7.5/10
Short story. Euphoric and manic, a bit cloying in certain parts.
For those who already read it, it's basically Friendzone: The Book

Finished The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon last week. Can’t say I understood everything, but that seems like Pynchon’s intention. Not in the condescending way where he’s just trying to trick you. It’s a natural consequence of his kaleidoscopic approach. Eagerly traverses lines of flight, embracing angularity, unafraid to risk whatever semblance of momentum he’d just gathered. He’ll flip the switch in the middle of a sentence and take an entirely different direction, freeing prose itself from its confines as a concept.

I started Mason & Dixon the other day. Definitely going to read more from him ASAP.

Only Pynchon I've read is Inherent Vice and I really liked it bit I'm scared to dive into anything else. Maybe I should give this one a go cause it's pretty short

Dogshit

why

It's a collection of loosely related vignettes on travel and human anatomy, and how those two things things are intrinsically linked (?!?). Way too scattershot, half-baked and pseudo-philosophical for me to enjoy, and at times just plain boring. Just not for me I guess, but it won a bunch of awards so people somewhere are getting something from it.

It's a shame as I really like her as a writer, hope she does more stuff like "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" cause I loved that book.

Maybe shouldn't have even posted this here cause it was a very rare DNF for me. But I am most definitely finished with it

Struggling to finish dune halfway through act 2. Love the world building but holy s*** the prose is dry as f*** and story barely moving

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

pain,pain,pain, so much pain.

The Complete Maus

Damn I see why this won a Pulitzer Prize. Incredible, must read.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

really well written and important book about how to help those who are oppressed fight against their oppressors. should be required reading for all teachers and so called revolutionaries. a bit too technical for my taste and would have liked to hear Freire talk more about his experience implementing his philosophy in Brazil, but I learned a lot from this book and would like to reread it again one day

9.5/10

Welcome To The Monkeyhouse by Kurt Vonnegut

collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. most of them were very good and a few were excellent. his sense of humor and social commentary makes for a fun read and short stories seem to suit him well. a few of these stories will definitely stick with me

8/10

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

novel about a single father trying to raise his "on the spectrum" son in a world slowly being destroyed by global warming. way too on the nose with the message for my taste, with annoying references to Trump and Greta Thunberg. felt like a very stereotypical liberal novel about the seriousness of global warming with no engaging story or deep characters to redeem it. somehow got shortlisted for the Booker prize but this one just seemed too shallow and pandering for me. didn't convince me to check out Powers' other book The Overstory, which is supposed to be good too

6/10

so u read it, nice

The last few panels of this one are heartbreaking. Really masterful.

Classic

Copped this today

Excited to check this one out. I'm intrigued

just finished this yesterday

what a wild ride. ending had me like wtf but the more I sit with it the more I like it. really powerful portrayal of societal values and the need to conform, something that's even stronger felt in Japan for sure. I liked Convenience Store Woman but wanted her to be a bit more adventurous with her next work and she definitely was. blazed through this one and been thinking about it ever since, would definitely recommend

8/10

For sure bro, she took the concept of Convenience Store Woman and expanded on it to a whole new level.

Finished this one a few days ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. When I was reading the first ~100 pages I thought I was gonna end up giving this book a low rating because I thought I was so clever and knew exactly where this book was going and boy was I wrong. Every single time I thought I had this book figured out, Catriona Ward completely pulled the rug out from under me. I don't want to say much about the actual plot of this book cause I think going in blind is the best way to approach it. The writing throughout is so well thought out. The suspense and horror within this book lies just as much in what is left unsaid as in what was actually written on the pages.

5/5 Stars. My favorite fiction/horror/suspense novel I read this year by far.

A subtle and disturbing account of a woman's slow descent from American dream to suburban nightmare. Nobody gets into the mind of the mad as casually as Highsmith does, probably cause she was so insane herself. Great book but absolutely miserable

This looks like something I'd dig haha

Great for a short read (120 pages or so) with a writing style that is easy to follow, especially compared to some frenchmen...
Camus nails the important scenes in the book, they are very intense and vivid. His writing is a bit short and choppy at the beginning, but I think he is just cutting out the fluff so he can get the story going. I don't want to spoil anything, but it is a very insightful story no matter who you are.

Just finished Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. I read BM a couple of years ago so I had time to grow as a reader before digesting this one. And it was a lot to digest. The hallucinatory sequences are insane. While I enjoyed BM more because of its philosophical leaning (existence as fractalized with mimicry outward from the fundamental structure and a turn inward towards it at the level of humanity through violence), I think that McCarthy captures the idea of 'totalities' perfectly in both works. I mean, just this passage for example

probably my all time fav book. Haven't read it in years but definitely feels like an epic of biblical proportions by the end.