Tag: literature
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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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The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
Rating: 3/5, average CW: rape, pedophilia The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner. Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime…
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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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2018-2019 Compilation Post
The end of summer is coming… Fall always feels like a time of reckoning. Harvest. Counting up what happened in the year, good and bad, and getting the books in order for winter. Last year I wrote 19 book reviews on this site and started the Diverse Reading Challenge with The Tale of Genji. It’s about 1000 pages,…
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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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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Rating: 4/5, good This book is horrifically, horrifically depressing. I usually enjoy dark books, but I didn’t get anything resembling “pleasure” out of this one. It is SO INCREDIBLY BLEAK. It doesn’t have the dramatic despair of Darconville’s Cat, the humble nihilism of Too Loud a Solitude, or the morbid curiosity of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.…