I haven’t done one of these in years.
Tag: Book Reviews
“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.
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.
In the TV show True Detective , the character Rust Cohle says, “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law…We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”
I first discovered Albert Camus’s philosophy when I was 17, pretty depressed and desperate for something to replace the “hope” that hitherto had been provided by religious faith.
Animal Liberation Now is a powerful update to the 1975 animal rights classic Animal Liberation.
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.
The Girls was an interesting read. I wasn’t sure what to expect going into it; I knew that it was loosely based on the Manson cult and I was interested in it because the psychology of cults really intrigues me, and I also really enjoy reading about the hippie era.
I have always found it interesting that people are so drawn to macabre stories of human evil– why do we like shows like Law and Order or binge true crime podcasts?
This is probably my favorite of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels– at least out of the ones I’ve read thus far.
Sometimes, in my more narcissistic moments, I wonder what it would be like to become a famous writer as has always kind of been my dream, and to write a collection of essays all about my thoughts on life. But I don’t think I could do it better than Vonnegut.
This is the first Murakami book I have actually managed to read all the way through, and I think I finally understand somewhat why he is so well-regarded.
I, Human initially caught my eye because of the Asimov reference in the title.
Fight Club is one of those famous books I hadn’t yet read but felt immense pressure to read due to its seemingly universal presence in pop culture.
I had been procrastinating reading this book for a while, because I was honestly too scared to read it.
Frappes and Fiction 