Tag: book review
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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…
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The Invisible Hiker by Kira Harland
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my cousin’s book and I edited the first four chapters. The Invisible Hiker is the autobiographical tale of Kira, a woman in her 20s who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT) with her father, John, and her cousin, Melissa. It’s called The…
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Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw
If you’re looking for a comfort read with supernatural characters, look no further…
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Lightning Strike by Catherine Asaro
Rating: 3/5, average This one I read with the local book club. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and I might have even skipped it if I didn’t know it was by a woman writer with a PhD in Chemical Physics. The cover on Amazon looks really cheesy, but the writing isn’t too…