This might be the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Well, the weirdest book I’ve read that I actually ended up enjoying. I might have to think a while before officially giving it that award. My instinct is to put this review away and not think about it for weeks. I just want to sit with the story, let it brew and fester in my mind a little bit. But I know if I do that, I will forget everything and end up floundering around when […]
A genre made just for me, I think.
Two years ago, I converted to Catholicism. I was raised Lutheran, identified as kinda Lutheran-by-default for most of my life, dabbled in Unitarianism, and settled into an indifferent agnosticism that seems pretty common in my generation – a kind of “how am I supposed to know if God exists, but I can vouch for the fact that a whole lot of Christians are real assholes” thing. Then I got engaged to a lapsed Catholic, and we both started having some God-related restlessness and feeling some […]
I will not submit.
I started writing this review about the academic epiphany I had while reading this book: the character mentions many writers, thinkers, philosophers, in quotations that made no sense to me. I felt incapable of what I chose as a career. But in the course of writing it, I realized that I got more upset about the book because of another characteristic of mine: that I am a woman. Submission carries such a heavy burden for real events that its pages fail to meet the expectations […]
Not-so Perfectly Matched
Let’s just start off by saying that Jodi Picoult isn’t my favorite author, but sometimes she makes you think, and sometimes, she can put both sides of an argument on the table in a narrative form that can be somewhat entertaining. Picoult is sort of a guilty pleasure for me, except I rarely enjoy it, and Perfect Match was no exception. While it is meant to be a gripping and tense narrative about the explosion of lives after the molestation of a small boy […]