This book seems to confront me, forcing me to question my own life, career, relationships, and goals. I am always a firm believer that good novels make us ask questions about ourselves. It isn’t just about escaping, but instead escaping within ourselves and discovering something new. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Fiction
A 2025 Summer Reading List (Generated by a Human)
So, I thought. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible to make a summer reading list written and recommended by an avid reader and book-loving human with some literary qualifications up her sleeve.
Below, you’ll find six books that I highly recommend for reading over the summer. Some are new releases, and some are recent. There is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. They are weird, serious, and hilarious. Hopefully, there is something for everyone. You get extra points if you read all six over the summer and let me know what you thought of them in the comments below. Continue reading
“See Friendship”: How is Social Media Changing the Way We Remember Our Past?
An unexpected revelation of how an old high school friend died breaks Goldberg out of this listlessness. And he becomes acutely obsessed with how his old friend, Seth, died. Rumours fly as Goldberg reaches out to old school friends. He decides, in true male millennial fashion, that he will do a podcast about his friend’s death that will feature interviews that will eventually reveal the truth about Seth’s life and death, like all morbid murder and death podcasts do. Continue reading
Surveillance Capitalism in the Icelandic Dystopian Novel “The Mark” by Fríða Ísberg
The novel is set in a not-so-distant future in Iceland and follows four main characters as they navigate a campaign leading up to a national referendum that would see an extremely controversial ’empathy test’ made mandatory for all Icelandic citizens. It is not a futuristic novel by any means, and the events and setting of the novel actually feel like they could be happening right now – making it all the more unsettling as a reader. Continue reading
Review of Orla Mackey’s Debut Novel “Mouthing”: A Powerful Depiction of Post-partum Depression
The double-edged sword of the close-knit community of the fictional country town of Ballyrowan is that it is both beautiful and utterly debilitating. The things that bring the community together over these decades are also what tear it apart. The secrets, resentments, love, and anger are all-consuming and impossible to untangle. Continue reading
History “Lessons” with Ian McEwan: A review of McEwan’s latest novel
The novel follows the life of Roland Baines, and the novel swaps between Roland’s formative years at an all boys boarding school in the U.K. and his adult life as a single father to his son Lawrence, after his wife disappears one day. Continue reading
A Review of “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois”: Race, gender, and the pecan tree that watches it all
Nations are fiction. The U.S. is fiction. Australia, my home country, is fiction. The stories that are celebrated and told about these nations do not speak to the true history of these lands. They begin at an arbitrary point, picked by and for white supremacy. They are stories told over and over again, like water over stone. They are stories about collective groups that change and form over time. But they are just that – stories. Continue reading
Climate Change Fiction (Cli-Fi): A review of Clare Moleta’s “Unsheltered”
I recently figured out I have been reading books of a very specific genre – dystopian novels and climate disaster novels which one could argue are a subgenre of dystopias. I didn’t recognise that I was in this pattern until I looked over my recently read books on Goodreads. I find it strange that I … Continue reading
A Review of Sally Vickers’ “The Gardener”: A novel about siblings, small country towns, and the power of gardening
After many twists and turns, two adult sisters, Margot and Halcyon also known as Hassie, find themselves living together in a rundown Jacobian house in Hope Wenlock – a small village in the Welsh marshes. The two sisters seem to be completely different. And their relationship is civil but also very cold at the beginning of the novel. The sisters, almost unbeknownst to themselves, want to reconnect. They just don’t know how to do it. Continue reading
A Review of “Every Day is Gertie Day” by Helen Meany
Instead of trying to look after the old, the poor, and the young – we are arguing over elf ears. Continue reading
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