I first came across Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when I watched Richard Brooks’ 1958 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman on a plane to or from Italy. I remember it striking me so much that I wanted to watch it again, but I couldn’t ascertain why, and I couldn’t find it anywhere […]

This year was such a whirlwind and yet it also felt very long. Things that happened in January feels like it happened two years ago, things that happened in June feels like it happened a year ago, October feels like 6 months ago. I got the shortest haircut I’ve had since I was eight (that […]

I think there is something to the criticism that you have to be a teenager or at least in close proximity to your teenage years to relate to and enjoy The Catcher in the Rye. I was mostly bored throughout the book, trying to finish it as soon as possible so I could move on […]

I was mostly bored throughout the entirety of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. It was a chore to get through from the very first paragraph. I also don’t think the premise is something that speaks to me. I’m not interested in actors or their vices, their lifestyle or their attention-seeking. So maybe this book was […]

I really truly enjoyed 3/4ths of this book. Which surprised me because I wasn’t overly enthralled with Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. Backman’s Anxious People is about an incompetent bank robber and a hostage situation with “the worst hostages ever,” but it’s even more about understanding and finding connection in unlikely places, with unlikely […]

Letters to a Young Poet is a compilation of ten letters that the poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to an aspiring writer. It sounds like a boring premise for someone not obsessed or even remotely familiar with Rilke’s work, but Rilke’s writing is so engaging and thoughtful, and a lot of the topics […]

Yet another science fiction novel that has surprisingly enthralled me. I believe I read it in three sittings, which isn’t common for me these days. It was the humor that made The Martian un-put-downable for me. It made me laugh throughout the entire book and endeared me to Mark Watney so that I had to […]

In her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Dr. Azar Nafisi processes her time living in Iran during the revolution and the war against Iraq, and she often does so by relating her experiences to the literature she taught as a professor. Though I wasn’t riveted or engrossed by the book, there are so many things […]

I’m trying to avoid characterizing my reaction to the novel as just “meh.” But it was genuinely almost completely meh. Except I’m starting to understand that it isn’t Murakami without at least one totally bizarre sex scene.  Norwegian Wood was so much more tolerable than 1Q84 by the same author, but I still wasn’t wowed, […]

I’ve seen Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo gracing a lot of readers’ favorites lists, so I was really excited to read this 1,243-page novel. Everyone says that the length shouldn’t be daunting because the book is so entertaining that the pages just fly by. Unfortunately, I won’t be adding this to my Favorites shelf, […]