bethniamh

librarian in the UK 🇬🇧

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American Classic Literature 🇺🇸📚🥧

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A collection of the most influential works in American literature.

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Classics Starter Pack Vol I 🕯️📖🎻

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An introduction to the Classics, these books are part of the cultural zeitgeist or the 'canon' that many would recognize. Look for more niche titles in later Starter Pack volumes.

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Literary Fiction Starter Pack Vol I 🖼️⭐️📔

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An introduction to Literary Fiction, these books are part of the cultural zeitgeist or the 'canon' that many would recognize. Look for more niche titles in later Starter Pack volumes.

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British & Irish Classic Literature 🇬🇧📚🫖

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Timeless plays, poems, and novels that shaped the literary heritage of the British Isles.

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British & Irish Classic Literature

Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.

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Feminism Without Exception 🌍✊⚧️

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Intersectional feminist texts that explore the complexity of feminism, centering voices from communities that are often the most excluded.

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Feminism Without Exception

Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.

bethniamh finished reading and wrote a review...

bethniamh

Oct 08, 2025

4.0

Enjoyment: 3.5Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.0Plot: 3.5

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As a trained musician myself, I loved the way the book talked about music and how you need that slight edge to a performance to make it truly compelling. I can’t speak personally to the themes relating to the author’s heritage, but it was clear this element of the story came from a very personal place. Very well written and compelling.

bethniamh started reading...

Nearly Departed

Lucas Oakeley

Joel Foster is a hapless twenty-something. His girlfriend, Beth Lewis, would likely have been a hapless twenty-something, too, had she not been obliterated by a very large cement truck. Some time after Beth’s tragic death, Joel is still trying to juggle grief with the world of modern dating. And while he still feels like a widower, he has to find a new love before three years is up. The catch? Just as Joel thinks he’s finally falling for someone, he starts getting haunted by Beth. It’s not a ghost story, it’s a love story. With ghosts.

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide

Batool Abu Akleen

"An extraordinary book. Voices of Resistance opens a rare window into the reality of young women living under brutal their loss, terror, and grief; their hope, ingenuity, curiosity, and humour as well as despair. These testimonials come straight from hell, and yet—read them, you’ll see—they are radiant with undiminished life."—Olivia Laing For two years, the world has witnessed image after devastating image of Israel’s genocide in videos, photos, and Instagram reels showing blanket bombardment, cities in ruin, and entire families pulled from the rubble of their homes. Such enormity can be difficult to process, but behind each image lie ordinary lives full of hope, love, and community. In these diaries, four Gazan women—Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid—offer first-hand accounts of Israeli airstrikes, forced displacement, and engineered famine. These atrocities are documented alongside the everyday resilience of from the neighbour who fashions an ashtray from the shrapnel of an Israeli missile, to the street vendor who donates his last egg for a child’s birthday cake, to the community of displaced people who pool their resources to stage a traditional wedding. Even when homeless, under fire, forced to bury loved ones, or thrown at the mercy of a devastated health system, the writers of these diaries never abandon their humanity, their individuality, or their belief in the future of Gaza. ALL PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE OF THIS BOOK WILL GO DIRECTLY TO THE WRITERS AND THEIR FAMILIES.

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Natural Beauty

Ling Ling Huang

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost. Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City. Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister. A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

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Natural Beauty

Ling Ling Huang

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Autofiction

Hitomi Kanehara

Rin is flying back from her honeymoon. She's madly in love with her husband, Shin, and the future looks rosy. Then Shin disappears to the bathroom while he thinks Rin is sleeping and she starts to imagine that he has gone to seduce the flight attendant. As her thoughts spiral out of control the phrase 'madly in love' takes on a more sinister meaning. Prizewinning author Hitomi Kanehara's sensational novel, Autofiction, follows Rin's life backwards through time from this moment so that we see her when she is eighteen, sixteen and finally fifteen, and a picture of the dark heart and violent past of this disturbed young woman gradually develops.

bethniamh commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum

jenniferPagebound

The App is live!!

I am over the moon to share that the app is officially live on both iOS and Android!!

We've quite literally poured our blood, sweat and (lots of) tears into the app development over the past 9 months and we could not be more thrilled for everyone to experience it!

We're still being indexed in app store search so you may have to scroll to find us, or type in Pagebound: Social Book Tracker. Here's links to iOS and Android: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pagebound-social-book-tracker/id6751526412 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.pagebound.app

There are quite a few improvements and new features in the app, including:

Book Journeys (click the map icon on the book cards in your library and other user's library to see their posts, comments, and updates for a specific book)
Quick access to "add to plan"
Filtering your activity on profile
Save posts
upgraded Read Dates editing

This is the first release, so there will be many more additions and improvements to come. (PS for Android users: we're aware of two bugs related to library imports from Goodreads/Storygraph, and issues with editing read dates - these have already been resolved and are pending Google approval for release.)

We owe a huge thank you to our beta testers who worked diligently over the last month to report hundreds of bugs and help us get the app prepared for release. A huge round of applause to them.

We hope you love the app as much as we do; it definitely makes engaging on PB so much more convenient and fun. If you have a great experience with the app, we'd love if you'd consider supporting us through Pagebound Royalty; Lucy and I have worked for $0 over the past year to bring the app and website to fruition, and have been covering business costs with our savings accounts. Your contribution means we can continue to work full-time on Pagebound without influence from investors or advertisers, and keep Pagebound 100% for readers by readers. Thank you so much to all the Royalty who have already contributed; it truly means the world to us and keeps Pagebound online!

ok now go download the app and tell us what you think!

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy

PS - leaving us a review in app stores also helps tremendously :)

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On Palestine

Noam Chomsky

Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.

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Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt

Originally appearing as a series of articles in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann sparked a flurry of debate upon its publication. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century that remains hotly debated to this day.

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Autofiction

Hitomi Kanehara

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Delight

J.B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley first made his reputation in the literary world by virtue of his essays, especially short essays that captured the essence of a moment or a taste of magic; and his talents were never better displayed than in the collection entitled Delight. For here are more than 100 brief pieces that capture and record the moments of wonder and beauty that are found beneath the surface of everyday experience. Every essay bears that unique stamp of J.B. Priestley as he refers to the pleasures of music, theatre, travel, sport, playing games, childhood, etc. Delights like Reading Detective Stories in Bed, Trying New Blends of Tobacco, The Sound of a Football, Long Trousers… and even the delight of Not Going! Terrific stuff! Great Northern Books did fans of Priestley a great favor when they brought out a 60th anniversary edition in 2009, for the book had long been unavailable. The anniversary edition contains, too, an introduction by Priestley's son, Tom.

Post from the Delight forum

bethniamh

Thoughts from 38% (page 97)

This is - as the title suggests - delightful. Priestley was a notorious grump (I grew up in the city he's from) so it's lovely to read about the small things that brought him pleasure. A Little Life kind of killed off my love of reading for a bit, but this is helping to bring me out of this slump.

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Delight

J.B. Priestley

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