The Godfather by Mario Puzo

love a good crime novel and this is considered a classic in the genre so I had to check it out. powerful character development and storytelling, this toed the line between authenticity and campiness for the most part. impossible not to compare it to the movie, and the biggest difference is the book focused more on the singer Johnny Fontaine and had some random chapters about a tertiary character getting a vaginoplasty lmao. if you take those storylines out (as Coppola smartly did) you've got a perfect organized crime story. even with them tho, this is still deservedly a classic

9/10

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of A Yellow Sun was a 5 star read for me so I had been meaning to check this novel out for a while. was a bit disappointed tho tbh. followed the story of a Nigerian couple that grows apart and experience the challenges of immigrant life in both the USA and the UK. Adichie's prose and ability to capture interpersonal relationships is top notch but the story just felt a bit too over the place in time and scale. like as soon as I was starting to get attached to characters or storylines Adichie switched the perspective or setting. then there were some parts that I thought took away from the main narrative and were unnecessary. still like her writing a lot but this one was a miss for me

7/10

Formas de Volver a Casa / Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra

second book I've read by Zambra and sadly, like Adichie's, this one didn't really work for me either. short novela about growing up in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and right after and the effect that that had on childhood. that part was entertaining and well written but then it got too meta with a secondary story about a novelist writing about the primary story. will check out more of Zambra's novels as I like his prose but this one was also a miss for me

7/10

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones by Olga Tokarczuk

I wanted to like this one as I heard great things about it and the synopsis sounds like something that would be up my alley but I just couldn't get into the narrator's perspective too much. story about a batty old woman in a small Polish town who is obsessed with astrology and becomes involved in the suspicious deaths of other town members. impressive prose and Tokarczuk did an amazing job of creating the setting and describing the village life but the story took a bit too long to get going and once it did pick up it was fairly predictable. if anybody can recommend another novel from her I'd give it a go tho

7/10

three misses in a row gotta get back on track

3.5/5

It doesn't matter if your black or white.. When your poor, your poor. That's life in small town Bacon County Georgia, the world of a young Harry Crews. The book cleverly titled "A Biography of a Place" feels like that, a different world where surviving past the age of 50 is a miracle. Crews may not have the grace Faulkner or McCarthy but their something there in his hardscrabble words of a man who's lived it. His memoir reads with a sense of humor that feels like a Coen Brothers film, think something like O Brother, where art thou? meets Sam Peckinpah. Its a solid easy read but I feel like I spoiled it by watching reviews of the book before hand.

If you enjoy Flannery O'Connor and Donald Ray Pollock, the country tunes of Merle Haggard, and some good ol southern cooking

Bad Monkey

3.5/5

This propulsive yarn is what the Apple TV show is based on but I haven't seen that. The story follows Miami cop Andrew Yancy, who's tasked with delivering an arm, which seems to be a product of a boating accident, to the relevant authorities, but something doesn't feel right. After some unfortunate events that see Yancy demoted to a health inspector, he still won't let this case go and see holes in it. Soon, he's embroiled in a tale where he crosses paths with his fugitive ex, a Bahamian voodoo priestess, and the eponymous bad monkey.

The sun-soaked sleaziness of Florida is given a Carribean twist here, although the phonetic language used for the Carribean characters got cringe fast. While the story can be quite funny, the snark started to grate and feel one-note, but I suspect it's the length of the book too which I think needed a closer shave. It was a good book, by no means literary, but it knows what it is and sticks to its guns.

The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

1.5/5

Yeah, oof. I wish I had more charitable things to say about this one but it read like a Malaria fever dream. A young man goes searching for his dead palm wine tapster, if I had to summarize, but I will give this book props for not adhering to the western structure of storytelling. It's based on Igbo folklore, so maybe that context is needed but yeah, this one did not jive with me at all unfortunately.

