Nothing Personal: An Essay — James Baldwin
Based.

How To Get Over A Breakup — Ovid
That's right baby, Ovid Metamorphoses coming in with the hot new dating tips. Ovid clears. This guy is a shitposter and would've loved twitter.

(cont.) but it's so detached to me, I doubt I would've noticed if it wasn't mentioned in the Introduction. Otherwise it kind of reads like sad guy fiction to me.

Demian — Hermann Hesse
It's like guy feeling bad for himself kind of fiction in a similar way that Catcher in the Rye does. The extremely obvious Cain and Abel parallelisms really got to me. I could feel echoes of how this would have touched upon how necessary it is for WWII soldiers returning home

Angel Down — Daniel Kraus
I have so many conflicting opinions about this book, I'm still not fully sure what to make of it. Daddy issues for sure. I feel like I didn't really have any kind of takeaway from this book which probably is not a great sign.

Red Doc> — Anne Carson
CARSON CLEARS. It's very different than Autobiography of Red, but I liked it.

Gideon the Ninth — Tamsyn Muir
Unfortunately my favorite part is when she was describing the castle thing near the beginning. Also Cythere clears purely out of the Rule of Cool.

(cont.) culmination of the book ending up being a highschool Speech and Debate event where the two adversaries are playing devils advocate against each other is just deeply entertaining.

Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
This book is so damn funny. I can respect what it's trying to say but the casual use of very classist and eugenics forward and racist language is wild. I can't take a scene seriously if you're going to hit me with "The Savage whipped himself" be so fr. Also the

To Be Taught, If Fortunate — Becky Chambers
I liked it better than Psalm4tWB. The chemistry between the characters felt kind of... Eh, but I'm willing to look past that to look at the existentialism of being forgotten as political tides shift at home. I thoroughly enjoyed that.

A Psalm For The Wild Built — Becky Chambers
Admittedly, I was very underwhelmed by this book. I do acknowledge SFF isn't my usual stomping ground, and that Becky was a new turn for the SFF genre into cozy Scifi. That being said, it was a little too... hand-holdy, in a self help book kind of way.

Harrison Bergeron — Kurt Vonnegut
Evidently you'll see a bunch of shorter books/short stories in a row. Didn't like it as much as Slaughterhouse Five, but Vonnegut has always had a taste for something strange and satirical. It has echoes of that same dystopia that F451, 1984, BNW address

The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera
It's like partially a philosophical essay, partially a novel, and partially a haphazard historical account. I evidently this was a common way of writing for Czech writers. I had a good time, though it didn't blow my mind.

Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
Based.

Monster — Hirokazu Kore-eda
Bruh why did this make me cry

Paved Paradise — Henry Grabar
Very funny and very enlightening. I think the conclusion was more of a shoe in even though the author claimed it isn't, but the point he's making still stands.

The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Based.

Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut
Funny, depressing, based. I didn't laugh or cry, but I feel like it took a toll on my soul

Detransition, Baby — Torrey Peters
This was a really smart and acute book with some truly, truly awful people in a really fascinating way. My main qualm is the attempt at intersectionality to include POC, it could have been done with more nuance or care.

All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque
Yeah, this was an incredible book. Amen.

Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
This book is such an exercise in mediocrity. It lacks a sense of identity, and focuses too much on trying to weave this larger narrative while not giving the reader that many means to get attached or drawn to any of the characters.

that it once again circles back around to the book's major weakness: lack of intimacy and general estrangement. It might overall be the point, but somehow it consequently weakens the book on top of it.
The only thing I found marginally funny is that The Perfect And Kind died from a bj. #1 way to die

was kind of ass. It felt like an unnecessary element thrown into the last 3 chapters of the book, as if it's trying to finally give the book some direction with the idea of cultural diaspora, estrangement, and lack of identity, but it feels so lacking in execution by injecting a new personality(6/7)

world in any other form than "it just is what it is". Unfortunately as it stands, Fetter's relationship with his mother is by far the most interesting thing that happened in this whole book, and it simply leaves everything else looking pale and sallow as a consequence. Also, the ending of the (5/7)

simply stews in punishment for both his own complacency and his action. The book fails to develop any intimacy between the forms other than quick flashes of Fetter's guilt and his sexual impulses, and as a consequence, it alienates the reader from really taking in any of the characters or the (4/7)

rapid intensity that it fails to really stick anything that it might be have to say about the caste system and the systematic structures by leaving you and the protagonist in the dark. As a consequence, you experience Fetter being shuttled around by other powers and people as a tool and then (3/7)

yet somehow manages to weaken its writing on both fronts. It's polished to an immaculate degree, with a marvelous sociopolitical landscape to beholden through the eyes of the narrator, that ends up being explored from the top to the bottom, but in doing so you get shuttled around with such (2/7)

The Saint of Bright Doors — Vajra Chandrasekera
I've been toiling with this book on and off for the last god knows how long and can finally say that I've finished it.
This book is, as I have iterated to my friends before, a book that makes an attempt to marry the fantasy and literary genre, and(1/7)

Strange Houses — Uketsu
I agree with the populace that it's the weaker book. Overall the delivery and the construct wasn't as well stitched together as Strange Pictures. The portion with the superstition took me too far out of the believability as well but. That could just be me.

Go Tell It On the Mountain — James Baldwin
I just noticed I consumed three titles with mountain in the name back to back.
This book gave me such a bad book hangover. It felt like getting retraumatized by my childhood all over again—and in that effect, it did it really well. Good job Baldwin, damn.