Eggplant.place

266d

All done with #DeanStreetDecember for 2025. Thanks again to Dean Street Press for the reads. If DS(P)D returns next year, so will this bad penny!
#bookstodon #Mystery #middlebrow #biography #reading

@bookstodon

https://robinwalter31.blogspot.com/2025/12/ten-from-ten-dean-street-december-iv.html

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268d

📚 Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal by: Meghan Quinn

There are two things you should know about Atlas 'Max' Maxheimer. One: he has the presence of a six-foot-four lumberjack with a knack for making people smile. Two: he lives and breathes the holidays. Not only is he the reigning victor of the annual to...

https://bookblabla.com/book/merry-christmas-you-filthy-animal

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #romance #generalfiction #contemporaryfiction #sports

There are two things you should know about Atlas 'Max' Maxheimer. One: he has the presence of a six-foot-four lumberjack with a knack for making people smile. Two: he lives and breathes the holidays. Not only is he the reigning victor of the annual town Christmas contest, but his family have a literal Christmas tree farm. 'Tis his damn season.

And she's going to ruin everything.

Betty is new in town, full of holiday cheer and, worst of all, is helping her uncle open a rival tree farm next door. Max is convinced she's out to destroy everything he loves. Betty thinks Max might be one sleigh short of a winter parade.

And they're having way too much fun trying to outdo each other.

After Christmas chaos, public humiliation and booby traps that Home Alone would be proud of, it only takes a blizzard, a romantic cottage and only one bed for the sparks between Max and Betty to ignite...

The perfect festive romance involving a very creative misuse of a popcorn garland, a grand Christmas romantic gesture and getting snowed in with only one bed...

🎄TROPES:
💕Small Towns
💕Banter
💕Rivals to Lovers
💕Forced Proximity
💕He Falls First
💕One Bed
💕A lot of spice 🌶️ 🌶️ 🌶️

But also expect...
Elite holiday movie references
A spicy moment with some chocolate covered cherries
Misuse of a popcorn garland...

READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH MEGHAN QUINN'S BOOKS...
'Outrageously laugh-out-loud funny' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'The way I completely

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281d

New on my #blog: "Books Reviewed: November 2025."
https://itinerantlibrarian.wordpress.com/2025/12/03/books-reviewed-november-2025/

A small wrap up this month, but still got something in.

#books #reading #AlchemicalThoughts #reviews #BookReview #bookstodon
💙📚

@bookstodon

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281d

📚 The God of the Woods by: Liz Moore

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-god-of-the-woods

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #familylife #generalfiction #psychologicalfiction #literary

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A NEW YORK TIMES "BEST THRILLER" and "BEST CRIME NOVEL" OF THE YEAR

PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR

Extraordinary... Reminds me of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History... I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR.

This expertly paced thriller has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries. The New Yorker

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281d

蘑菇的拟态日常

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281d

📚 Honey and Spice by: Bolu Babalola

Sweet like plantain, hot like pepper. They taste the best when together...
Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission...

https://bookblabla.com/book/honey-and-spice

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #romance #contemporaryfiction #womenfiction

Sweet like plantain, hot like pepper. They taste the best when together...
Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission to make sure the women of the African-Caribbean Society at Whitewell University do not fall into the mess of "situationships", players, and heartbreak. But when the Queen of the Unbothered kisses Malakai Korede, the guy she just publicly denounced as "The Wastemen of Whitewell," in front of every Blackwellian on campus, she finds her show on the brink.

They're soon embroiled in a fake relationship to try and salvage their reputations and save their futures. Kiki has never surrendered her heart before, and a player like Malakai won't be the one to change that, no matter how charming he is or how electric their connection feels. But surprisingly entertaining study sessions and intimate, late-night talks at old-fashioned diners force Kiki to look beyond her own presumptions. Is she ready to open herself up to something deeper?

A gloriously funny and sparkling debut novel, Honey and Spice is full of delicious tension and romantic intrigue that will make you weak at the knees.
A smart, sexy summer read, which hits your brain and your romance buttons in one shot. Los Angeles Times

The ultimate summer romance... It's got all the juiciest, most satisfying romance tropes, but in Babalola's capable

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268d

📚 Snap by: Susin Nielsen

Frances Partridge, fifty-five, is a beloved children’s author. Geraint Blevins, forty-one, is an auto mechanic and devoted family man. Parker Poplawski, twenty-three, is just starting her career as a wardrobe assistant on a hit TV show. What do these people have in common?

