I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]
“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”
I’ll start this review by giving particular props to the narration on the audiobook. As a newcomer to the world of audiobooks, Beautiful Ruins earned the distinction of being the first where I can honestly say the audio narration elevated the reading/listening experience and did more than just get the job done. I was not surprised when I learned that it won an award for the format in its year of eligibility. So good on you, Edoardo Ballerini. The story is one of those where […]
Slow your roll, Nicholas Sparks
Lit fic as a category is pretty up its own ass, and many reviews for these books are also up their own asses, in a phlegmy, colonic matryoshka of sycophancy and intellectual pre-ejaculate. I don’t really care to participate in this shitfest, so instead, here’s a bulleted list of what worked and didn’t work about A Little Life. There be spoilers. This was fine * Yanagihara: “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better.” […]
Theater references and a portrait of a perfectly imperfect marriage
When I first finished this book, I *thought* I had a lot of strong opinions about it. Like, “Lotto is EXHAUSTING!”, or “These lucky bitches have a Shiba Inu puppy, and what do I have? Nothing!” But now, I’ve sat on it for a week, and all I can really muster for Fates and Furies is a “Meh.” I’m on record somewhere claiming that I love character-driven work, but also elsewhere claiming that a truly compelling plot can make me overlook deficiencies in other areas […]
Lovely writing and fresh story, but somehow came up short for me
This is a moving book and certainly worth reading, but I had such high hopes after the first few chapters and ended up feeling a little disappointed that the amazingness didn’t quite carry through to the end. This is a coming of age story of a Nigerian girl, Ijeoma, set in Nigeria in the late 1960s. Ijeoma’s world is disrupted when her beloved father is killed in a civil war (the Biafran War) and her mother sends her away to live with a teacher’s family while […]
[existentialist quote here]
3.5 stars. How the Dead Dream is a somewhat strange book that I nonetheless enjoyed. It’s one of those “slice of life” stories that is barely generalize-able to the population at large, but uses the character study of one man and his stunted relationships to satirize the societal values that spit out his type. Our first introduction to main character T. is as a young boy, when he is in the midst of cultivating a fetish of sorts for physical currency. The feel of coins […]
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