My bookshelf·Index Published

2022

19 books

No. 0290 field guide · No fixed address

The Urban Sketching Handbook: Color First, Ink Later

Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara

Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…

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The Urban Sketching Handbook: Color First, Ink Later
No. 0269 novel · No fixed address

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin

Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
No. 0220 science fiction · space

Station Eternity

Mur Lafferty

Mallory Viridian has a problem: People keep getting murdered around her, and she keeps solving the cases, and after enough bodies nobody wants her near them. So she moves to a sentient space station called Eternity, which is largely populated…

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Station Eternity
No. 0199 thriller · No fixed address

The Overnight Guest

Heather Gudenkauf

Wylie Lark is a true crime writer holed up in a rented Iowa farmhouse over Christmas, working on the 1980s murders that happened in that house — two parents shot, a girl missing, a boy who survived. A blizzard comes…

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The Overnight Guest
No. 0189 novel · American West

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture.…

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Lessons in Chemistry
No. 0187 novel · Europe

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Rivka Galchen

Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615,…

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Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
No. 0182 thriller · Europe

Rock Paper Scissors

Alice Feeney

Adam and Amelia have been married ten years and give each other a gift by the traditional list every anniversary — paper, cotton, leather. She wins a weekend away in a converted chapel in the Scottish Highlands, they drive up…

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Rock Paper Scissors
No. 0121 field guide · sea

Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish

David Liittschwager

My Octopus Teacher might have alerted us to the idea of a novel alien intelligence beneath the waves, but nothing can prepare you for the profound diversity and unconventional beauty of octopuses, seahorses, and jellyfish seen through the lens of…

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Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish