of long-established families and rigid traditions as the new wife of a young farmer, with her foreign Polish-Jewish-Palestinian background and her fancy scientific knowledge about bugs. ![]() ![]() Everything else in modern farming is a gamble, and farming is a hand to mouth business. We’ll start with Lusa: she lives on a farm where tobacco is the only crop that will grow reliably and store without rotting while waiting for the market’s best prices. It’s about the lives of four people living all quite near each other, in a small Virginia mountain valley and on the mountain itself. On a more recent rereading, I couldn’t even stop to make lunch until I reached the end. This novel is so intensely involving that, the first time I read it, I was up until 3am, sitting in the courtyard of a Spanish holiday cottage, desperately trying to finish the novel before I got eaten alive by night insects. This time on the Really Like This Book’s podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in very rural modern America, enjoying Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where women are coyotes caring for their young, and a widowed scientist finds a new way to keep the family farm running. ![]()
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![]() ![]() INSCRIBED by the author in blue ink to title page: 'To John and Anne | Reece | from | Daphne du Maurier.' Publisher's brown cloth with gilt titles to spine, and green endpapers. 3) The Flight of the Falcon, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1965. ![]() Jacket toned and chipped to spine, with some further closed tears. Green illustrated bookplate of John Reece to front pastedown. ![]() With the distinctive yellow Gollancz dust-jacket priced at 21s. INSCRIBED by the author in blue ink to fly-leaf: 'Anne and John, | with sincere good | wishes | Daphne du Maurier | 1971.' Publisher's red cloth with gilt titles to spine. 2) The Scapegoat, London: Victor Gollancz, 1965. With the distinctive yellow Gollancz dust-jacket priced at 16s. INSCRIBED by the author in blue ink to fly-leaf: 'Anne and John, | with good wishes | Daphne du Maurier | 1971.' Publisher's red cloth with gilt titles to spine. Thirteen books, one autograph postcard, and one typed letter signed: 1) The Daphne du Maurier Tandem, comprising Mary Anne and My Cousin Rachel, London: Victor Gollancz, 1964. ![]()
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Maria adelmann how to be eaten5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() Named a Best Book of May by TIME Magazine & Glamour One of NPR's Best Books of the Year Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women. ![]() What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other? Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other's stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed. And Raina's love story will shock them all. ![]() Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. ![]() One of NPR's Best Books of the Year: This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. 15+ Hours: Long Audiobooks for Long Car Rides.Bookception! Books about books, libraries, writing.Natalie Feld Memorial Library Donations. ![]()
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Richer than sin meghan march5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() " Richer Than Sin is everything I have come to expect from Meghan March's books, multiplied by ten!" ~Naughty Book Blog Absolutely jaw-dropping." ~Angie, Angie's Dreamy Reads " RICHER THAN SIN IS PURE, UNADULTERATED TEMPTATION.IT WILL LEAVE YOU OBSESSED!" ~Marie's Tempting Reads! "Already at the very top of her game, Meghan March's Richer Than Sin doesn't just raise the bar on romance, it shatters the ceiling." ~T.M. I'm getting my second chance, and this time I'll do whatever it takes to prove them all wrong. They say a Riscoff and a Gable can never live happily ever after. She was out of my reach for years, but now she's home again-and there's no ring on her finger. ![]() We burned like a flash fire until everything went sideways, and she married another man. I certainly didn't expect her to be Whitney Gable. Like any man who sees and knows what he wants, I went after her. I used to believe that-until I caught a glimpse of a woman who took my breath away. Not with a family feud that is the stuff of legends. From New York Times bestselling author Meghan March comes a saga of forbidden romance. ![]() |