Book picks similar to
This is the Circle by Tash McAdam


good-stuff
library-first
minimal-romance
2-review

The Rebellion


Isobelle Carmody - 2011
    When Rushton, the Master of Obernewtyn and Elspeth's love, is kidnapped, will she be willing to pay the price for his life?

A Planet of Blood and Ice


A.J. Hartley - 2017
    Sentenced to be reeducated on the moon of Jerem, they were placed in stasis on the automated ship Phetteron for their six day journey. They never reached their destination. “Home looks after its own…” Thrown off course by a computer malfunction, the Phetteron is damaged in an asteroid belt and crash lands on the uninhabited ice planet of Valkrys. Having spent their lives in temperature controlled environments, consuming nutrient supplements, and interacting with people mostly through the infonet, the teens are unprepared to depend on each other to face the harsh, hostile, and hellish landscape. Home will send a rescue party long before their meager supplies run out.   “No contrary positions are viable…” Sola was a roamer. She wandered the city after curfew, reveling in the freedom of being disconnected from the techgrid and embracing the joy of physical activity. For those actions, Home declared her deviant. But on Valkrys, her deviance is an asset that may be the teens’ only hope for survival. As Sola explores their strange new world, she discovers that she and her shipmates are linked by something more frightening than their subversive behaviors—and uncovers a truth about the planet the authorities at Home wanted buried. Valkrys is not uninhabited. And what lives there is predatory…

Trances of the Blast


Mary Ruefle - 2013
    . . any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence."—Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America, William Carlos Williams Award citationTrances of the Blast is a major new collection from recent National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Mary Ruefle. Full of Ruefle's particular wisdom and wit, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness.If only I'd understood that lonelinesswas just loneliness, only lonelinessand nothing more.But I was blind.Little did I know.If only I'd invented salt.I might have died happy.I wish I loved you,but you can't have everything.Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village


Victor Montejo - 1987
    An accidental clash between the village's "civil patrol" and a Guatemalan army troop leads to the execution or imprisonment of many villagers. Written in clear, direct prose, this account reads like an adventure story while conveying an historical reality. This vital and essential record captures how Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which reached its most violent peak in the 1980s, ripped the traditional fabric of Guatemalan society.

Firestorm


Mark Robson - 2008
    But this once all-powerful being is now fatally damaged and fading fast...Only the dragons and their riders can save it!

After Friday Night Lights: When the Games Ended, Real Life Began. An Unlikely Love Story.


Buzz Bissinger - 2012
    G. (Buzz) Bissinger, then a young reporter for the “Philadelphia Inquirer,” moved to Odessa, Texas, family in tow, to follow the fortunes of the 1988 Permian High School football team. He hoped to write a celebratory treatment of a team and a town. The result: “Friday Night Lights,” a bestselling American classic that spawned the popular film as well as the series, considered by many one of the best on television.The original book’s most compelling character was James “Boobie” Miles, and his experience in Odessa was, as Bissinger puts it in his daringly honest sequel “After Friday Night Lights,” “a symbol of everything that was wrong with high school football.” The complex friendship between subject and author has deepened over the years, and is, Bissinger writes, “the most lasting legacy of “Friday Night Lights,” or at least the legacy I care about most.”Heading into the 1988 season, Miles looked like a star-in-the-making, a sure bet to ascend to college and the NFL. Abandoned by his mother, beaten by his dad, he had scraped through a rough upbringing, but it appeared that success on the field was soon to redeem his pain. Then, in a meaningless preseason scrimmage, Boobie blew out his knee. By midseason he was off the team, no longer needed by his coaches, who had found themselves a new running back.“After Friday Night Lights” follows Boobie through the dark years he suffered after his injury right up to a present that is imbued with a new kind of hope. It is the indelible portrait of the oddest of enduring friendships: that of a writer and his subject, a “neurotic Jew” and a West Texas oil-field worker, a white man raised in privilege and a black man brought up in poverty and violence, and a father and his “fourth son.” Their story encompasses the realities of race and class in America. And reveals with heartbreaking accuracy how men rise again after their dreams are broken.

Bangkok Burn


Simon Royle - 2012
    He didn’t get to where he is without knowing a thing or two about people, including how long it takes for a crocodile to digest one. Before Chance can quit, his father asks him to “take care of a little something for me.” Then a bomb goes off.Waking up in hospital later that night, his father in a coma next door, Chance’s troubles have only just begun. There are three guys dressed in black down the corridor and they aren’t carrying flowers. Worse, Uncle Mike isn’t answering his phone, and a guy with a lisp is asking for a hundred million dollars in a week or “I’ll kill him, sthlowly.”While figuring out who is trying to put the family permanently out of business, where to get a hundred million, and who’s got Uncle Mike, in the midst of a Bangkok gone crazy with factional fighting, quitting the family business takes a backseat to survival.Survival begins with dying. And dying is the easy part.

Mary Engelbreit: The Art And The Artist


Mary Engelbreit - 1996
    This book features the most extensive collection of Mary Engelbreit's work ever published, and it represents nearly 40 years of Mary's art. The new paperback version features a revised preface.

