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 […]

The novella made me cry. It only took two hours to read since it’s so short, but it somehow is packed with so much power. This is my second Steinbeck, the first being East of Eden, and I am thoroughly impressed with him as an author. The writing in both books are impeccable, the characters […]

This book was a bit of a disappointment. I wanted to experience the love I have for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, but I had to force myself through Mary Anne. It had a lot of political intrigue, which wasn’t my cup of tea, and I didn’t feel like the characters were strong enough to keep […]