I succumbed and read The Girl on the Train! Why the hell didn’t any of you warn me that it would be impossible not to take it way too personally? J’accuse! (Just kidding; I like to stay unspoiled and wouldn’t have listened to you anyway.) What’s funny is that I listen to the “My Favorite Murder” podcast, and I’ve listened to their promo for the movie a whole bunch of times, in which the script goes “devasted by her recent divorce…” blah blah blah blah. […]
Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance
In spite of this having been on a number of “best of 2016” lists, I walked into this book completely blind, and was fully shocked, disturbed, and yet driven by it. It’s a really tough read, not just psychologically, but because it’s brutally graphic in a way that doesn’t exactly require a warning, but is unusual for a Western reader used to a vaseline’d lens covering sex and violence. I really loved this, and it continues to haunt me a little bit. I can’t imagine […]
The Repercussions of Drugging Unwitting Children (And Other Things)
This book was one of those that I liked, but I also didn’t much like it, or at least I didn’t really like or understand the characters in it. Yes, that’s it exactly. I didn’t understand a single one of the many characters in this book. And that’s not entirely my fault. In Commonwealth, one of the children of a blended family falls in love with a much older writer and ends up telling him stories about her childhood. And he ends up writing […]