Butter
it doesn’t have the sauce, the themes are half baked and sometimes contradictory, but the slice of life elements are always going to work for me and i liked some of the side characters. other side characters basically…
Reading log
Notes from the margins.
Reviews, reactions, and the occasional underline. What I read and what I made of it.
Bunny (Bunny, #1)
7.5/10 or something. not qualified to review this
Beartown (Beartown, #1)
it’s complicated. 4.5/5
Strange Pictures
fairly interesting mystery with unremarkable prose. reads more like you are getting a summary of a better told story. I find it cheap when characters are the same characters as prior chapters but we didnt know because…
Interesting Facts about Space
9/10. this was 5 stars for me with a weak ending. I am not cruel enough to dock a full star for it.
What You Are Looking for Is in the Library
basically breakaway by Kelly Clarkson little baby book but thats okay. its meta because the librarian only recommends books that are simple enough to be read by kids but still may impact on the adults in each vignette.…
Perfection
short book but appropriately so. omniscient narrator for our couple, and there is no dialogue in the entire work, which I didnt notice until page 100 somehow. misc unstructured thoughts below. so interesting - the MCs…
The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)
its funny, its cute, its queer. no notes --- psych apparently this is mad problematic. bro wrote a cute fantasy book based on the Sixties Scoop. yikes!
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
book cover attempts to market this entirely incorrectly. the summary on the incover also feels disingenuous to the content and tone. this is a wonderful novel that lets us live in the head of a woman as she mostly…
The Guest
3.75/5
Self-Portrait with Nothing
she was clunky but her heart is in the right place
The Membranes
oh yeah. this has the sauce
Dawn: Stories
7.5/10
The Ministry of Time
7/10
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
it doesn't have the sauce. 2.5
Boy Swallows Universe
4.25/5.
The Vegetarian
devastating. xoxo
Normal People
yeah i mean it's fine
Love in the Time of Cholera
At first I read this book literally, and if you do that while trying to think critically, you're gonna hate it so much. This was my initial review under that lens: GGM's capability to write some beautiful prose has…
The Secret History
the 1 star reviews are all so annoying lol. this book is sick. I gotta get a wool overcoat and some more suits. --- addressing what people hate about this book, and why thinking that is dumb: "the book climaxed halfway…
The Memory Police
Fahrenheit 1984
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney writes so well that I still stuck around after I realized she doesn't use quotation marks at all. although I'm a chess player, I related much more to Peter, not Ivan. I found the fragmented writing when…
If Cats Disappeared from the World
the devil removes things from the world like a shitty database that doesn't know how to cascade delete items. the cats also don't disappear, so the If in the title carries a lot of weight
Out
really enjoyable read. I don't really want to give it 4 stars because I am not happy with what happened between Masako and Satake at the end, really doesn't sit right. but the overall plot and cast was fun and took…
My Year of Meats
3.5-4 stars. very funny book, especially the first half before things get more serious. Deals with themes of authenticity and abuse. Situates itself in very real US issues related to economies of scale (walmart) and…
Sputnik Sweetheart
par for the course for murakami
All the Colors of the Dark
like others who went in blind, i was bemused at the several genre shifts before I ultimately settled in. I was pulled in by the writing style, rolled my eyes at some parts, and ultimately stayed for the characters. The…
An Artist of the Floating World
settling on 4 stars, i think. Ishiguro delivers great storytelling, told from the perspective of a retired artist in post wwii Japan, as he recalls memories from his youth intertwined with his current life in a much…
Kafka on the Shore
It took me 3 tries to read this book over 10 years. In 2014 when I first picked it up, it was a gift before my trip to Japan. I, a 15 year old boy, ironically struggled to follow the story of another 15 year old boy…
The Silent Patient
stupid ass book
Never Let Me Go
minimum spoilers I think we need to stop writing dystopia novels where we just take words and capitalize them to show how this is a different world than we live in (Donor, Exchange, Gallery, etc). at this point i have…
Convenience Store Woman
no message or character arcs. got the point by page 15. our protagonist is clearly autistic yet the author nor society seem weirdly avoiding saying it.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
would give 4.5 stars if I could. will see if my head settles on 5 later
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
gorgeous. Best murakami has been. stunning side characters. throughout the novel he explores some consistent "something" inside people. when reading murakami, you also have a consistent something inside you as a result…
Verity
normie garbage. idiot characters, plot twist is wholly expected and entirely underwhelming. protagonist literally irrelevant to story