Category: General Fiction
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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.…
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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…
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The Vegetarian by Han Kang
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Rating: 5/5, excellent Have you ever felt like a book was written specifically for you? That’s how I felt reading Han Kang’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian. I’ve been a vegetarian on and off over the years, and depressed sometimes, and I feel a kinship with Yeong-hye, the protagonist of this book. Yeong-hye…
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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…
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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…
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It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
Mental-health memoirs are my guilty-pleasure reading for 5 reasons: Reason 1: They’re relatable. It’s comforting if you have a mental illness (or even if you just get moody sometimes) to know that someone else has had the same experiences. Reason 2: They provide insights into how to deal with mental illness. You get to follow…
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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
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Rating: ☆☆☆☆✮ January 2016 I’ve been following Charlie Jane Anders’ career for a couple of years now, and so I was super excited when I heard that she released a science fiction/fantasy novel. She was a writer and editor at i09, a science, science fiction, and pop culture news blog. Charlie Jane Anders is also the host…
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Oreo by Fran Ross
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Book Title: Oreo Author: Fran Ross Year Published: Originally 1974, reprinted in 2015 Publisher: New Directions Pagecount: 240 Rating: 4/5 It’s witty, dirty, socially smart and a little bit visionary, but no one’s heard of it. At least until now… Oreo didn’t get a lot of attention when it was first published in 1974 by…
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Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Book Title: Go Set a Watchman Author: Harper Lee Year Published: 2015 (written in the 1950s) Publisher: HarperCollins Rating: 4/5 Go Set a Watchman is Harper Lee’s recently published first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Tonja Carter, Lee’s lawyer, found the manuscript in a safe-deposit box in Lee’s hometown. Since Harper Lee is now…
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
“Madame Bovary”… recalls “bovine”, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought when I heard the head of the Literature department at UCSC, Vlad Godzich, giving a lecture on it. The connotation is not an accident – the theme of romance mixing with, and being overcome by reality is the main theme of the novel. This is the…