I first read Machiavelli’s The Prince as assigned reading for a sophomore history class in high school. I remember being surprised at enjoying it. It’s basically a pamphlet how-to for princes and rulers, and often values cold pragmatism over morality. I don’t remember if I found it particularly shocking the first time around, but I […]

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is a very wholesome, sweet book, in the same realm of A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman. It’s written in a refreshingly straight-forward prose, and is a very short, easy read. It follows a man who dies, goes to Heaven, and encounters five people […]

After hearing so many people rave about her, I finally read a Clarice Lispector novel. And I hated it. I wanted to DNF The Passion According to G.H. so many times; I again got through it out of sheer obstinacy. Though I’m not sure I can say I “read” it since often I just literally […]

I picked up The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham because I love the film with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. It’s a slow burn of heart-rendering, complex emotion, ending in tear-jerking scenes. Edward Norton is particularly impressive in it, and it quickly became one of my favorite movies. Upon reading the book, I learned […]

I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I picked up this novel. My expectations are laughable in retrospect. I bought The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith at nearly the same time (I still have yet to read the latter), because I was in […]

I grew up on westerns, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Louis L’Amour. My Hannah Montana was the Roy Rogers show and my Harry Potter was Barnabas and Tyrel Sackett. I read Louis L’Amour throughout middle school until someone asked me why I was always reading “those books” and I realized I hadn’t visited my school […]

I’m in love. When I first read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, I enjoyed it. But now I’m in love. I’ve nearly underlined, bracketed, or annotated every line in that book. It seemed like every single line spoke to my soul. Every character was living, breathing, vitalized. Every observation felt natural and insightful.  I reread […]

I went into I Who Have Never Known Men not knowing much other than it’s dystopian and about a bunch of women trapped in a bunker. I think that’s the best way to approach the novel. Anything more would stray into spoiler territory, because with this book, the less you know beforehand the better.   I […]

Howards End is one of those books, like Lolita for entirely different reasons, where I can appreciate the execution and ingenuity after the fact, but the experience of reading isn’t the most pleasant. While reading, I felt like most of the aspects weren’t really working for me. Upon reflection, I better understand how and why […]

I didn’t go into Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales expecting a lot. After thinking the sequel was just decent relative to my enjoyment of the first novel, I really just picked up the third to finish the series. I would say the quality of the books decreased with every installation, though that isn’t to […]