Imagine that one day you wake up a changed person. The Vegetarian by Han Kang attempts to answer the question of why. Enter Yeong-hye. When she suddenly wakes up a vegan, her only explanation being that she “had a dream,” her unremarkable life is delineated as something unthinkable. Her meat-loving…
“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.“ While I’m not one to be against reviewing autobiographical works, there is always an underlying feeling of uneasiness. Imagine this feeling when No Longer Human…
“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.” In the grand finale of the Poppy War trilogy, R.F. Kuang writes with increased pace and skill. Rin’s journey is more hard-hitting than ever. The circumstances begin to fall into place with her as a truly monstrous yet compelling anti-hero. Rin, now…
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken. In the world of Jane Austen’s novels, Emma is up there as having one of the most misunderstood of the Austenian heroines. Beautiful, rich, and witty…
Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe. The most noticeable thing when going into Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is its cover. The titular and attractive Vladimir, a…
I’ve had Boy Parts by Eliza Clark on my to-read shelf for a while now, but I never actually got around to tackling it. But readers know all too well that sometimes we need escape from the romance and fantasy through blunt contemporary works. And how else through the lenses…
The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus. With the emergence of a deadly, incurable virus within animals, humanity has turned to cannibalism to satiate its hunger for meat. Now, the field of slaughtering and domesticating humans is a large one,…
I won’t tell you whether it has a happy ending or a tragic ending…neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic. There is a melancholy that permeates through this entire book. It toes the line between alienation and friendship, hope and…
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. The Great Gatsby is the quintessential American novel of glamor, irony, and social class. A profound exploration of the American Dream, the novel presents the timeless themes of wealth, class, and love in the most…
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is often seen as the go-to book for feminist literature. Published in 1985, it makes numerous “must read” lists; upon reading it, I can see why. Offred is a handmaid—that is, her only function is to breed–in the republic of Gilead, an extremely oppressive,…