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 […]

This book is not entirely what I was expecting. I don’t know why, but I was expecting more of a Jane Eyre type of novel, with a romance between a sensitive lady and a stodgy gentleman that you grow to like as the novel progresses, but Wuthering Heights was infinitely darker. I rooted for Jane […]

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 […]