So I read this book in almost exactly 24 hours. My book club picked The Unseen World, at my suggestion, and so of course I waited until the last minute to start it. Don’t know why I did that. It was so good. And I never would have picked it up without book club (even though I suggested it), so thank goodness for book clubs. Anyways, I started it yesterday at 10 AM, got through a little over half by bedtime, then woke up early […]
Cerebral and unapologetically feminist.
Taking myself as a reader out of the “ratings game” for a moment, The Blazing World deserves five stars for its ambition, passion, ferocity, and intelligence. It’s a complex book about a complex woman who is consistently undermined and undervalued (probably because she is a woman, and certainly because she’s an older one), and who vows to expose to the world the bias and hypocrisy of those who do so. It’s told after her death through a series of her journal entries, along with written […]
“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”
I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]
“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”
I’ll start this review by giving particular props to the narration on the audiobook. As a newcomer to the world of audiobooks, Beautiful Ruins earned the distinction of being the first where I can honestly say the audio narration elevated the reading/listening experience and did more than just get the job done. I was not surprised when I learned that it won an award for the format in its year of eligibility. So good on you, Edoardo Ballerini. The story is one of those where […]
Slow your roll, Nicholas Sparks
Lit fic as a category is pretty up its own ass, and many reviews for these books are also up their own asses, in a phlegmy, colonic matryoshka of sycophancy and intellectual pre-ejaculate. I don’t really care to participate in this shitfest, so instead, here’s a bulleted list of what worked and didn’t work about A Little Life. There be spoilers. This was fine * Yanagihara: “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better.” […]
Theater references and a portrait of a perfectly imperfect marriage
When I first finished this book, I *thought* I had a lot of strong opinions about it. Like, “Lotto is EXHAUSTING!”, or “These lucky bitches have a Shiba Inu puppy, and what do I have? Nothing!” But now, I’ve sat on it for a week, and all I can really muster for Fates and Furies is a “Meh.” I’m on record somewhere claiming that I love character-driven work, but also elsewhere claiming that a truly compelling plot can make me overlook deficiencies in other areas […]
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