Category: 4 Star Books
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw
If you’re looking for a comfort read with supernatural characters, look no further…
-
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…
-
A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
Rating: 4/5, good Have you ever had a book mirror your life so much it’s spooky? A Gift of Magic is a children’s paranormal book. It was first published in 1971 and I read it in 2000 when I was about ten years old. It got re-released in 2012 and after looking up the synopsis…
-
I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman
Rating: 4/5, good I picked up this book because I saw Toni Newman on a Zoom call with Charlie Jane Anders and a lot of other trans and nonbinary authors. There were so many cool authors and good books to pick from it was a little overwhelming (the call included Alok Vaid-Menon, Meredith Talusan, Vivek…