Books shelved under “General”

New Heather O’Neill? You know I am on it. Valentine in Montreal is an interesting departure, in many ways, from her earlier work, yet it is also clearly very much in line with her style and motifs. Its most notable conceit, of course, is how O’Neill wrote and released it in a serialized fashion in The Montréal Gazette. I love this idea of bringing back serialized fiction!

The eponymous Valentine works in a depanneur…

Not sure how I feel about this one. I picked it up on a whim as a birthday gift for a friend. The back cover copy describing its dystopian, fascist world seemed intriguing. Afterwards, I remembered I read another novel by Yōko Ogawa long, long ago. Like that one, The Memory Police is explicitly about what happens when we lose our memories—albeit in a very different way. It’s fantastical and dreamlike, yet also quite deadly.…

As always, a new Holly Bourne novel is an instabuy for me at this point. One thing I have loved about Bourne is how she has rigorously pursued her own eras to an almost Taylor Swiftian degree: from her young adult novels to her novels about single women in their late twenties and early thirties to this, a novel about women having (and not having) kids. While perhaps a slightly chrononormative progression, that’s the only…

Often it takes a lifetime to figure out who we are. Although internet culture has helped spread a wider array of labels to help people articulate their gender, sexuality, spirituality, and other aspects of identity, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to find the right labels or try them out. Life is trial and error—a lot of trial and error. The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat is a challenging read that bears this out. Larre…

That’s it, no more Gabrielle Zevin for Kara. Granted it had been fifteen years since the last book I had read by her. Moreover, both of the books I’ve read have been YA novels. So maybe I could be forgiven for talking myself into trying Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, given the hype it has received. Sometimes the hype is worth it, and I shout, “Why did you all let me sleep on this?”

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I am a firm believer that there is room for a wide range of literature. As much as my favourite form of storytelling is a juicy and straightforward novel, I enjoy short stories and novellas, stage plays and movies, video games and songs. Foster, by Claire Keegan, is an example of why I’m grateful that, at least for now, publishing has niches that have room for smaller, quieter tales. Although not something I would…

Yes, every once in a while I manage to snag a book that isn’t an ARC soon after its release (and actually read it)—all of this helped by my lovely public library, for they had a copy but of course there are holds on it, so I have to read it right away! Yellowface is quite the departure from Babel, the only other R.F. Kuang book I’ve read to date. But my understanding, from…

Bodies by themselves are weird, but what really takes the cake is how we police our bodies based on societal norms. It’s no secret that many societies, including Canadian society, are fatphobic and love to police women’s bodies. This is a difficult subject to write about and get right—and I’m probably not very qualified to talk about whether or not Diana Clarke gets it right in Thin Girls. All I know is that it…

As someone who is childfree by choice but who has many friends who are parents, I think a lot about how this event in someone’s life affects our evolution as individuals. The Mothers approaches this with additional layers of considering race and class. I say “layers” because that’s how it feels like Brit Bennett tells this story: like a croissant, hundreds of thin layers folded over on each other, waiting for you to read them.

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Back in a previous life when I was an English student in university, we learned about something called intertextuality, which loosely put is the relationship among various texts. All I can say is that I am glad I read at least one book by Audre Lorde before reading The Days of Afrekete, which from its title to its tropes is steeped in Lorde’s work. (A lot of other reviews are also comparing it…

When I was younger, I might have loved this book. It’s exactly the right mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable narration that would have tickled the still-forming prefrontal cortex of my young university student brain. I might have written an extremely lengthy review, arguing how brilliant Karen Joy Fowler is for this masterpiece of a novel.

When I was younger, I might have hated this book. It’s a nauseating mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable…

Just absolutely devastating. But of course, I have come to expect that of Louise O’Neill.

After two brilliant forays into young adult novels, both well worth a read, O’Neill brought her unstinting criticism of patriarchy to her first adult novel Almost Love in the best and most scathing way possible. After the Silence is a more-than-worthy second adult novel. While both have passing similarities—depictions of emotional abuse, gaslighting, male partners treating women poorly—O’Neill looks at…

Second review: August 2020

It has been nine years since I first read Of Human Bondage, so I felt very overdue to revisit a book that I dubbed in my first review “ripe for reading again and again.” Maybe I was a little scared that it wouldn’t hold up. Well, I am in a re-reading mood in this second half of pandemic-laden 2020, and Maugham fit the bill.

Trigger warnings in this book for:…

Very mixed feelings about this one. Zazen is the kind of nihilistic, meditative tract that a lot of people rave about. Vanessa Veselka definitely examines a lot of the paradoxes inherent in the way some adults conduct themselves during those often aimless days after school and before middle age. At the same time, I did not have a good time reading this, and I never really enjoyed any of the characters. But I do wonder…

I have been a diehard fan of Louise O’Neill since I read Asking for It, and I pre-ordered Almost Love when I learned of its existence. O’Neill combines an unflinching feminist philosophy with an unfettered talent for storytelling, and her latest novel is no exception. Equal parts amusing, scathing, and surprising, Almost Love presents us with the paradoxes of making and breaking relationships and the ways in which we make and break ourselves in…

If I were younger, I would be all over this book. If I were slightly older than that, but still younger, then I would probably sneer at this book’s pretentiousness. As it is, having advanced to the ripe old age of 28, I have now acquired enough wisdom neither to gush nor to sneer but simply to shrug. The Golden House is most definitely Salman Rushdie, but it’s also a little bit different. And perhaps…

Books with unlikable protagonists are difficult. I love the conceit of an unlikable protagonist in some circumstances. Yet if one is not in the right mood, not liking the protagonist doesn’t help. Solar compounds this problem with Ian McEwan’s dense narration which, while providing excellent insight into Michael Beard’s interior life, means that we spend a lot of time on little moments that aren’t actually all that interesting. As with several books I’ve picked up…

It’s the penultimate read for the Banging Book Club! Arguably the most well-known of this year’s selections and easily the most controversial from the moment of its release, Lolita is definitely complex and not an easy book to read.

Lolita reminds me of Lullabies for Little Criminals, one of my favourite books and one that I revisited this year in preparation for teaching it to my adult learners (I’ve since taught it twice,…

Reading Adult Onset feels like watching someone else watch a movie inside a glass box: I can see them enjoying the movie but can’t quite join in. I think I’ve come to terms with the fact I didn’t like this book, but I’m still trying to figure out if it’s well written or not. That is, I’m pretty certain most of what I didn’t like is on me, not on the book—but maybe a little…

The epistolary novel was a huge tradition back when the novel was first becoming big. I love that blogs have breathed new life into this form. Anonymous Lawyer, based on a blog of the same name, is the somewhat-fabricated record of the hiring partner at a corporate law firm. He shares his views on summer students, employee management, how to get to the top, and family matters. In this character Jeremy Blachman conveys…