Buzzfeed’s book reviews have never steered me wrong, so when one of their lists suggested The Power as a must-read Dystopian novel, I felt I should give it a go. And it was WORTH IT. Disturbing, mind-bending, and surprising, The Power feels like this generation’s answer to The Handmaids Tale. I was not surprised to read that Alderman thanks Margaret Atwood in her acknowledgements because the book follows an updated take on the The Handmaid’s Tale structure. Complete with excerpts from fictional archaeological findings to the mind blowing epilogue and […]
A Year in Japan
Tracy Franz’ memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water chronicles the year her husband, Koun attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen Monk. Alone with only intermittent access to Koun during his residency, Franz is left to navigate the foreignness of an unknown culture as well as the foreignness she feels in herself. The book is structured in a set of running diary entries broken up by seasons, chronicling both the linear time of Japan’s holidays and climate, as well as […]
How the Other Half Lives
I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the […]
Stick With This One, It’s Worth It
This is my first ever experience reading a book before print, and it took a little while for me to get into this one, but once I was in, the payoff was worth it. Never Anyone But You follows Suzanne and Claude (Luci) from falling in love as teenagers in the early 1900s through the many different Paris art movements post World War I, onto their Nazi resistance during World War II, and their final years on the small isle of Jersey. In truth, the first […]
Sometimes A Book Stays With You
I would never have picked this book up on my own, and as much as it’s an emotional roller coaster, I’m actually very happy my book club decided to read this. On a craft level, this book is incredibly accessible. I blew through it in two days, and literally thought about the characters every minute I wasn’t reading. It’s emotional, painful, with moments of brilliant love, and at its core, it’s the story of humans enduring the worst and still pressing on. A Thousand Splendid […]
The Outsiders
Capital ‘L’ literature puzzles me as I often feel that it’s a giant waste of time while I’m in the middle, but then I get to the end and reflect on it, and I realize that having read the book was worthwhile. This sentiment couldn’t be more true than my feeling on finishing “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” On a surface perspective, I read 350 pages in which nothing really happened and the characters went nowhere. But on a deeper inspection, the pages roil with […]
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