Books, Etc.
People often claim that Animal Farm is about how communism necessarily leads to oppression, implying that capitalism is the moral alternative— which completely ignores that in the story, the oppression the pigs brought was, explicitly, the same oppression under which the animals suffered at the beginning of the story: capitalism.
Capitol Hill Books is everything a used bookstore should be. It has a quirky and cozy atmosphere, overflowing shelves, and prices that won’t deplete your paycheck.
The Ministry for the Future starts out by planting us in the middle of a living nightmare. A pre-monsoon heatwave in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is creating wet-bulb temperatures approaching the limit of human survivability.
Maybe I’m weird, but art that faces the bleak head-on is strangely comforting to me
Everything your study guide didn’t tell you about Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Lunar Park doesn’t seem to be an out-and-out hit, if the Goodreads rating is to be used as a meter, but I quite enjoyed it.
I took only two English classes in college (unfortunately), but both of them assigned stories by George Saunders, and thus began my interest in his work. This was the third (?) story collection I read of his, and I enjoyed it very much.
There is a sort of voyeuristic allure to Bret Easton Ellis novels for me. For whatever reason, I love to read about hypersexual nihilists with far too much money and far too much access to cocaine.
Billie Eilish is going to star as Esther Greenwood in an upcoming movie adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The film, directed by Sarah Polley, is currently in production.
I picked up this book because of its premise.
I suppose I’m a bit late to the jump here, since it’s not showing in theaters anymore, but a few weeks ago, I, like apparently everyone else in the world, went to see Obsession.
Which is creepier: Pennywise, or the way Stephen King wrote the main female child character of this book?
Like Lolita , this book brings readers disorientingly under the spell of a bizarre narrator with an uncommon way with words.
I knew I would like this book after the New Yorker described it as centering “around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died. He was a cruel mentor, yet they fear that they will never succeed on the job market without securing a letter of recommendation from him.”
That sounds like a book for me if anything does.
In my opinion, there is a limit to the amount of ambiguity that a story can sustain. If you cross the limit, it goes from being interesting and mind-bendy to just making the reader feel a bit slow.
After reading Tony Tulathimutte’s short story collection Rejection I knew that I had found a new favorite contemporary author. And picking up his novel, Private Citizens, next, did not disappoint.
As an animal rights activist who is also a biology student, little has weighed on me more heavily in my day-to-day life than the ubiquity of biomedical animal testing.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a book recommendation list post, but recently, as I found myself perusing the Internet for suggestions on media to replace the void left by the show I had recently finished watching (rather than going straight to watching it again, as I was fairly tempted to do) I was reminded of how useful, and fun to write, these types of posts are.
Wouldn’t we be better off without all this gosh darn technology?
“If I smoked cigarettes, I would sit at a train station with this book and light up.” – Me when I was 19 and thought smoking looked super cool, maybe in part due to this book’s iconic cover, but that’s a conversation for another day.