I found the earlier chapters clearly defining love as “the will to nurture our own and others’ spiritual growth” really brilliant and challenging in a good way. Unfortunately I found the majority of the rest of the book incredibly repetitive and near nonsensical.

★★★☆☆ A well-worn Gothic premise in the novel setting of 1950s Mexican countryside. This book hits all the best Gothic cliches, i.e. a young woman is sent to a creepy remote mansion with prickly secretive inhabitants and uncovers a terrible mystery…

☆☆☆☆☆ I never know how to rate books of poetry so I don’t. Themes/motifs of nature, animism, trees, birds, rocks, water.

★★★☆☆ This is an incredibly John Green book. The John Greeniest. The most John. The very Green. This book went down like chicken soup and I’m really not mad about it.

★★★★★ Gorgeous could-not-put-it-down senior year YA queer rom-com. Like a beautiful, extra gay blend between Booksmart and Paper Towns. Casey McQuiston does it again!

★★☆☆☆ As expected, Clay’s Ark is an entirely different beast than the first two Patternist books. There is also no mention of the psionic abilities of the first two books at all except for one tenuous throwaway reference two-thirds of the way in. The setting and set-up reminds me very much of The Host by Stephanie Meyer as well as the Animorphs series weirdly enough, which I read as a kid.

★★★☆☆ Not as good as the previous ALTA graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang but still contains the signature political and moral themes.

★★★★☆ Octavia Butler deftly weaves between the supernatural - the supernatural megalomania of Doro or the supernatural empathy of Anyanwu - and real historical devastations of slavery and its legacy on American society into the late 20th century.

★★★☆☆ This was good but not as good as everyone says it is? Well-written insofar as it’s a riveting tale, but can’t compare to the memoirs I’ve read by more seasoned writers.

★★★★★

★★★★★ My top read of 2021. A sweeping multi-generational medical and business drama about the Sackler family and the opioid epidemic from the family's humble beginnings as a band of immigrant Jewish brothers in New York to the shady marketing tactics that spawned the opioid crisis.

I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by the author herself, and remember I did in fact cry in a grocery store (not H Mart).

An incredibly cute magical realist WLW romance between a college student and a mysterious rugged girl trapped on a subway and…in time…

★★★★☆ This book was a revelation. I love a book that peels back the lies marketing and Hollywood have shoved into our brains, and this book really does that for food.

★★★☆☆ Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness.

★★★★★ This book pre-dated and predicted the pandemic, manipulating the ruptures and revelations of a fictional plague event to comment on contemporary life and society. This book is set in my hometown of Vancouver and is deliciously local.

★★★★☆ Jia Tolentino is my absolute favourite cultural critic and essayist. She speaks to me and on topics I care about with such acerbic clarity and personality. My favourite essays from this collection…

★★★★☆ Devoured this in a day after re-watching the movie recently, because I was interested in Molly Bloom and also wanted the dirt on the celebs she names. Not quite as self-critical as I personally would’ve preferred and more than a little self-congratulatory/self-absolving in the end.

This book is kind of a nesting doll of allegories and allegorical literature. The main character is a novelist who starts off writing a romance between a typing teacher and student that sharply turns in the middle of her writing into a magical realist horror.