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.
Tag: fiction
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?
“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.”
“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.
Ah, existentialism. The word conjures images of French cafes, cigarettes and black and white photos, but what is it really?
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.
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.”
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.
Frappes and Fiction 