My jaw is on the floor at how this has received such universal acclaim across every platform and major outlet in the country. This is one of the most annoying, frustrating, pretentious, amateurish books I have ever read. I could keep going with a long list of adjectives, but then I would be as overwrought …
David Grann’s The Wager was a thrilling, shocking, and intriguing episode from an era of history I didn’t know too much about. The characters were so richly portrayed, and the drama of the shipwreck and survival was incredible. I’m not usually one to really seek outwardly “thrilling” books, but this totally kicked ass. Grann makes …
Review: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann Read More »
I AM FINALLY FREE!!! To anybody has viewed my Goodreads profile since its humble beginnings, you may have noticed that I have been trying to read this brick for 2.5 years, picking it up and putting it down (or rather dropping it and creating a crater in the earth) when it got too dense, which …
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is my first of his full-length work since I read Between the World and Me during undergrad, and while this book wasn’t as transformative as that one for me, this is a crucial perspective on the current moment. Between the attack on education, the post-2020 reaction of Black Lives Matter, …
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica paints a nasty portrait of a dystopian society of normalized and industrialized cannibalism. Well-written, disturbing, and vivid in its scenes of sterile horrors, this novel follows the life of a male employee of the human factory. He lost a child, is separated from his wife, and generally miserable, …
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Love and respect to my opera heads, but I did not enjoy Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. This novel, about a large hostage situation conducted by terrorists in an unnamed South American country, has an intriguing premise, some really beautiful passages, and some interesting characters and themes, but it was such a slog for me …
Last month I reread The Voyeur’s Motel, Gay Talese’s immoral, shocking, and hypnotizing portrait of a pervert who pimps out his motel to view the sexual habits of his guests. Like passing a car crash on the highway, I can’t help myself from looking at how the events transpired. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction …
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands follows the chaotic conspiratorial thinking of a 72-year-old woman named Vesta Gul after she finds an anonymously written note on the ground in the woods stating that a woman named Magda is dead. After the mysterious inciting incident, the actual things that happen for the bulk of this book …
Frederick Douglass’s first memoir is the horrific and harrowing childhood and young adulthood as an enslaved person in the United States. His writing is amazing. It’s really interesting to view this as an activist/abolitionist piece of nonfiction in the years leading up to the Civil War, propelling the cause forward in a way that’s only …
Review: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass Read More »
James by Percival Everett is a retelling/reimagining of the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim, known as James in his own book, who accompanies Huck Finn on his escape down the Mississippi River. I am not always a fan of retellings or spinoffs of well-known …
