Category: 4 Star Books
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Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
Shortcomings is a graphic novel about cranky 30-something Japanese-American man (Ben) whose relationship with an idealistic 30-something Japanese-American woman (Miko) is strained by his constant negativity and his undeniable interest in white women.
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The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster
Rating: 4/5, good The back cover of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster reads (at least the 2007 Penguin edition of the book first released in 1982): “’One day there is life… and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.’ So begins The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster’s moving and personal meditation on fatherhood.…
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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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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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The Invisible Hiker by Kira Harland
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my cousin’s book and I edited the first four chapters. The Invisible Hiker is the autobiographical tale of Kira, a woman in her 20s who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT) with her father, John, and her cousin, Melissa. It’s called The…
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Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw
If you’re looking for a comfort read with supernatural characters, look no further…
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The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Rating: 4/5, good I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It reminded me of how fun fantasy novels can be! When I was reading this, I was reading it only at night and I was super excited to go to bed because I could read it before going to sleep. It was a little intimidating at around…