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In the Red by Elena Mauli Shapiro, 2014 Edgy and perhaps mildly erotic. It sort of lacks a heavy underlying problem but is stark and desperate. Bleak. 3.5/5 |
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In the Cut by Susanna Moore, 1995 I was way too about this book. I might even call it a new favorite. It's sickening and exploitative and hilarious and sexy. Cracked up a bunch and then got lurchy and anxious with images of obscene vividness in my mind while my stomach was medically extracted. Heavy sav factor. I guess I was vaguely reminded of Less Than Zero but these obviously aren't teenage losers and it's generally way more hardcore. 6/5 |
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Sharp Edges by Jayne Ann Krentz, 2010 Uneven ratio of steamy romance and mystery, and I don't really care about it 2.5/5 |
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Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik, 2015 Angsty teen mystery lamenting on loss and grief. It tackles the themes successfully but it's not a highly complex kinda ordeal. Someone dies and someone's always gotta wonder why. 3/5 |
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Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips, 2013 Fictionalized look at a true case of serial murdering and mail order predators seeking widows. It has elegant but dry prose, and has some good moments amongst the trial aspect but really shines early with the dramatization of the family's last days before being tortured and murdered in a torture murder garage. 3/5 |
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The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, 2000 I sure did learn a lot about orchids and now I might kinda want one or two or eight hundred of my own. Also was generally entertaining and well humored but it's not my preferred journalistic thing. 3/5 |
^I had no idea that that was a real book.
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what'd you think it was, a parfait?
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I thought it was an ebook that they made up in Adaptation.
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it's an adaptation
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added ratings to the entries lol like people care
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Where do you live that you get such a steady supply of new books, Goof? Are there no other little free libraries for folks to drop books into?
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why you gotta Goof me like that
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, 1938 A truly amazing piece of literary history. I read this book like a drug that I was dependent on, getting agitated and anxious and finicky when it was not in my hands. Indeed one of the least put downable books I've read, blazing though the last third or so last night with no hope to withdraw from the situation. The prose was immediately arresting but also never really leaving one in any sort of daze, quite readable. Character development is in full blast as a shy and young freshly married wife attempts to overcome the trace of their manor's late mistress. The tense and slightly neurotic passages/monologues are brilliant and unnerving in relation to sanity. Builds constantly upon a growing surplus of maddening tension and anxiety and another feeling I suppose you could call love. Masterpiece. 5/5 |
could a mod merge my library thread https://www.musicbanter.com/media/93...e-library.html with this one and take the 2018 out of the journal title
seems like that should've been a logical course of action in the first place. I also still have books from before that I didn't say anything about. |
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Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke, 1998 Pretty gritty crime novel that had amazingly original atmosphere that might remind one of a darkish shade of purple. A lot of people get busted up in a mess of murder and extortion and prejudice where justice is backwards. I think it had a lot of characters and minor situations that it got somewhat more difficult to follow but nothing must have left my mind as I was reminded of the whole affair in better clarity by the time we screech to the end. 4.5/5 |
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, 2008 After finishing this publication I felt a touch conflicted. The two narrators go about their lives with supremely haughty and patronizing observations of the world around them and make me feel like I wouldn't want to affiliate with these jerks and that probably just goes to prove them right. Excessive words and cliches but also humorous in a unique and some other things. I just didn't connect with a lot of what was said. 3.5/5 |
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002 For all its significance I wasn't even aware of this book before reading it, but it deserves the credit. Quite an epic contemporary odyssey of self discovery, spanning generations and countries aplenty. Our narrator tells the vast and inexplicably precise tale of his insanely incestuous Greek family and the dormant mutation that marked his life as an often confused young girl. It's quite heart warming and easy to get a hold of despite its wordy nature. It talks about the prevailing of love and emotion and personality and the ultimate triumph over genetics. Its heavy with the genetics too, though. I learned a lot about the intricate science of rare hormonal mutations and ambiguous genitalia but it never loosened the grip on my heart. It's also frequently humorous and has treated me to one of the most hilarious lines I've ever read. 5/5 |
