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, […]

I guess I can maybe see why this novel is so hyped. The short four-stories-within-a-story structure isn’t entirely mainstream, and each story was designed to tug at the heart strings. And it satisfies a very common self-indulgent fantasy that we all have experienced about going back in time to change something or heal something inside […]

I was on the verge of DNF’ing Babel by R. F. Kuang so many times. I don’t know what compelled me to finish; I seem incapable of DNF’ing a book any longer. I have no idea how this book is so hyped and awarded. It’s the worst book I’ve read so far this year.  I […]

“…my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime…a lie that made others happy was more important than truth itself.” Or was it? In Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig explores this question and comes squarely on the side that unless it’s entirely […]