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 […]

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 […]