Tag: book review
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Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright
Rating: 4/5, good I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by…
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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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A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
Rating: 3/5, average “Many histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a case of the…
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The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft
Rating: 3/5 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a novella of about 40,000 words written by Lovecraft in 1927. It’s one of his later stories, and it incorporates a lot of the monsters he created in earlier works. Even though it has the usual Lovecraftian horror suspects like Nyarlathotep, the night-gaunts, and the gibbering Outer…
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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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So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman
Rating: 4 So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical,…
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Dawn by Octavia Butler
Rating: 4 Warning: this review contains spoilers! The other characters withhold a lot of information from the main character, so discussing the themes of this book is really difficult to do without spoiling it. I’m just not going to bother here, and assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care about spoilers. Octavia Butler’s…
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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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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…