Black Sunlight by Dambudzo Marechera

3/5

A follow up to "The House of Hunger" by the Zimbabwean author, it is a dense, fascinating exploration of one man's interpretation of resistance and violence. Part biographical, it's based on the author's time in Oxford, and the writing itself has a fever dream like quality as well but with a much more visceral tone to it. While the plot is lost in polemics by the end, the story is an interesting peek into the mind it came from. Dambudzo himself was quite an interesting figure (He was kicked out of Oxford because of his erratic behavior, slept in the streets of Zimbabwe's capital city Harare because he wouldn't contact his family, and ultimately died of an AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987).

If you want to dive into this authors work, definitely give House of Hunger a shot, but this is the particular brand of writing in Black Sunlight:

"It is this multiplicity of our singleness which I think gives an illusory depth to living. What we consider deep and abiding is perhaps the result of technique rather than a Creator's purpose. So much for religion"

"You're only mad when there are other people around you, but never when you are on your own. It's people who manufacture all kinds of crazinesses"

"There was this woman who fondled me with teargas in her eyes. There was this man who hung about as silent as a gunshot. They were my parents. He would pull the trigger and her eyes would smart and burst. The echo played a rapid tattoo on the windowpanes. I would hear the snarl of a train. I would hear another world raging inside my skull as though at any moment I would spin like a silver top and disappear out of my head. It was a disease, one they thought was fatal. But I knew what I had to do. At that time I always knew what I had to do besides just biding my time. He pulled the trigger several times one night and she like a cyclone wrung all the silence from me. I howled. Howled like a sinister symphony at full blast. I used to write like that. When, finally, he silenced me with the back of his hand and she saw red and there was all this blood splashing about I knew, quite definitely, that I had somehow entered the wrong room, come into the wrong world. I had to escape. I have to escape. The shrill whine tore through my ears and deposited three policemen who froze the bright picture. The man was carried out of my life."

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3.5/5

A book with enough N words to replace Quentin Tarantino's lifetime viagra supply. Will be reading "James" by Percival Everett which retells the story from the runaway slave Jim's perspective

A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute

2.5/5

Neville Shute's most popular novel tells the story of an Englishwoman, Jean Paget, who learns of an inheritance left for her that inspires her to return to Malaya where she was once captured by the Japanese during World War II and forced to embark on a brutal death march spanning 7 months along with other women and children. This part of the story is based on an actual account that was in the Sumerian region. Jean Paget, while in Malaya, crosses paths with an Australian named Joe Harmon, who drives for the Japanese, and that's where their friendship blossoms into something more but I promise that this is not a romance. If you enjoyed Lt Mamiya's accounts of World War II in Murakami's "Wind Bird Chronicles," you will enjoy this section of the book.

Jean Paget herself is an interesting main character, and I was engaged by the first half that takes place in Malaya. Once the location moves to Australia, it becomes a boring small town trivia p***, with nuggets of casual racism thrown at the Aboriginal people (the Japanese too) so be warned. This book was written during a time where having a bar for the "coloreds" next to an all white bar was taken as progressive or controversial so if you're gonna read this, go into it with this context. The novel is pretty rosy-eyed when it comes to colonialism and capitalism too, so yeah

Your Black Sunlight review has me so interested even though it's middling. Thanks for the rec!

Check out The House of Hunger if you're interested. It's a good barometer for this guy's writing

f***ing hate whoever designed all of these new covers for his works

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

came upon this when looking for novels based in the Amazon. it's about a woman who works for a large pharmaceutical corporation and is sent to the Amazon to track down a rogue scientist and report on her mysterious d*** trials. Patchett's prose was simple yet thoughtful, and I was engaged with the characters throughout the whole story, but I didn't like some of the choices made at the very end

7/10

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

second Rooney novel I've read, and she's undoubtedly a very talented writer. this is somewhat of a new direction for her as she follows two brothers while they grieve their father's death and navigate complicated relationships. Rooney shines in exploring love and connections, and I thought she did an excellent job depicting the complexities of a sibling rivalry and how men interact with each other and deal with grief. there was a jarring change of prose between characters that took me a bit to get used to, and it explained a lot when in the afterword Rooney shared the philosophical texts and Shakespeare plays she quoted from. could've been better if she added one more perspective imo, but this was still a very moving and well written novel

8/10

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

first Tolstoy I've read and this novela was somber but thought provoking. a man on his deathbed comes to grips with the life he's lived and the death he faces. was limited by its length but still touched on a lot of deep topics and I can see why it's highly regarded

8/10

4.5/5

I think somebody on here recommended it.
Great short book and touches on a lot of things such as racism, sexism, violence etc....

