Rated The Robots of Dawn 8/10
Edited 43d ago
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Rated The Spiritual Poems of Rumi 4/10
This was a gift and it’s more decorative than anything else; the layout is beautiful but the “nonliteral” translations are so hippy-dippy and loose that they could be hanging on the wall of an AirBnB.
Rated Digging Stars 8/10
not a knockout like HOUSE OF STONE, maybe feels a little loose, but a compelling and interesting read - especially how it puts you inside the perspective of a Zimbabwean for whom American political/racial dynamics are somewhat opaque.
Rated Velvet Was the Night 8/10
A clever and compelling thriller set against the backdrop of political repression in 1970s Mexico.
Rated A Natural History of Dragons 6/10
I would have loooooved this when I was a kid. As a (married, child-having) adult it's hard to get past the way the protagonist handles the events of the last couple chapters of the book.
Edited 43d ago
Rated The Story of the Lost Child 8/10
Edited 44d ago
Rated I Who Have Never Known Men 10/10
This book is fairly misrepresented in the blurb and people's descriptions, IMO, I don't think it's about female friendship and intimacy basically at all, and it's only barely science fiction. It's one of the most existentially horrifying novels I have ever read, though. It's about the death of an entire society and is clearly informed by the Holocaust.
Edited 44d ago
Rated The Gods Themselves 10/10
I was so excited to find a major Asimov work I somehow hadn't ever read, and I loved it.
Edited 44d ago
Rated The Frozen River 7/10
Historical fiction, pretty anachronistic (our protagonists all have very modern values) but I didn’t mind that. Near the end there was a description of several young kids dying of disease that kept me up late though.
Edited 44d ago
Rated Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream 10/10
Exceptional - well researched and reported, eye-opening, infuriating. As mad as you think you are at private equity, you can always be madder
Rated Circle of Days 7/10
This was fun! You can get through it in a day or two and it feels like watching a movie. I'm kind of shocked it was more than 700 pages since I read it as an ebook and it went so quickly.
Edited 44d ago
Rated The Butcher of the Forest 8/10
really good - a concise and contained story (rare for the genre!) that suggests a rich larger world without burdening the tight little narrative with a ton of exposition or explanation. more like this please!
Wants to read Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
Rated A Tale for the Time Being 10/10
A tender, strange and intellectually restless novel about time, memory, loneliness and the fragile ways people become connected through words. It moves between intimate teenage despair and much larger questions about history, technology, nature and whether reading someone’s story can become a form of responsibility.
Some of its philosophical detours occasionally slow the emotional momentum, but they also give the book its unusual depth. What stayed with me most was its refusal to treat suffering as something neat or easily resolved. It allows uncertainty to remain uncertainty.
Quietly devastating, formally playful and much warmer than its darkest moments initially suggest. A book about finding another person’s voice and realizing that simply paying attention may already change both of you.
Edited 43d ago
Rated Heads of the Colored People 8/10
A brief and clever collection of stories, loosely connected by characters, geography and theme - many of them about Black protagonists navigating relationships with other Black people in both Black and white social milieus. Engaging and well-executed.
Rated Devil House 8/10
a little bit less than the sum of its parts, but compelling and well-written
Wants to read Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity