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…
This was a pretty difficult read. Given the history of the author, it’s easy to surmise that Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar isn’t just some detached piece of literature; it’s eerie how likely it is that the musings of our narrator, Esther, were articulated through Plath’s thought process in how she perceived…
“Sometimes we want what we want, even if we know it’s going to kill us.” It is when you read pieces like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch that you realize that modern literature has failed us. A lot of the books that we are accustomed to fail to leave lasting impressions. Most of…
“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.” Convenience Store Woman is one of the books whose titles reflect the contents of…
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is the epitome of no plot, just vibes. Unlikeable characters, an unreliable narrator, and a bizarre, dark type of humor—this book has it all. It’s year 2000, set in the wealthy enclaves of Chicago. Hilarious and sad at the same time, the…
It is an impressive feat to be able to write an unconventional, let alone an unexplored, type of love story as Audrey Niffenegger does in The Time Traveler’s Wife. While the plotline is intricately woven, the premise is simple: Henry DeTamble has a “Chrono-Displacement Disorder”, a genetic condition that causes him…
I have mixed feelings about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. On one side, I want to appreciate the lyrical mastery of the prose; on the other, I’m disgusted at how this very prose portrays our narrator, Humbert Humbert, not as much as a monster as it does a mere protagonist in passing.…