Just copped Intermezzo, can’t wait to get into it. I loved Normal People a lot.

Finished The Great Alone. I am kind of a sucker for Hannah’s emotional-rollercoaster style of writing. She always does a great job of balancing themes and actually saying something regarding those themes through the things that happen in her books vs just putting out trauma pr0n.

Also absolutely loved the setting of this book. I love stories that take place in remote woodsy places and deal with themes of loneliness/self-sufficiency etc. She really makes the Alaskan wilderness jump off the page and directly into your head.

4.5 ⭐️

Two memoirs, ho boy

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

4/5

This is a frank and unromantic look at Rastafarianism through the lens of a Jamaican woman who grew up in such a household. Safiya herself is a renowned poet but you get to see the horrors that fuelled this journey, particularly her father's stranglehold on her family's very existence, all in the name of being "free" from the wiles of Babylon. This is Safiya and her family's struggle for autonomy. It's also an examination on how parents can pass down trauma from their upbringing without even realizing it.

I thought this was a good read and I recommend it if you're curious about Rastafarian culture beyond the exports of Bob Marley or the sanitized version sold to the west.

Some lines and quotes that I liked:

"There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain—that being citizens of a “developing nation,” we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it. But there is hope, too, in our scarcity, tolerable because it keeps us constantly reaching for something better"

"Years later, while retracing the history of my family’s journey into Rastafari, I would eventually come to understand that my mother felt called because she wanted to nurture, and my father felt called because he wanted to burn. Somewhere in between her hope and his fire, there was a united belief. A miracle."

"There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. While my mother had saved me from the waves and gave me breath, my father tried to save me only by suffocation—with ever-increasing strictures, with incense-smoke. With fire"

"Don’t pay him any mind, sweetheart,” she said to me over the loud chatter of the room. “He was just acting crazy because he was drunk.”
I frowned at her. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“No. But that’s how all men act when they’re drunk. Just try to avoid him for the rest of the night,” she said. She was passing down something about the world to me just then—the world as she found it and survived it, ever since her mother died. She’d been trying to escape for a long time. Not just the man who had grabbed her on the bicycle as a child, or the street louses she had to fight off on her way home from school, but eventually the advances of her own grandfather from whose drunken fondling she ran away. This she would only tell me about years later. The world that sent her running and hiding from unwanted hands and mouths and tongues was the same one I now moved through—and she expected nothing but the worst from men."

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

3.5/5 rounded up to 4/5

Another memoir but this is quite short, and a light read. Took this up after Safiya Sinclair's memoir, and it was a much needed switch up. It's mostly a collection of anecdotes from the author's life, told with humor (I chuckled several times) but also an insight into dealing with anxiety and depression. I liked some stories more than others but that's the nature of such a collection.

Quotes I liked:

Her response to a letter she wrote to herself as a kid but to a grown up version of herself:

"Are mom and dad still alive? Actually, you turned out to be Batman, so we had to have them put down for story-line purposes."

On procrastination:

"Procrastination has become its own solution—a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success."

On depression:

"At first, I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything—even the things you love, even fun things—and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is."

"And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something—it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem."

