The ghost of Sylvia Plath is intrinsically linked with any discussion surrounding her novel The Bell Jar. In the literary space, there always seemed to be some mysterious aura surrounding it, leaden with heavy context even if you don’t strictly remember the story behind the weight the bare mention of the book carries. The book […]

After reading The Painted Veil by Maugham, in which cholera is prominently featured, I thought it was an ideal time to brave reading Love in the Time of Cholera, thinking it might be a nice segue even though I absolutely hated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cholera has very […]

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 […]