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Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin, 2010 Pretty much every single person I'd seen say anything about this book likened it to a modern day Steinbeck, and while I don't have enough experience to back that up myself, I figured it's a good thing to say. This is a simple and incredibly genuine story of a youth on his own. It obviously struck some heavy cords with me and I could relate to much of the journey and the emotions therein. The young narrator finds himself alone in a strange and intimidating world, traveling with only vague aim and he needs all the help he can get. The road is littered with just as much hardship as it is with cigarette butts, and sometimes glazed in torture and I know this all too well. He's traveling pretty heavy with an entire horse, too. The ending was nice but not so satisfying in a literary way, but that doesn't really matter with this book. It's the experiences beforehand that poke at your feelings and empathy is on high for this boy that never really got to be a normal boy. 4/5 |
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Arcadia by Iain Pears, 2015 I bought a fire signed first edition of this book from the dollar tree and now it's one of my favorites. It's a virtuosic smorgasbord of themes, genres, and plot lines that should please if not completely arouse to ejaculation any fans of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and even maybe political thrillers alike. It's simply loaded to the brim with awesomeness and surprises and putting it down proved to be a nuisance. A mathematician from some distant future (who knows which one) is devising highly polarizing technology supposed to have the capability of accessing parallel dimensions and/or time periods, which is tested with the open ended fantastical jottings or a brilliant professor. The device feeds off the information to create a sort of projection of the story, a Tolkieny fantasy land of swords and lords. A young girl wanders in on accident and complications arise. And these complications are quite complicated. There's blackouts and deaths and the institute that formerly employed the machine's creator needs to track her and it down in the interest of public safety. But the whole nature of the technology is to study the inverse of cause and effect and whether the future can alter the past as it does the other way around. So new universes come to be and that's just not the way things are supposed to be so the timelines of the respective worlds have to conform to keep the story logical, thereby sending the other into a state of complete never-existence because the nature of things is that it's all just one universe after all. You never really know when or where the dimension is located with respect to the other and the way they're connected also ought to be a subject of deep speculation. Arcadia is amazingly inventive and deft in so many fields and impossibly gripping. A true feat. 5/5 |
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How I Came to Sparkle Again by Kaya McLaren, 2012 A book loaded with an almost comical amount of tragedy and hardships for its fragile characters, but more so loaded with hope and perseverance. The main character comes home to the ski town of Sparkle, Colorado after fleeing from her husband and his affair with another woman, and it's up to the Sparklers to help her heal, whether that be with humor or liquor or hot sex. There's also a ten year old girl with a dead mother and single father with hardly any time for her. And miscarriages. The pay off didn't deliver as much as I'd hoped but it stayed true to the claims of being a page turner at least for me. It also should get bonus points for a surprising amount of gruesome medical recollections. 3.5/5 |
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Dodgers by Bill Beverly, 2016 A coming of age and travel story that's straight outta Compton. We got this guy East, who at only 15 is a reputable street banger/watcher for the trap and he and an assembled crew of four set out to the alien land of Wisconsin to bust a cap in some judge's ass. Pretty gritty at times and an unexpected turnout somewhat. 4/5 |
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This Census-Taker by China Miéville, 2016 Very intriguing and esoteric little tale of isolation and the such. A young boy and his parents live up a grand hill, far away from the bridge town below. After the mother leaves that world, he would run into town screaming murder, seeing the act vaguely, already aware of the father's penchant for coldly murdering small animals with his bare hands to throw into some deep corpse hole. So now it's just father and son and son isn't a bit excited about that equation. Then comes a census taker very late into the story and I guess everything's good then. The atmosphere here is something else entirely, something highly unsettling. This book was so interesting in the content it has that its length is downright disappointing, I'd really liked more from it, more details and insights, but as it is it's sort of like an appetizer for a monumentally amazing book that doesn't exist. 4/5 |
I'm glad you're getting so much reading in, but please tell me that you're still writing.