The Extended Summer of Anna and Jeremy


Jennifer Ann Shore - 2019
    Faced with the reality of her reputation as a lame, high school cliché, she decides now is the time for a change, so when hotshot basketball player Jeremy Blake interrupts her late-night plotting over a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, she convinces him to help. As they explore the summer together, Anna can’t help but wonder what else will fall into place as autumn approaches.

Blessings


Julia Cameron - 1998
    In the tradition of Heart Steps, Blessings reveals the keys she uses to reconnect herself with the source of her creative spirit. Focusing on gratitude and recognizing the power to change one's surrounding world by changing one's thinking, Cameron explains how she surrenders to the "deeper flow of life rather than willfully forcing artificial solutions."By acknowledging the beauty, harmony, and synergy of life, readers learn through Cameron's inspiring prose how to cherish the gifts they have been given and use them to their fullest. Those who read and follow Cameron's advice and prayers and listen to Tim Wheater's healing music in the audiobook will realize how to achieve harmony in their lives and embrace the notion that they are part of a larger whole that holds them in a benevolent and protective view.With Blessings, readers will understand the secrets of a life that is rich, beautiful, intricate, and valuable.

The Psycho Ex Game


Merrill Markoe - 2004
    Grant Repka is an obscure indie rock musician who, in his forties, finds his career surprisingly resurrected with the success of his comic operetta about the doomed romance of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. When Grant and Lisa meet after one of his shows, sparks don’t immediately fly—but e-mail addresses are exchanged. A my-book-for-your-CD trade and a couple of e-mails later, Lisa tells Grant that she enjoys his song “My Psycho Ex,” but warns him that where psycho-exes are concerned, she’s pretty sure she “could drink him under the table.”Little does she know that this will become the opening salvo in an epic e-mail battle dubbed the Psycho Ex Game, a storytelling competition in which horrific tales of dysfunctional love and living with lunatics are volleyed with glee. The rules are simple; the point system, unique: the experiences that would normally leave someone running for the therapist’s office (humiliation, degradation, and complicity in psychotic behavior) just might win match point in the Psycho Ex Game. Now it’s Grant vs. Lisa as the wretched tales of his ex, the Junkie Queen of Darkness, vie with the woe inflicted by her ex, a tantrum-throwing actor/director widely known as Mr. Summer Box Office Record-Holder.As the correspondence evolves, it surprises Lisa by offering her the kind of intimacy she has never shared with a man in the same room. Before long, what started as a friendly competition becomes a road map to an unlikely couple’s growing involvement, leaving both Grant and Lisa secretly wondering, “If we were to get involved, which one of us is potentially the next Psycho Ex?”Written in alternating he said/she said chapters, The Psycho Ex Game is shot through with the acerbic humor of Merrill Markoe and the mordant observations that have made Andy Prieboy a literate voice in rock. The Psycho Ex Game is a hilarious dissection of injuries sustained on the front lines of romance—and the careful nursing that gets us battleready once again.From the Hardcover edition.

Four Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Novels: Whose Body? / Clouds of Witness / Murder Must Advertise / Gaudy Night


Dorothy L. Sayers - 1982
    Murder Must Advertise. Gaudy Night.

The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes


Avraham Burg - 2007
    Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost the ability to trust itself, its neighbors or the world around it. He shows that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own family history--his parents were Holocaust survivors--to inform his innovative views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in world at large. Thought-provoking, compelling, and original, this book is bound to spark a heated debate around the world.

Master Letters of Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1998
    Although there is no evidence the letters were ever posted, they indicate a long relationship, geographically apart, in which correspondence would have been the primary means of communication. Dickinson did not write letters as a fictional genre, and these were surely part of a much larger correspondence yet unknown to us. In the week following Dickinson’s death on May 15, 1886, Lavinia Dickinson found what she described as a locked box containing seven hundred of her sister’s poems. The Master letters may have been among them, for they were clearly not with the correspondence, which Lavinia destroyed upon discovery. Of primary importance, the Master letters nevertheless have had an uncertain history of discovery, publication, dating, and transcription. This publication, issued at the centennial of Emily Dickinson’s death, presents the three letters in chronological order, based upon new dating of the manuscripts, and provides their texts in facsimile as well as in transcriptions that show stages in the composition of each letter.

The Inheritance


Mika Lane - 2018
    Problem is, I can't even get a date.The old coot who used to hang out in my bar? Turned out he was a millionaire. A multi-millionaire. And he just left me all his money.The catch?Of course there's a catch.I get the money if I’m 25 years old (check), and married (not checked; not by a landslide). And--I only have 30 days to pull this off.But when I meet Nat, Linc, Win, and Brose, I've found what every girl dreams of, multiplied by four. The millions were within reach. I could pay off my student loans, move out of my roach-infested dump of an apartment, and maybe even take a vacation with my best gay boyfriend Matty.But four guys?That wasn't part of the deal.I had to choose.And decide it if was worth it.