Since June

Currently:

Salem's Lot by King
A Feast for Dragons (ASOIAF 4&5 combined) by Martin
The Message by Coates

I'm definitely gonna look for The Message, but rn I'm tryna read through Between the World and Me

It's very short. Basically four essays. Already compared Rakim to Shakespeare

Real af

Classic english teacher move

i think death of ivan ilyich was the first tolstoy i ever read

but

what are ur faves published in the last 3 years

if you have that committed to memory

yea I liked his writing, will have to check out Anna Karenina

favorites published in the last three years let's see. think I've read like 30 and these are the ones that stick out, all literary fiction cause that's my favorite genre

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Heat 2 by Michael Mann
Klara and the Sun by Ishiguro Kazuo
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Danny Ryan series by Don Winslow
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store or Deacon King Kong (reading now) by James McBride
All The Sinners Bleed by SA Cosby

no five star books among those tho...

big shout out for klara and the sun

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

short story turned into a novel about a slow man who is given a miracle d*** to turn him smart. like a lot of high concept stories, felt like this had a promising premise but lacked depth. parts of it were well done but it never went in a very interesting direction or had something unique to say imo

7/10

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

novel about a seemingly perfect all American hero and the traumas his family goes through in the late 1960s. first Roth I've read and tho I liked his prose, he made so many choices that took away from this book. interesting storyline and chain of events but the shifting narrators and timelines as well as long tangents made this frustrating at times. like in the last thirty pages of the book Roth introduces new characters and gives their backstories I was annoyed af lol. does capture the late 60s and early 70s quite well and I'd read Roth again but this book needed an editor

7/10

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

written in 2017, this collection of essays is as powerful and well written as Abdurraqib's other works. love how he's able to blend culture and current events and of course his poetic prose is what sets him apart. some of the essays I couldn't get into because I wasn't as familiar with the subjects (like the early 2000s emo scene) but other essays really hit home. I've now read all of his major collections of essays and would recommend them all, but Go Ahead In The Rain is probably my favorite

8.5/10

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

had this on my TBR list for a while but wanted to get to it after seeing Kang won the Nobel prize for literature. novella told in three perspectives about a Korean housewife who spirals into insanity. well written but nothing that really impressed me, feels like I've seen this story/perspective done many times. idk not really seeing the hype as this is supposed to be her best work

7.5/10

Just finished All Fours by Miranda July

On my bookshelf:
Funny Story by Emily Henry
Molly by Blake Butler
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Magic Island by William Seabrook
Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

The Cold War allegory from Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for Vietnam. The enemy is among the people, invisible, controlling them. Women and children are as dangerous as military aged males. They b***y trap one hole while hiding in another. God and country were a lot easier to believe in during the age of post-war prosperity.

King is a nasty little reactionary, but he gets by on detail. The town is fleshed out in vignettes populated by character sketches. Many feel like self-inserts. Too many in the room can be obnoxious or redundant, but struggles with substance abuse, child abuse, bullying, and sexual deviancy are brought alive by the same insight. He is as disgusted with himself as he is with communists, the obese, and homosexuals.

★★★☆☆

Finished this last week and I am so glad that I was compelled to go to Barnes & Noble right after work a couple weeks ago cause this is one of the best fantasy books and overall best books I’ve ever read. The setting is heavily based on the Roman empire, which I thought was a dope ass concept. And the end had me staring at the wall for a good 10 minutes and left me needing the sequel.

Categorized as fantasy, but it also just has all of the qualities that I love in a book: mystery, suspense, dark academia…

…And that brings me to the magic system. One of the coolest magic systems I’ve read in a long time. It’s really well thought out and sophisticated while also being simple enough to understand once you get oriented within the world after the first 100 pages. There’s a chart you can reference but that’s all I can really say about it without getting into spoiler territory.

Islington also really successfully executed the fantasy-protagonist-being-good-at-everything-they-do trope while still making the protagonist seem human and flawed and liable to f**k up any progress he makes by being good at things through character his flaws.

Can’t recommend this enough. I’m halfway through my next book and I’m still thinking about this.

5/5 ⭐️ read through and through.

4/5

Never has a soft spoken Midwestern man wrote with more venom and beauty to its inhabitants and location than Mr. Gass. He's an "authors author" someone who knows his way with words and can dissect his subjects of these short stories. One in particular, The Pedersen Kid is one of the most unsettling short stories i've had the uncomfortable pleasure of reading, a family drama that turns into stream of conscious neurosis by the end with the coldest of Midwest snow as the backdrop. The other stories may not have hit as hard for me but the quality is there, from mean nosey neighbors, obsessions, loneliness, and the ever present Midwestern weather.