Because reading without writing is like fucking without cumming. |
I write every day
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How many times do you write it?
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I'm writing these reviews, aren't I
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Yeah, but you didn't write "every day" in any of them.
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sorry
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But seriously though, hang in there. You a cool dude. https://media.giphy.com/media/lwIiKOzyqxrDa/giphy.gif |
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The Cold Moon by Jeffery Deaver, 2006 in this edition of supermarketcore we are treated to a murder mystery orchestrated by a sadistic clockophile whose overly elaborate scheme's ultimate motives are obfuscated by the contrived convolution of it all. Then we find he's some kinda sextuple agent involved in way too many factions for his own good. While that plot and the style of these sorts of books are generally decent though redundant, they always try to shed so much cliched and overused light on the character's inner workings and emotions and state of mind that you might figure the lamp isn't even plugged in. They're literally all the same. Then again so are the characters. I dunno why these authors write novels a mile a minute without ever changing anything at all but it's whatever. 3.25/5 |
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Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, 2016 This is an interesting story about coming to terms with your worldly vessel. I think. It follows a girl born dwarfed in an unnamed village somewhere and sometime where gypsies and voodoo curses are relevant. Ashamed of her striking ugliness, her parents venture to stretch her into a tall beautiful girl by way of what is basically a doctor's torture device, as if her appearance would change after dislocating joints and irreparably harming bones. It doesn't. In fact she gets uglier and hairier. What comes next I shan't explicitly state but it's quite a thing. Separated from a traveling entertainment troupe she'd joined, her best and perhaps only friend and most definitely only almost lover is torn and searches for her. Then we're plagued with wolves. It's described as emotionally suspenseful and it's pretty apt, especially near the end. It's a different kind of suspense than your generic mysteries and horrors which are intent on tensing the mind, instead focusing on your heart. It had a strange sense of incompletion that initially disappointed me but then I figured the context, themes already covered and events already passed, and it works out in accordance to the whole story. In a sense it doesn't really end, a cycle. Truly original and captivating. 4/5 |
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The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, 1979 Vast generational saga of life long forbidden love and life in the Australian outback. It follows the plight of a sprawling family and their even more sprawling inherited estate, and the infatuation of the only girl of the like 27 piece family with a kinda douchey priest. A lot happens in the story's 60 some years. It may be dry and uneventful but it paints a humbling portrait of foolish romance and family matters. 4/5 |
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Six Years by Harlan Coben, 2013 Best selling thriller recipe: 30 oz secrets 1-3 characters that are not what they seem 2 g culturally relevant and unfunny jokes 1 oz lost love 1 agenda that is "bigger than you could imagine" 2.5/5 |
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The Witchfinder's Sister by Beth Underdown, 2017 Now this one was tight. The story of witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins is very interesting and enigmatic on it's own, and this is told from the point of view of his fictional sister. Hopkins was at large before the Salem witch trials, executing women all across the Tendring Hundred for varying degrees of witch-esque activities. It had great tension as his sister is subjected to her brother's ghastly deeds, along with a plethora of secrets perhaps better left untold. The atmosphere is sparse and bleak, overcast with the coming dread of the witchfinder, fear in the hearts of his subjects. 4.5/5 |
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damn
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Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, 2010 A South African yarn spun from crime and general seediness. Takes place in some alternate future where criminals are marked by being "animalled", meaning, they give you an animal. I never really figured out who. But the animals also come with some vague magical leanings, and those with them are ostracized and segregated in this sort of ghetto called Zoo City. A journalist and her sloth are good at finding lost things (that's her whatever the ****), and use this ability to help keep herself afloat amidst great debts and undesirable folks, as well as some nice internet fraud. She gets swept up in the underbelly of this whack society and well it's just no good. I liked it and would like to read more from the author. 4/5 |
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Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy, 2009 the plight of a woman overloaded with loss and grief. It's definitely pretentious in its prose and insights and vocabulary but not horribly so like other people have said. Genuine and realistic and heart rending, around part 4 it becomes a drastically different story. 4/5 |
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