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.
Tag: Writing
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.
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.
I haven’t done one of these in years.
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.”
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.
C.S. Lewis, in my experience, is the darling of those Christian missionaries who hand out religious books to random people on my college campus, and Mere Christianity is perhaps his most well-known and well-lauded book.
The more C.S. Lewis I read, the more baffled I am that he is regarded as one of the best Christian apologists. Honestly, the best part of this book was that it was short, and the audiobook was read by one of those audiobook narrators with the smooth British voices.
I recently moved into my college dorm to start my freshman year (which is, partly, why I have been so inactive online recently) and in my explorations of the campus I have discovered that the library is especially intriguing.
The Metamorphosis is a very weird little book which is just one long extended metaphor. And I’m going to go ahead and interpret the hell out of it now because we all know I am very very knowledgeable about Literature.
That was a very intriguing book.
Whenever I see news about yet another school shooting, there are three main questions that always run through my head.
So, the narrator of this book is utterly unhinged.
Just a short essay I wrote about graduating high school
Call me a book snob, but I’m still a Vonnegut stan.
Pondering the end of the universe never fails to cause me to go into a state of existential vertigo.
If you’re no fun, you might call this book gimmicky. I call it brilliant.
I’m about two years late to the hype train, yeah, but at least I finished the book.
Frappes and Fiction 