I read Shibuyama’s review of The Merry Spinster before I got into the book and braced myself for horror. I don’t like horror (I get nightmares easily, apparently) but I’d heard good things and still wanted to read it. This was a case of bracing myself and then it really not being as bad as I was thinking so yay! Played the expectations game and won. It helped that the book opens with a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, the OG little mermaid which is […]
I just … didn’t care
Maybe it’s because I know jack about classical or chamber music, but I just could not muster a single fuck to give about this book. My high school required a music history class so I at least recognized some of the names tossed around but just like … damn. I work in the visual arts, folks, I can talk about that all the live long day. But even the manufactured drama in this book was boring. The Ensemble is about a chamber music string quartet. […]
Better than I gave it credit for
I’ve been trying to suss out how to describe my taste in books and the best I can do so far is to say that I prefer plot-driven to people-driven. You know those books about ordinary folks in small town and the life that unfolds around them? Not my bag, generally speaking. Celeste Ng is really the big exception. I read her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, last year and loved it. So much. A mother and daughter and the life they stumble into in small […]
The book club-iest of book club books
A while back, my friends and I started a book club. We meet roughly every other month and have for the last say year and a half. Normally it’s just two hours for us to sit down, drink wine, and hang out, and that’s awesome. In the meetings we’ve held so far, only once have we all actually read the book and that was Big Little Lies (side note, that made for a super fun meeting. We talked about the book for a full three hours and […]
A surface read, but an enjoyable one
I read Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series last year and didn’t think all that much of it. It read like bad fanfic, despite being more or less original. So I didn’t have the highest of expectations going into Strange the Dreamer, and got to be pleasantly surprised. I’ve even got a future hold on book 2 at the library set up. If you couldn’t tell by the title and cover, this is another young adult fantasy about a young person discovering their place in […]
A memoir that made me introspective
Memoirs are about the author but I have to admit I spent most of Hunger thinking about myself. I don’t like having to say that – I’m a privileged white woman, stories like mine get told all the time and this was a story emphatically not about me and yet chapter after chapter I thought about myself. As something of a Tumblr feminist, Roxane Gay was someone I was culturally aware of, but Hunger was the first of her books that I’ve read. She is an incredibly […]
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