Nothing, that’s what. Until...

https://bookblabla.com/book/snap

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #friendshipfiction #familylife #generalfiction #humorous

Frances Partridge, fifty-five, is a beloved children’s author. Geraint Blevins, forty-one, is an auto mechanic and devoted family man. Parker Poplawski, twenty-three, is just starting her career as a wardrobe assistant on a hit TV show. What do these people have in common?

Nothing, that’s what. Until each of them reaches a breaking point and snaps in spectacular fashion. They meet in a court-mandated anger management class: three very different people, forced to spend a lot of time together, who slowly end up bonding and helping one another in unexpected ways, whether it’s to move on or to exact revenge.

Lighthearted, timely, and funny, Snap is Nielsen at the top of her storytelling game, delivering flawed but relatable characters whose heartaches, foibles, and choices will make you cringe as you laugh out loud.

A laugh-out-loud novel about the consequences of being pushed to the edge—and plummeting right over it

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281d

Five stars:

At Death's Dough by Mindy Quigley (2025) is the fifth book in the Deep Dish mystery series. It's the first one not to have an audiobook version and I'll admit to missing Holly Adams's performance.

It's February in Geneva Bay. The snow is thick. The lake is frozen. Delilah O’Leary finds a body while ice fishing. That discovery leads to a story of hidden loot lost during the Prohibition years.

https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_12/at_deaths_dough.html

#bookstodon #mystery #reading
@bookstodon

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268d

3.75/5 for "Let Him Lie" by Ianthe Jerrold, my penultimate read for #DeanStreetDecember 2025. A beautifully written Clayton's detective story.
#Reading #Bookstodon #Mystery

@bookstodon

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/547711e9-a370-4629-8697-8ee1a9be78c0

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246d

📚 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by: Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recen...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-loneliness-of-sonia-and-sunny

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literary

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

A transcendent triumph. not so much a novel as a marvel. The New York Times Book Review

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281d

After a disappointing start, Book 2 of my #DeanStreetDecember , "The Trail of The Three Lean Men" was a lot of fun. Two down, eight to go
#Reading #bookstodon #Mystery
@bookstodon

https://robinwalter31.blogspot.com/2025/12/ten-from-ten-dean-street-december-iv.html

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268d

When you're reading and someone assumes that means you're doing nothing and they can interrupt you.

#books #reading #writing

At Vespers by Halle. A young woman looks up from reading a book. It's probably some religious thing, but I've cropped out the cross and I just like the intensity on her face.

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116d

A second #SundaySentence, simply because Helen Garner’s diaries are so rich.

“There’s stuff I /should/ be reading, but I don’t know what it is, and so I read just anything, and feel all the time that it’s the wrong stuff.”

Happily, this is not where I am now. (After all, I’m reading Helen Garner!) But I’ve definitely been there.

@bookstodon #bookstodon #reading

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266d

📚 Sky Full of Elephants by: Cebo Campbell

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receive...

https://bookblabla.com/book/sky-full-of-elephants

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

Bold and imaginative. Tananarive Due
This stunning allegory will spark much discussion. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A truly powerful and riveting story. Bo

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246d

Killing Stella. By Marlen Haushofer. 1958. (Translated by Shaun Whiteside)

In 1950s Austria, you are a housewife with kids, when an acquaintance dumps her 19 year old daughter with you for a year; the daughter is innocuous but your household is so fragile, and you are managing your own internal storm of mundane familial relationships, that the friends’ daughter is caught in the invisible crossfire.

4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon #reading #books #women #austria

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267d

📚 Norwegian Wood by: Haruki Murakami

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces ther...

https://bookblabla.com/book/norwegian-wood

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #mediatiein

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

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147d

Heated Rivalry. By Rachel Reid.

You are a star hockey player just out of high school, when you meet your fellow rookie and nemesis, a Russian player, and you and he will go on to challenge each other on the ice and in the bed FOR 8 YEARS, which it turns out is longer than either of you can stand.

