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murrderdith's reviews
493 reviews
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
2.0
I guess I just don’t care what a fifty-odd year-old man has to say about Alanis Morrisette.
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.0
There were some really great moments in this novel and Schaitkin does a good job creating this unsettling town separated from the rest of the world where mothers just sometimes evaporate. I don't think the novel rises to Shirley Jackson levels of claustrophobic world-building...which is why they probably shouldn't have blurbed it like that. It's a lot to live up to.
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
There is an exquisite, stark bleakness to Didion’s writing. Now having her fiction to compare it to, I think I prefer her non-fiction work as her style has a journalistic quality that doesn’t always feel right for a novel. I think she captures the lie undergirding mid-20th-century American prosperity--that the material bounty of post-war America belies an existential crisis. A realization that all of that is empty.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder, Infidelity, Racial slurs, and Abortion
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Listen, it's Virginia Woolf. It's good and this is groundbreaking work in its narrative use of gender fluidity. Orlando is an amazing character, even if they* are also an absolute aristocratic snob (I mean, so was Woolf.)
...it's also the book of hers I enjoyed the least. It turns out, my favorite thing about Woolf is her ability to shift perspective within the stream-of-consciousness style she pioneered. The interiority is still here but without that other element, this text felt more linear and rigid than Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse (my personal favorite.) I missed the writer's ability to embody so many people (and occasionally buildings) within a narrative.
*The character shifts from masculine to feminine pronouns in the text, I'm using the singular they here for expediency's sake.
...it's also the book of hers I enjoyed the least. It turns out, my favorite thing about Woolf is her ability to shift perspective within the stream-of-consciousness style she pioneered. The interiority is still here but without that other element, this text felt more linear and rigid than Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse (my personal favorite.) I missed the writer's ability to embody so many people (and occasionally buildings) within a narrative.
*The character shifts from masculine to feminine pronouns in the text, I'm using the singular they here for expediency's sake.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Racial slurs, Racism, Xenophobia, Colonisation, and Classism
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Pretty clear and concise recrimination of social media and late-stage capitalism that also acknowledges better than other books I've read in this space the limits of what individual people can do to "fix" their focus problems (I'm looking at you, Cal Newport.)
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
5.0
This memoir was so beautifully and unsparingly devastating. Machado is unflinching in her account of (as Machado notes herself) all of the "legal" ways a partner can abuse and diminish you while also rooting the narrative within a folkloric framework (she never names the Woman in the Dream House, the only character without one in the way that the villains of those first stories we learn never have names as we recognize them)--returning again and again to the tropes of these ur-texts. Her language moves from ethereal and gauzy to razor-sharp in a way that reinforces the whiplash experience of having a volatile, erratic partner.
**I would recommend looking at the content warnings from other users before reading this book if you are at all concerned it may be a difficult read for you to work through. I will add some but it is a likely an incomplete list**
**I would recommend looking at the content warnings from other users before reading this book if you are at all concerned it may be a difficult read for you to work through. I will add some but it is a likely an incomplete list**
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Biphobia, Body shaming, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Homophobia, Infidelity, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Lesbophobia, Gaslighting, and Alcohol
This is a memoir of domestic abuse. It is beautifully written but not necessarily something everyone is in the right place to read. That said, it could also serve as a text the reader recognizes themselves in. I think it can be worth reading painful, recognizable texts for this reason. Proceed with caution.
Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn
hopeful
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.0
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
This was an interesting, if not fully fleshed, novel. Told over a week from multiple perspectives, it focuses on the residents of an affordable housing complex in a rundown factory town in Indiana. The novel largely rotates around a teenage girl named Blandine who is obsessed with the medieval saint, Hildegard von Bingen, and creates unnerving art protests to undermine local redevelopment--you know, teen girl stuff.
I genuinely did like the novel. The writing is fantastic and the characters are odd but also believable. That said, the multitude of intersecting narratives didn't always feel cohesive. I don't think the novel would have benefitted from stripping it down to a single third-person perspective but there are characters that could have been eliminated entirely (Hope and her husband) to give others (Joan) more space without taking anything from the larger plot.
I genuinely did like the novel. The writing is fantastic and the characters are odd but also believable. That said, the multitude of intersecting narratives didn't always feel cohesive. I don't think the novel would have benefitted from stripping it down to a single third-person perspective but there are characters that could have been eliminated entirely (Hope and her husband) to give others (Joan) more space without taking anything from the larger plot.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Violence, and Blood