Category: Literature

Daphne du Maurier is great at writing so that you get lost in the story; it seems so seamless and effortlessly atmospheric. Granted, Mary Anne wasn’t the same caliber, but the praise applies to Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. I still like Rebecca a lot more, probably because I related to the new Mrs. de […]

I first read If Beale Street Could Talk in college, and I remember being struck by Baldwin’s writing. I was no less impressed on my second read. The book takes place right after the Civil Rights Movement in 1973, and it’s about a young woman fighting to get her fiance, Fonny, out of jail. Fonny […]

I’m finding this book very hard to review. I loved our protagonist, Count Rostov; I loved each individual story or happening that takes place; I loved the supporting characters, nearly all of which were gems; and I loved the history. Unfortunately, despite all of that, I didn’t love the experience of actually reading the book.  […]

The concept of People of the Book is extraordinary. I wanted to read it because The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish is one of my favorite books, and it has an extremely similar premise: intertwining past and present POVs as a scholar tries to figure out the history of an old manuscript. They both […]

This is entirely out of the realm of my usual reading material, but I adored this little book. Perhaps partly because it can fall into the academia subgenre, which is becoming my favorite type of novel to read. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a fantasy novel about a scholar studying elusive faeries in a […]

It’s that time of year again! Time to take stock of what I read this year in preparation for a new one. I read 22 books overall, only 5 of which I disliked. This year, I thought I’d divvy up the books I read into categories. In each category, I will list the books in […]

When I think of Ernest Hemingway’s writings as a whole, the word that comes to mind is “honest.” He mastered a style that was truly distinct. He would edit his works and strip out everything he thought was embellishment or superfluous. The sparser the sentence, the truer it was, and the more the reader could […]

I’m finding it really hard to portray how intensely I loved this book and how deeply it resonated with me. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is honestly so clever. I usually don’t write the synopsis of books in my reviews, because I tend to skip over them when reading reviews myself and there are so […]

Daisy Jones & The Six reads like typical fanfiction. To be honest, I didn’t go into this thinking that I would like it. I’ve read a Taylor Jenkins Reid book before, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and was very disappointed, so I might have gone into this novel with a bit of bias. But […]

I can’t believe Ernest Hemingway actually made me care about an old man catching a giant marlin. I have absolutely zero interest in fishing, so I was entirely expecting to feel ambivalent about this book or be completely bored by it. But by the end of the book, I was genuinely rooting for the old […]