From the very first page, I adored the writing in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. It’s such beautiful writing with a compelling plotline. It’s revealed in the prologue that a group of college students murdered one of their classmates, and the rest of the book is delving into what led up to the murder and […]

I made the mistake of waiting too long after I read the book to write this review, so my feelings are not entirely fresh in my mind, but I do remember I found the book very moving. I appreciated a woman’s tale during a period where we don’t have many of those. Anita Diamant’s The […]

Mary Oliver’s poetry collection “Red Bird” is the first I’ve read of her. I think “Devotions” is the recommended collection to start with, so perhaps that was my mistake, but I didn’t really connect to any of her poetry. But I’ve also heard that Mary Oliver mainly writes about nature, and I honestly like to […]

I first read The Sun Also Rises my freshman year of college, and I reread it for the sole purpose of figuring out my favorite Hemingway out of the three I’ve read: For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and obviously The Sun Also Rises. I can now affirmatively say that The Sun […]

Around halfway through the book, I was thinking maybe this book wasn’t doing it for me, though I didn’t dislike it and definitely didn’t want to stop reading it. I just wasn’t as invested as I wanted to be. And then I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning to finish the second half because […]

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a modern retelling of Achilles, specifically the age-old speculation about the relationship between him and Patroclus, which is actually a little more than I knew about the book going in. This is a quick, entertaining read, though not without its flaws, and I appreciate how Miller made […]

I’ve been into book hauls lately on Booktube, probably because I’ve been in a consumerist mood myself and I want to see what everybody else is reading. They led me to look up the books mentioned, and I was shocked at how much prices have increased over the past few years (I know, everything has […]

The world Huxley creates in Brave New World is so vivid and incredibly introduced. He sets the scene up very well in the first chapter, and the rest of the novel flows smoothly after. Just like 1984 by George Orwell, there are aspects of the novel strikingly predictive of our modern world, with its genetic […]

Zweig is the author of my favorite short story, “Letter to an Unknown Woman,” so I had high hopes for his novella Chess Story. I got off work, reread “Letter to an Unknown Woman” to get me into a Zweigish mood, picked up Chess Story, and had read the entire novella by 10:45 that night. […]