Whew! I have not been updating my blogs really at all in 2026, mostly due to the surprising intensity of my final-semester courseload
Tag: book lists
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.
The first half of December was dominated by finals, but, as I realized, it’s the last December of my life (most likely) that I will be in that situation.
Wouldn’t we be better off without all this gosh darn technology?
I haven’t done one of these in years.
“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.
“Little Red Barns is a groundbreaking investigation of factory farms and the unprecedented measures being taken to hide their impact — on animals, public health, and the environment — from the public.”
I listened to this book while on a bus to New York City (at least until Spotify informed me I ran out of free audiobook listening hours, which was interesting since I literally pay that service $10 a month, but I digress). Fortunately I was able to finish it using the services of the good old-fashioned library.
“Do you know what happened already?
Did you know her?
Did you see it on the internet?
Did you listen to a podcast?
Did the hosts make jokes?
Did you see the pictures of the body?
Did you look for them?”
I knew this book would be a difficult read, but I did not expect it to be quite as good as it was.
Picture a bunch of rich people with too much time on their hands, too many drugs at their disposal and a severe lack of empathy.
This is a tough one. Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite writers; she always finds a way to create an atmosphere of intense dread and transfixing disgust in the worlds she creates.
An over-the-top satire on Wall Street culture, rife with brand name obsessions, spectacular misogyny and, of course, murder.
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead is a beautifully-written and philosophically intriguing novel with strong animal rights undertones.
A Scanner Darkly is both a novel about an intriguing sci-fi world and a disturbing exploration of substance abuse.
I long to write essays like Joan Didion
Why do I have such an obsession with weird disturbing books by female authors?
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides is at once a lyrical portrait of 90s suburbia and a biting critique of how teenage girls are perceived by society.
Frappes and Fiction 