The thing that most stood out to me in reading Hamnet is Maggie O’Farrell’s writing. I admire it so much. She has a way of sitting, living, and moving at the same pace as her characters rather than rushing from plot point to plot point (as I tend to do in my own writing). She […]

My editions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes are together within the same bound book, and I read them consecutively as if they were one novel, so I’m going to review each together, referring to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as GPB, and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes as BGMB.  I thought the novels themselves […]

This is my third time reading my favorite or second favorite book of all time, depending on the day: Crime and Punishment. I read it again with the express purpose of annotating it, because prior to the last couple years, I was totally adverse to writing in books, which I thought as vandalizing the sacred, […]

I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about this book. Perhaps because I read this during a particularly busy time in my life and was distracted, but it might also be because this book exists in that space where there’s a lot of technical skill, but I felt like something undefinable is […]

I struggled so hard to get through this one. It’s supposed to be the epitome of magical realism and generational epics, but I was entirely unimpressed. The most common theme in the novel is pedophilia, which fortunately isn’t my thing. And I guess the secondary theme was incestual pedophilia. I was going through my sparse […]

I appreciate the premise… kids are cloned for the sole purpose of donating their organs for naturally born humans, and we follow their journey from school to death. I suppose the kids’ origin and purpose is supposed to be a huge twist to the novel, but I had already watched the movie years ago (which […]

I had high hopes for On Chesil Beach since Ian McEwan’s Atonement is among my favorite books. This is definitely not as masterfully memorable as Atonement, which is more high concept, but I’m very impressed at McEwan’s bravery in approaching this subject matter. And the delicacy in which he approached it. Has anyone else ever […]

I love this book. It’s been a few months since I’ve read it, but I just went through all the notes and annotations I made in the novel, and it reminded me why this might be my favorite book I read in 2024.  I didn’t know what I was in for when I picked up […]

The book review is going to be incredibly challenging to write, because I still have little idea exactly how I feel about Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I didn’t know what it was about before starting the novel; I only picked it up because I loved Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and wanted to […]

At the start of the novel A Man Called Ove, I didn’t think I was going to like it. The beginning scene of Ove yelling at someone in the service industry probably wasn’t the move to get me immediately hooked. I didn’t feel like reading about a grumpy, mean old man, and the writing didn’t […]