4 of 5 library cats 🏒 🏒 🏒 🏒

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #gay #lgbtq #romance #xxx

Book cover featuring two hockey players facing off

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267d

📚 The Ghost Brigades by: John Scalzi

Jared Dirac is the only human who can provide answers... A superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA, Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories. But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigades.

At first, Jared is a perfe...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-ghost-brigades

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #militaryfiction #actionadventure

Jared Dirac is the only human who can provide answers... A superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA, Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories. But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigades.

At first, Jared is a perfect soldier, but as Boutin's memories slowly surface, Jared begins to intuit the reason's for Boutin's betrayal. As Jared desperately hunts for his "father," he must also come to grips with his own choices. Time is running out: The alliance is preparing its offensive, and some of them plan worse things than humanity's mere military defeat...

The Ghost Brigades are the Special Forces of the Colonial Defense Forces, elite troops created from the DNA of the dead and turned into the perfect soldiers for the CDF's toughest operations. They're young, they're fast and strong, and they're totally without normal human qualms.

The universe is a dangerous place for humanity—and it's about to become far more dangerous. Three races that humans have clashed with before have allied to halt our expansion into space. Their linchpin: the turncoat military scientist Charles Boutin, who knows the CDF's biggest military secrets. To prevail, the CDF must find out why Boutin did what he did.

Old Man's War Series
#1 Old Man’s War
#2 The Ghost Brigades
#3 The Last Colony
#4 Zoe’s Tale
#5 The Human Division
#6 The End of All Things
Short fiction: “After the Coup”

Other Tor Books
The Andr

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116d

Stag Party. By Torrey Peters.

You are an usually large and ugly 19th century lumberjack in an all male remote camp, and you get the chance to appear at an arranged “dance” as an available female, which you eagerly accept.

4 of 5 library cats 🌳 🌳 🌳 🌳.

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #lumberjacks #trans #sex

Book cover featuring elk in odd positions.

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266d

📚 Kindred by: Octavia E. Butler

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: pro...

https://bookblabla.com/book/kindred

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #historical

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present.

Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise. (New York Times).

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.")

The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation

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137d

#Reading #Books
I've been regularly reading fiction type books for more than 50 years. And in that time, I never knew the definition of the genre called Literary Fiction.

Today that changed. And yes, I have read some books that would be in the literary fiction category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction

Edited 137d ago

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116d

📚 Seveneves by: Neal Stephenson

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in a hastily built space ark.

But the complexities a...

https://bookblabla.com/book/seveneves

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #thrillers #technologicalfiction #suspensefiction

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in a hastily built space ark.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges threaten the intrepid pioneers, turning their mission into a desperate survival story until only a handful of survivors remain...

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious post-apocalyptic journey into the unknown... to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking hard science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

What would happen if the world were ending?

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266d

After #DeanStreetDecember 2025, an update on the state of my https://www.deanstreetpress.co.uk/ library. It's in 3 tags: dsp-read, dsptbr, and dsp-dnf. On the left, dsp-read. On the right, dsptbr (atm) I did not screenshot dsp-dnf, because there are only five. 😁
#Reading #Mystery #middlebrow #Bookstodon #nonfiction
@bookstodon

Image shows the 122 Dean Street Press books the poster has read in left-to-right chronological reading order.

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Image shows the 52 Dean Street Press books in his Calibre library the poster has yet to read

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265d

The other day, I put "Sequoia" up into my PayHip store.

It's the first book I ever self-published, a cute short story that's difficult to define. There is time-travel, but also a shamanic quest, a tree-hugger and an old, grumpy guy. Also, my first queer character.

If that's your kind of thing, take a look!

https://shop.hannah-steenbock.de/b/sequoia

#Reading
#TimeTravel
#ShortStory
@bookstodon

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263d

#sundaySentence @bookstodon #reading #literature #bookstodon

“…each and every one of us carries with us a wholly uncharted world that reveals itself to us only on occasion, in unfathomable states of perception, and may not such rich mental states, this secret reality, the life that exists in the remotest depths of the soul, be represented in literature too?”

Karl Ove Knausgaard

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