Category: 4 Star Books
-
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
Rating: 4/5, good I originally read this on a plane, quickly, without much thought. I tried to sit down and review it a few weeks ago, but I felt like I didn’t understand it well enough. I looked up Osamu Dazai’s biography and then reread No Longer Human, and it seemed to come into place.…
-
Infomocracy by Malka Older (Centenal Cycle #1)
Rating: 4/5, good Infomocracy by Malka Older is a political science fiction thriller. It’s about a near-future world where 20 years ago, the peoples of the world split off from traditional countries into small local voting blocks of 100,000 people known as centenals. The people in these centenals vote to choose which global government to…
-
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Rating: 4/5, good This book is horrifically, horrifically depressing. I usually enjoy dark books, but I didn’t get anything resembling “pleasure” out of this one. It is SO INCREDIBLY BLEAK. It doesn’t have the dramatic despair of Darconville’s Cat, the humble nihilism of Too Loud a Solitude, or the morbid curiosity of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.…
-
Brynnde by M. Pepper Langlinais
Brynnde by M. Pepper Langlinais Rating: 4/5, good Summary: Brynnde Archambault needs to find someone to marry, else she’ll be stuck with dull Mr. Dallweather. The answer to her problem arrives in the form of handsome and witty Viscount Burbridge, but just when everything seems to be going smoothly, scandal strikes and the engagement ends.…
-
Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin
Rating: 4/5, good Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed is a very slim volume, only 127 pages long, and is an introduction to Maimonides’s epically long tome The Guide for the Perplexed which was originally written in 1190. Maimonides’s main point seems to be that Jewish mono-theism is not simply believing in one God, but…
-
You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero
Rating: 4/5, good This is a butt-kicker of a book. It contains some deep motivation, real talk, and psychological counseling that could help you get out of a rut. It also has some woo-woo aspirational-vibrational stuff, but the writing in this book is so witty and involving it didn’t bother me. I loved all the…
-
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Rating: 4/5 Wonderful! This is a book that appeals to anyone with a heart (in the metaphorical sense). This book is what I always wanted scifi to be, but it never was… aliens who are really alien, but not othered by the narrative.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…