THE 10 BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2019

This was a bit of a lost year for this blog, since I took an unprecedented hiatus from March up until last week, and though that partly reflects the fact that I read fewer books than I normally do in a year, I still read a decent amount, and came across a good number of …

REVIEW: LABYRINTH, BY BURHAN SÖNMEZ, TR. ÜMIT HUSSEIN (2019)

CN: Book features a suicide attempt, head trauma, and some degree of existential dread. Burhan Sönmez’s Labyrinth tells the story of Boratin, a 28-year-old Turkish blues musician living in Istanbul who one day inexplicably decides to jump off the Bosphorus bridge. Somehow, he survives, but his memories have been either lost or scrambled. He can’t …

Going on a (hopefully brief) break

Hello! Some of you may have noticed that I haven't posted a book review in several weeks. This is because I am going through one of my periodic reading burn-out phases (which I wrote about around this time last year, if you're curious). It's hard to predict when these phases end, but for now I'm …

REVIEW: THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS (2019)

The City in the Middle of the Night is a novel rich in twists and turns, which makes it tricky to write a spoiler-free summary, so I'll just say this: it's set in a far future where what little is left of humanity has been forced to settle on a near-uninhabitable planet named January, and it largely follows the adventures of Sophie, …

REVIEW: GHOST WALL, BY SARAH MOSS (2018)

Sarah Moss is interested in relatability. Why is it often seen as so important that something in a book or a film or a game is "relatable"? Why must characters and situations reflect or remind us of specific aspects of our own inevitably narrow experience of the world? Personally, I approach most art with the …

MONTHLY CATCH-UP: BEST BOOKS OF JANUARY 2019

I read a lot of great books in January, and it's hard to pick one to review, so I decided to write a mini-review for the ones I liked most. Maybe this'll be a thing I'll do again in the future, maybe it'll be a one-off. Who can say! Madeline Miller, Circe (2018) One of …

REVIEW: MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER, BY OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE (2018)

Ayoola has a problem. Whenever she's going out with a guy, she always ends up murdering him. Luckily she can count on her sister Korede to swoop in and literally clean up her mess every time. But then it's Tade's turn to fall for Ayoola. And Korede has had a crush on him for a …

REVIEW: THE BAREFOOT WOMAN, BY SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA, TR. JORDAN STUMP (2018)

The Barefoot Woman is a strange, deceptively subversive book. The title, the prologue, the first two or three chapters—at first, all these things led me to believe that the book would mostly be a tribute to Mukasonga's mother, a portrait in words, an expression of grief and remembrance dedicated to a woman with an extraordinary …

REVIEW: BEVERLY, BY NICK DRNASO (2016)

One of my reading resolutions for 2019 is to read more books from THE PAST, i.e. any year before the current one, and today we travel all the way back to 2016. The last review I wrote before the holidays was for Nick Drnaso's Sabrina, the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Man …

REVIEW: SABRINA, BY NICK DRNASO (2018)

There's something unsettling about those illustrated instruction cards airlines give you to prepare you in case of emergency. Obviously that's partly because they raise the spectre of one of all-time most terrifying nightmare scenarios, dying in a plane crash. But, also, I think some of their creepy vibes stem from the stylised people that populate …