Reviews and Comments

A good friend recently took his own life, and he did it in a hotel. So the coincidence of my starting to read this book literally a couple weeks later probably put it off on the wrong foot with me. Also, I don’t typically read this sort of “elevated mass-market” fiction, so maybe my unenthusiastic reaction to this book is partly an unenthusiastic reaction to the category. This one was recommended to me, so I read it without knowing anything about it. It’s an entertaining story that doesn’t really say anything meaningful, and the characters are amusing but forgettable. The story is relatively contrived. This book felt like it was written with the author’s eye toward selling a movie or Netflix series based on it. But I enjoyed the process of reading it, and I’m sure the Netflix series will be enjoyable too.

I love Nelo Case, and I wanted to love this memoir, but I felt like it was mostly the story of her making sense of her childhood and adolescence and moving past the way it affected her, and that’s a great reason to spend time in therapy, but a less great reason to write a book. I related to a lot of it, and I enjoyed her prose style, but I felt like I could have skipped it.

Not exactly a relaxing read, but essential learning for Americans in 2025. This first book of three covers the incidents, political maneuvers, and social trends that started in WWI and eventually led to the Nazis taking power.

I enjoyed The Overstory, but thought it was a bit overstuffed with characters and could have used a better editor. The author must have gotten that feedback from others, because Playground gets it just right. It's a little too on-the-nose with setting up characters who represent opposing views of "technology will save us" versus "technology will ruin us," but I loved the way the story unfolded and the lyrical descriptions of the underwater world.

WARNING: There is a scene of a dog being harmed towards the end of the first chapter. Just skip ahead when you first see a dog mentioned, while the narrator is child.

A beautiful and inventive novel, both funny and touching. I loved it.

I was getting very tired of this book until I got to the last 15-20%. And then I LOVED it. I wish the first 80-85% had been tightened up a bit. And, no spoilers, but the structure is an exact copy of a 2019 book that was turned into a limited series a few years ago. We read it for my book club, and I’m not sure we’ll have too much to talk about, as everything about it is relatively light and forgettable. It was nevertheless an entertaining read.

A subtle and beautiful portrait of post-World War II Japan, viewed through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. It examines the way the people who supported the totalitarian society (and informed on their friends and neighbors) dealt with their guilt (or lack thereof) and social ostracism.

I got through half of it. With Cormac McCarthy in the news recently, I realized had never read the book that was considered his masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, it is nihilistic and violent, and despite the beautiful prose, is a grim slog about man’s affinity for violence. I feel like I got the gist without having to finish the emotionally exhausting and gratuitously violent remainder.

I’m not sure others would love this book as much as I did, mainly because the husband reminded me so much of my awful ex-husband, and we were together the same length of time as the couple in the novel: 14 years. But I found it to be an incredibly incisively-written portrait of what it’s like to be in a long relationship in which one spouse is always carrying the heavier load. It will be too much of a downer for a lot of people, but it’s also not very long.

This was not really a novel, it’s a character study of a group of astronauts living on the ISS, and the thoughts they have while in space. It’s a nice philosophical journey, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

I’m glad someone wrote this book for history’s sake, but as someone who followed the decline and fall of Twitter (and Musk’s role in it) pretty closely, I didn’t get a lot of new information from it. Nevertheless, it’s well-written and entertaining.

I was surprised at how basic and predictable this book was. It reads like a YA novel — I would compare it to something like “Anne of Green Gables.” It’s short, but so boring that I had to struggle to finish. Not recommended.

I appreciate that Sally Rooney is a cult favorite, but this is my third book of hers, and I think I just don’t like her style. I understand what she’s trying to do — documenting very naturalistic dialogue and interactions in meticulous detail, from multiple perspectives — and I think she’s good at it. But the pacing, as these details are thoroughly recounted, is too slow to hold my attention, and the “surprise” resolution of the plot just isn’t that big of a deal (these days the concept of a “throuple” is so common that it’s become a cliché). So even though this is the book I liked the most out of the three I’ve read, I wouldn’t recommend it.