Category: 4 Star Books
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Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
Rating: 4/5, good “Sometimes a man grows tired of carrying everything the world heaps upon his head. The shoulders sag, the spine bows cruelly, the muscles tremble with weariness. Hope of relief begins to die. And the man must decide whether to cast off his load or endure it until his neck snaps like a…
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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…