Reading During the Plague Year
A quick summary of what I read this year while coronavirus blanketed the Earth.
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January 3, 2021
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Place and Identity in How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Where do I come from is a deceiving question. It seems like there should be a straight-forward answer. For the siblings in C Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills…
July 7, 2020
In Joe Ambercrombie’s Best Served Cold, Revenge is a Tired Trope
Why do some revenge stories work and others, like Best Served Cold, fall flat?
February 12, 2020
Tiamat’s Wrath is Full of Chaos and Creation
In Tiamat's Wrath the only constant in life is change.
April 18, 2019
Quitting Haruki Murakami
The originality that captured my attention in his early work is now just recycled, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
March 27, 2019
Tilling the Prose of Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland
Smarsh demands the reader to defy stereotypes, to see the complexity of a person, instead of the image of a single mom with a baby on her hip, standing in the screen door of a trailer with a cigarette dangling off her lip.
February 8, 2019
Educated: Abuse, Trauma and Escape
In Educated, Tara Westover escapes the abuse and trauma of a family who has a deep distrust of public education, medical science, and the government.
February 6, 2019
Vulnerability and Interior Lives in The Goblin Emperor
The Goblin Emperor inverts some classic fantasy tropes.
January 17, 2019
The Astral Delight of The Luminaries
Part murder mystery and love story, set during the New Zealand gold rush as characters orbit and collide in a dramatic tour de force.
January 11, 2019