Category: Tear-Jerkers
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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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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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The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t know how to describe this book other than to say that it’s very, uh… Vonnegut-y. If you’ve read Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat’s Cradle or ”Harrison Bergeron”, you’re familiar with Kurt Vonnegut’s unique combination of satire, pacifism, and accidental time travel. The Sirens of Titan, one of his earliest novels, features the seeds of…
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Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear
I really fell in love with this book, but after talking to people about it at our scifi book group I’ve heard all kinds of reactions. Some people really liked it, some not so much… it’s a 100-page book, so the plot is very simple. It’s about an Earth soldier who crash-lands with a Drac…
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is both sensual and challenging, shocking and learned. Its content is lewd but moving and its style is high but not above blunt jokes. It’s hard for me to put how I feel about it into words, but I’ll do my best. Lolita is the story of a literary, effeminate pedophile who captures a…
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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
I’m a little late to the party on this one, as it came out in 2005 and was fairly popular when I first heard about it in 2009. By that time I was a senior in high school and not really interested in YA fiction as much, so I ignored the hype, but… a book group…