Category: 4 Star Books
-
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…
-
Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright
Rating: 4/5, good I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by…
-
I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek
Rating: 4/5, good “A useful novel against men, money, and the filth of Instagram” I Hate the Internet is a very strange book. It’s half novel and half anti-tech industry diatribe. Jarett Kobek beats his breast to social justice precepts while railing against call-out culture and slacktivism. There are characters, but they take a backseat…
-
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Rating: 4/5 I tried to read The Bell Jar in high school, but didn’t get very far. I had just finished reading (and loved) Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, and so I thought I would like The Bell Jar, but I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t understand what made a person like Esther Greenwood…
-
So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman
Rating: 4 So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical,…
-
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Rating: 4 Warning: this review contains spoilers! The other characters withhold a lot of information from the main character, so discussing the themes of this book is really difficult to do without spoiling it. I’m just not going to bother here, and assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care about spoilers. Octavia Butler’s…