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.
Tag: book review
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.
I picked up this book because of its premise.
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.
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.