Just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers As a parable cautioning against the perils of privacy loss in the digital age, The Circle fails miserably. I’m inclined to be generous to Eggers, though, and if you set aside the notion that he has anything prescient or insightful to say about big data, sharing, or online privacy (he […]
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Just finished Kindred by Octavia E. Butler Once I settled into the writing style, I really enjoyed this book. It tells the story of Dana, a black woman from the 70s who travels back in time to protect one of her white, slave-owning ancestors. When Dana first travels back to save Rufus, he’s just a boy. Later […]
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Just finished The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck It feels a little silly to attempt to say anything at all about such a classic piece of literature. I’m happy to report that I really enjoyed reading it, and I’m glad I hung onto it all these years after 11th grade English. The dialogue is written dialectally, […]
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Just finished Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell This book was a special treat that I’d been saving as a sweet palate cleanser between two much more challenging novels (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog). It served its purpose well, but I didn’t love it as much as the other Rainbow Rowell books […]
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Just finished This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper I’m not sure how to talk objectively about this misogynistic piece of garbage without revealing my bias. Whoops. See? There I go already. It’s like a Mad Libs Frankenstein monster of every book you’ve ever read by a white guy before 2010. Dad didn’t say much growing […]
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Just finished Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood Grace Marks was a real person, a maid convicted of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, in 1843. She was originally sentenced to death but ended up in an insane asylum, briefly, before spending 30 years in prison and eventually being pardoned. When I was reading this book last […]
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Just finished Not on Fire, but Burning by Greg Hrbek This is a powerful and intense book that manages to tackle a lot of Important Topics without becoming overloaded or unfocused. The way that Hrbek initially unsettles you and then manages to stretch the tension out through the book was incredibly skillful. I was in the […]
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The monthly posts were getting a little out of control, so I’m switching it up and trying a weekly review of the stuff I’m reading. Just finished Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie While not quite as perfect as Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun is still better than most of the other novels I’ve […]
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Synesthesia is the phenomenon where people have a mix of sensory experiences in response to a particular input. Numbers may have tastes, musical notes may sound like a specific color. Numbers and notes are pretty mono-sensorial for me, but when I’m reading I often associate books with kinds of food. Then again, I’m also hungry all the time so that […]
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A lot of things have changed about my reading habits since moving to Amsterdam. The biggest shift came when I had to divest myself of most of the books that I’ve been accumulating more or less since middle school. This has had the obvious result of chopping down my TBR pile into a measly slim stack. […]
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