Category: Literature
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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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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…
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Sula by Toni Morrison
Diverse Reading Challenge #1 Rating: 4/5, good Sula is a modern classic. It was published in 1973 and is Morrison’s second novel after The Bluest Eye. I tried to read Beloved in college (it was assigned for Helene Moglen’s Gothic Imagination class – by the way, there’s a colloquium in her honor happening in March) but…
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book is amazing. Basically, A Little Life is the story of four men – Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm – who we follow over the course of thirty years of friendship. The main character, Jude, has been severely abused as a child and as a teen and only started to…
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Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon
Rating: 3/5, average Warning: This review contains spoilers! It really ended up being more of a summary than a review because I was having a hard time understanding the plot and I thought others might benefit from seeing the story written out. It’s well-written but there’s a lot of complexity in the language as well…
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The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Stranger by Albert Camus Rating: 4/5, good I read this in high school and all I remembered was that he didn’t cry at his mom’s funeral and he shot a guy because it was too sunny. I picked this up to reread on a trip because it’s small (a little over 100 pages) and…
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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.…
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The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Rating: 5/5, excellent WARNING: This review contains spoilers! This book is a touchstone for me. I read it the first time in middle school, and it really resonated with me. The Invisible Man is a very irritable, impatient, smart person. He reminds me a lot of myself and my…
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Diverse Reading Challenge
In my last post, I talked about how writers should read more books by minorities and PoC, and I got inspired to make my own list of books I want to read. I’ve read a couple of books by women and PoC on this blog, but I want to read more, so I’m making a…