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 […]
Read more...
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 […]
Read more...
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, […]
Read more...
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 […]
Read more...
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 […]
Read more...
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 […]
Read more...
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 […]
Read more...
Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein I wasn’t surprised to learn that Vogelstein is a writer for WIRED because this book reads like a nicely paced piece of long-form journalism. There is enough historical context to accompany the deeply nerdy stuff so that I didn’t get bogged […]
Read more...
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays – Zadie Smith It’s been a few years now since I read On Beauty and White Teeth, but I remember really loving both and I’d consider myself a fan of Smith’s. I would imagine if you are as educated in the world of literary criticism as Smith you might get more enjoyment out of this […]
Read more...