Author: sbhowell
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As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski
As Long as I’m Still Breathing is a 75-page memoir broken up into seven chapters of first-person past-tense prose and free verse poetry. It delves into Avraham’s struggles with depression and how transitioning to male and converting to Judaism helped give him the strength to stay alive. It tells the story of how he converted…
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The Location Shoot by Patricia Leavy
Ella has a bit of sexual philosophy: she says, “you should only sleep with people you’ll always love or people you’ll never love.”
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Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Rating: 4/5, good I first read this book when I was seventeen, as part of summer reading before senior year of high school. It’s a short book, but very dense and philosophical. It was a bit hard to read and I remember not quite getting it, but the idea that religion is human-constructed and shouldn’t…
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Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 4 by George Adamczyk
Rating: 4/5, good I really enjoyed this book! It’s comprised of four short horror stories with plenty of blood, guts, and chaos. In the first one, “Emma”, a group of “party girls” get terrorized by a haunted virtual assistant. In the second, “A Grave Situation”, an abusive executive is dogged by undead unfortunates he took…
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Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon
Rating: 4/5, good I found this book in 2015 at the Grove Press booth at the Bay Area Book Festival. It appealed to me because I had seen a lot of pro-Palestinian articles online around the time of Operation Defensive Shield in 2014. My Hebrew school education on the conflict was about as balanced as…
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Colonoscopy Tips
I recently got a colonoscopy because I have a family history of colon cancer and I’m having some recurrent upper left abdominal pain, chronic constipation, and minor rectal bleeding. It went pretty well (Excellent prep and no polyps! Just internal hemorrhoids. >.>;;). I’d like to talk about my experience and share some tips, both for…
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Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Rating: 4/5, good Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in…
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I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Is it okay to be glad over an abuser’s death, and if so, is it okay to express that feeling? In what contexts? What other factors impact the answer, such as the severity of the abuse or the feelings of others toward the deceased? What does it mean to feel relief or anger at the…