AnnbutnotAnne

Will be serving a life sentence behind bars ⛓️🏢🔒 for having 1,000,000,000 books shelved as "reading" even though I haven't touched them in over a year. 📚Shelf Theme: rainbow for rainbow month 🌈

3803 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore

Reading...

59%

18%

25%

12%

63%

31%

17%

13%

71%

AnnbutnotAnne commented on AnnbutnotAnne's update

AnnbutnotAnne DNF'd a book

Like This, But Funnier

Hallie Cantor

For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO’s Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and “making it”) as a writer in Hollywood. TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline’s serious ambivalence about having children. When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it—and unbeknownst to Harry—Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher. Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline’s understanding of what it means to be the “likeable female protagonist” of her own life.

AnnbutnotAnne made progress on...

Like This, But Funnier

Hallie Cantor

AnnbutnotAnne DNF'd a book

Like This, But Funnier

Hallie Cantor

AnnbutnotAnne joined a quest

Teach Me Something New and Oddly Specific 🐟🚀🦇

🏆 // 1330 joined

Not Joined

This Quest is a collection of micro-histories inspired by the List "Teach me something new and oddly specific," winner of Q2 2026 community voting.

AnnbutnotAnne is interested in reading...

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time. In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer. Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.

AnnbutnotAnne TBR'd a book

Small Rain

Garth Greenwell

A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell. A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

AnnbutnotAnne TBR'd a book

Flashlight

Susan Choi

A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?

AnnbutnotAnne commented on a post

AnnbutnotAnne

Thoughts from 16% | Chapter 4

spoilers

View spoiler

AnnbutnotAnne commented on a post

KatieV

Edited

What draws you to subplot romance?

I find myself coming back to this quest everytime I sense a reading slump approaching and without fail, the books on this quest manage to pull me out of a slump. I am a romantic at heart so I love reading about charatcers falling in love. But I often find that Romantasy (and SFF that put too much emphasis on the romance), sometimes create plot points for the express purpose of causing angst for our love interests. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I personally find subplot romance to feel a bit more natural and true to how people really fall in love and build connections through shared experiences and values.

So what draws you to books with romantic subplots? What about this genre appeals to you and how does it compare to SFF with more/less romance? What is the sweet spot for you?

(edit for typos)

AnnbutnotAnne made progress on...

A River Enchanted

Rebecca Ross

56%

AnnbutnotAnne TBR'd a book

Whose Names Are Unknown

Sanora Babb

Originally written and slated for publication in 1939, this long-forgotten masterpiece was shelved by Random House when The Grapes of Wrath met with wide acclaim. In the belief that Steinbeck already adequately explored the subject matter, Babb's lyrical novel about a farm family's relentless struggle to survive in both Depression-era Oklahoma and in the California migrant labor camps gathered dust for decades. Rescued from obscurity by the University of Oklahoma Press, the members of the poor but proud Dunne family and their circle of equally determined friends provide another legitimate glimpse into life on the dust-plagued prairies of the Southwest and in the fertile, but bitterly disappointing, orchards and vineyards of the so-called promised land. Babb, a native of Oklahoma's arid panhandle and a volunteer with the Farm Security Administration in Depression-era California, brings an insider's knowledge and immediacy to this authentically compelling narrative. A slightly less political, more female-oriented, companion piece to The Grapes of Wrath.

AnnbutnotAnne DNF'd a book

Talking at Night

Claire Daverley

Will and Rosie meet as teenagers. They’re opposites in every way. She overthinks everything; he is her twin brother’s wild and unpredictable friend. But over secret walks home and late-night phone calls, they become closer—destined to be one another’s great love story. Until, one day, tragedy strikes, and their future together is shattered. But as the years roll on, Will and Rosie can’t help but find their way back to each other. Time and again, they come close to rekindling what might have been. What do you do when the one person you should forget is the one you just can’t let go?

AnnbutnotAnne is interested in reading...

The Wall

Marlen Haushofer

When her cousin and wife fail to return from a walk, this story takes a sinister turn to a quest of survival A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival. This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world. **PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

AnnbutnotAnne wrote a review...

AnnbutnotAnne

Jun 28, 2026

You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom

2.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 1.0Characters: 2.0Plot: 1.5Audiobook: 2.5

Dominican families have never been more toxic.

You Should've Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado is pitched as a gothic horror novel aiming to deconstruct all which rots Dominican culture to its core. From the double standards faced by women compared to men, the incessant gossiping over one's misfortunes after feigning sympathy, to the harsh treatment of our Haitian neighbors, we cover quite a bit of ground.

Tirado has no problem capturing what being around these people are like. The overwhelming perfumes, the fake intimacy as they kiss your cheek in greeting, how one minute you're receiving all the info about someone's personal life and the next you're the subject of all the gossip. It's entirely overwhelming, and we see how our main character, Xiomara, never really knows how to feel about her family from one moment to the next.

My main issue with this novel centers around the characters. While we've captured the worst behaviors on the surface, all of these characters are entirely two-dimensional. We do not attain a greater understanding of anyone in this novel, and I would argue it's because, while Tirado knows this class of person quite intimately, they do not understand where this behavior originates. And because we aren't fully deconstructing the why, it feels as though we, like the gossips which this book condemns, are simply meant to relish in this family's misfortune. No further thought necessary.

Also, I hate to say it but I do find the demon and all the horror which comes with its existence painfully underwhelming. It feels as though it was added in a later draft with how little most of the family members care about the mystery. The sleuthing also felt rather weak, and I earnestly believe if we omitted that element from the book entirely and kept a similar ending, we could've worked more on characterization and this would be a better book for it.

All in all, this book is a fun ride but I wouldn't recommend it unless someone needs to know why I don't go to family reunions.

P.S. Also wouldn't recommend this audiobook. While I love having a Dominican narrator, the narrator in question does not attempt to alter her voice for different characters whatsoever.

AnnbutnotAnne finished a book

You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom

Vincent Tirado

Demons clash with inheritance claims as secrets unfold and violence is unleashed over twelve harrowing hours trapped in a house with the worst thing family. When Papi Ramon, the patriarch of the wealthy Abreu family dies, he gives the family one last message in the “One of you is el bacà, the demon that I made a deal with. Get rid of them or you will be damned.” Xiomara, the uncontested favorite of Papi Ramon (and therefore the least liked in the family), watches as everyone dismisses this as the joke of a senile old man and demands the lawyer obtain the previous will Papi wrote. While the lawyer drives back to his office, a storm breaks out, forcing the entire family—Xiomara’s aunts and uncles and cousins—to remain in the house. And the words of Papi’s will hangs over their heads even heavier than the rain clouds. Over the course of the night, scandal after scandal is revealed to the public about the family. Suddenly a tense few hours of surviving her family turns into a vicious night of recrimination, violence, accusations…and murder. Xiomara is faced with an impossible uproot a demon and somehow kill it or excise the ghosts that linger within her own family. And the clock is ticking...

AnnbutnotAnne made progress on...

You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom

Vincent Tirado

88%

AnnbutnotAnne commented on AnnbutnotAnne's update

AnnbutnotAnne made progress on...

Talking at Night

Claire Daverley