Author: sbhowell
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My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi
Rating: 4/5 Warning: This review contains spoilers. Warning: This book may trigger those with depression and other mental illnesses. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a graphic novel memoir about a woman in her late 20s whose life is stymied by clinical depression, sexual repression, and her parents’ and society’s expectations. Driven to the end…
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How To Install Luxury Vinyl Floor (Mohawk SolidTech)
This post is for anyone who’s thinking of attempting a DIY install of plank-style vinyl flooring, and also a place to keep my notes so that I can remember how to do it in the future. Because we have cats and due to the havoc cats will wreak on carpet, we decided about a year…
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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Rating: 4/5, good I saw the movie version of Annihilation before I read the book, and I really liked it. The movie does a great job of balancing its horror and science fiction aspects, and has a lot of great terrifying and surreal moments. The book is more Lovecraftian than the movie. It has more…
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Want by Cindy Pon
Rating: 2, bad I almost put this book down at 15%, but I powered through for the sake of my scifi book club. Want is about a teenage boy named Zhou living in futuristic Taiwan where the air is so polluted most people die by the age of 50. The only people who live long…
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Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh
Rating: 4/5, good This book surprised me more than anything I’ve read in a long time. I came in expecting a grim, feminist narrative about a girl growing up in a small town, overcoming adversity, and coming into her own, and what I got was an extremely dark, gritty story about a young girl’s depressing…
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Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc
Rating: 3/5, average This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism. It starts off with…
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Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Rating: 2/5, bad If Red Rising were food, it would be a bloody steak. Partly because much of its appeal is in the prolific and clever violence, but also because it’s left a little undercooked. Red Rising is about a young man named Darrow, a Red miner, who is tasked with becoming a Gold elite…
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Who Fears Death By Nnedi Okorafor
Rating: 3/5, average Who Fears Death is a science fantasy novel by Nnedi Okorafor, PhD, a Nigerian-American writer and creative writing instructor. Who Fears Death has been optioned for an HBO show directed by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about this book. I’ve been following Nnedi Okorafor on Twitter since…
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The Vegetarian by Han Kang
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Rating: 5/5, excellent Have you ever felt like a book was written specifically for you? That’s how I felt reading Han Kang’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian. I’ve been a vegetarian on and off over the years, and depressed sometimes, and I feel a kinship with Yeong-hye, the protagonist of this book. Yeong-hye…