by Ann Y. K. Choi I seem to be finding it harder and harder to give an author the benefit of the doubt while reading, and I think it’s becoming a problem. The realization came partway through Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety after reading something particularly unsubtle or repetitive and putting the book down, likely more…
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by S. E. Hinton The Outsiders is S. E. Hinton’s popular and enduring story about class, friendship, and family, wrapped in a narrative about youth gang wars, presumably taking place in the ’50s or ’60s. Ponyboy and Johnny––both greasers, the lower-class gang––end up killing a Soc in self-defense. (Soc: short for “social,” so likely closer…
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by Kenneth Grahame This one was really weird to me, and for a few different reasons. Firstly, The Wind in the Willows is another case of any synopsis I read failing to get to the heart of the story, partly because there are multiple storylines following different characters throughout, but also because the only one…
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by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry In The Little Prince, an unnamed narrator crashes his airplane in the middle of the Sahara Desert. With a dwindling supply of water, he works frantically to repair his craft, but is met unexpectedly by a small boy who doesn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation. The boy questions him,…
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by J. D. Salinger This is a book I’ve been meaning to re-read for quite some time. I think I’ve been hesitant to pick it up mainly because of my experience doing so with another book I previously held in such high regard, The Shining. It doesn’t feel good reframing, for the worse, the way…
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by L. M. Montgomery Well, this one’s been a long time coming, which shouldn’t be entirely surprising. I––like, I suspect, most people who enjoy reading a lot––have accumulated a large stack of books over the years. I mean, I’m slowly getting through it, I think, though it’s hard to tell if I’m actually making any…
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by Sherman Alexie The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a story about Junior, a young Native American living on the Spokane Indian reservation. Learning at a young age how limiting life on the rez is, how the dreams of everyone around him are systematically crushed, he transfers to high school in Rearden,…
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by H. Leighton Dickson It’s rare for a story to really stop me in my tracks early on but, with Cold Stone and Ivy, Dickson did something that I was beginning to think I’d never see outside a Kurt Vonnegut story, and she did it in a way that was utterly foreign to me. You…
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by Darin Kennedy There are quite a few songs that spoke to me on a deep, visceral level, but never quite to the extent that music spoke to Darin Kennedy, who wrote a book as a result. And, I definitely can’t compete with Anthony Faircloth in Kennedy’s story, The Mussorgsky Riddle. I mean, he set…
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by John Green I have a bad habit of occasionally reading stories in a way that I suspect the author would hate. In the case of The Fault in Our Stars, it started when I gave Hazel, the protagonist, an Essex accent and continued when Augustus, her love interest, became a young Brad Pitt. (Young,…
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