Tag: book review
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Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
Rating: 4/5, good “Sometimes a man grows tired of carrying everything the world heaps upon his head. The shoulders sag, the spine bows cruelly, the muscles tremble with weariness. Hope of relief begins to die. And the man must decide whether to cast off his load or endure it until his neck snaps like a…
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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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As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski
As Long as I’m Still Breathing is a 75-page memoir broken up into seven chapters of first-person past-tense prose and free verse poetry. It delves into Avraham’s struggles with depression and how transitioning to male and converting to Judaism helped give him the strength to stay alive. It tells the story of how he converted…
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The Location Shoot by Patricia Leavy
Ella has a bit of sexual philosophy: she says, “you should only sleep with people you’ll always love or people you’ll never love.”
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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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Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon
Rating: 4/5, good I found this book in 2015 at the Grove Press booth at the Bay Area Book Festival. It appealed to me because I had seen a lot of pro-Palestinian articles online around the time of Operation Defensive Shield in 2014. My Hebrew school education on the conflict was about as balanced as…
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Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Rating: 4/5, good Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in…
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I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Is it okay to be glad over an abuser’s death, and if so, is it okay to express that feeling? In what contexts? What other factors impact the answer, such as the severity of the abuse or the feelings of others toward the deceased? What does it mean to feel relief or anger at the…