Like Lolita , this book brings readers disorientingly under the spell of a bizarre narrator with an uncommon way with words.
Tag: book review
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.
Whew! I have not been updating my blogs really at all in 2026, mostly due to the surprising intensity of my final-semester courseload
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.
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?
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.”
Animal Liberation Now is a powerful update to the 1975 animal rights classic Animal Liberation.
I am a big fan of r/nosleep, a forum for users to post short horror fiction. The gimmick of the subreddit is that the stories are often framed as Redditors’ real personal experiences, to enhance the immersion factor of browsing the stories.
Play It As It Lays is one of those books I’ve always seen on recommendation lists with titles like “POV: you’re hot and sad.” So, of course, I decided to give it a read.
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” is a surreal and disturbing short story set in an unnamed penal colony. The narrative explores questions of punishment and societal justification, revolving around an elaborate torture/execution device that etches the condemned’s sentence into their skin over twelve hours. The reviewer appreciates Kafka’s ability to create a unique Kafkaesque atmosphere. The book receives 4/5 stars.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. So I missed out on what is seemingly an otherwise shared experience of 90s-early 2000s kids– but for that, perhaps, I should be grateful.
George Orwell manages to articulate why people using political buzzword salad is so annoying in one essay.
Looking for an adorable picture book to read to that one toddler in your life who never wants to take a nap? Well, I have just the book for you…
(I meant to post this in October but, as they all say, better late than never)
Frappes and Fiction 