Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play about the Salem witch trials, somehow capturing what propelled it, sustained it, and ended it in a very short timeframe. This play took me on a journey. Let’s start at the beginning. A very good place to start. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I wasn’t so sure about the […]

I knew prior to reading that people rave about this book, but after my nonchalant impression of The Starless Sea by the same author, I was fully expecting to be unimpressed by The Night Circus. Fantasy isn’t the genre I’m typically drawn to, anyways. But I flew through this. I remember muttering to myself near […]

I first encountered the story of George R. Tweed through the movie No Man Is An Island with Jeffrey Hunter that my family and I watch and rewatch all the time. My father let me borrow Robinson Crusoe, USN, which chronicles the true life story of George R. Tweed. Tweed was a U.S Navy radioman […]

My editions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes are together within the same bound book, and I read them consecutively as if they were one novel, so I’m going to review each together, referring to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as GPB, and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes as BGMB.  I thought the novels themselves […]

This is my third time reading my favorite or second favorite book of all time, depending on the day: Crime and Punishment. I read it again with the express purpose of annotating it, because prior to the last couple years, I was totally adverse to writing in books, which I thought as vandalizing the sacred, […]

I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about this book. Perhaps because I read this during a particularly busy time in my life and was distracted, but it might also be because this book exists in that space where there’s a lot of technical skill, but I felt like something undefinable is […]

I struggled so hard to get through this one. It’s supposed to be the epitome of magical realism and generational epics, but I was entirely unimpressed. The most common theme in the novel is pedophilia, which fortunately isn’t my thing. And I guess the secondary theme was incestual pedophilia. I was going through my sparse […]

I appreciate the premise… kids are cloned for the sole purpose of donating their organs for naturally born humans, and we follow their journey from school to death. I suppose the kids’ origin and purpose is supposed to be a huge twist to the novel, but I had already watched the movie years ago (which […]

I love this book. It’s been a few months since I’ve read it, but I just went through all the notes and annotations I made in the novel, and it reminded me why this might be my favorite book I read in 2024.  I didn’t know what I was in for when I picked up […]

The book review is going to be incredibly challenging to write, because I still have little idea exactly how I feel about Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I didn’t know what it was about before starting the novel; I only picked it up because I loved Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and wanted to […]