2022 Update: Just shy of ten years since I first read it, No Country for Old Men is every bit as grim as I remember, and then some. One thing shifted for me on my second reading: I used to think of this book as an ultra-gritty crime story, but this time around, it felt more like [...]
Summary: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a work of speculative fiction that celebrates humanity’s ability to endure and laments our tendency to self-destruct. Beginning 600 years after a catastrophic “Flame Deluge” (i.e. late-20th-century nuclear war), Part One introduces the “Order of Saint Leibowitz,” a group of Catholic monks dedicated to preserving precious scraps [...]
Summary: The Master and Margarita is a work of magical realism by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. The story takes place in Moscow during a brief but tumultuous visit from Satan and a retinue of his followers, who kick off all kinds of macabre mischief upon their arrival. Caught up in the chaos are the eponymous Master [...]
Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky is the third and final book in her Broken Earth trilogy. It presents the concluding events of Essun and Nassun’s narratives, revealing how the fate of the world is decided by these two women and their companions. Jemisin also takes us on a journey through Hoa’s memory of how The Shattering occurred, [...]
Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate is the middle book in her Broken Earth trilogy. Jemisin invites us deeper into the Stillness, continuing the story of Essun and some familiar supporting characters from the first novel (see my review of The Fifth Season for an overview). In The Obelisk Gate, we learn more about the history of the Stillness, including the mythology of [...]
Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the first installment of The Broken Earth, a fantasy trilogy set on a vast continent called the Stillness, “which is not still even on a good day” (7). The inhabitants of the Stillness experience frequent seismic events and other natural disasters, including brutal “Fifth Seasons”––long winters lasting six months or more that [...]
I. Grabbing the Wheel It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the [...]
Summary: Paul Conti’s Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic provides a basic introduction to the topic of trauma and summarizes what Conti has learned during his career working with trauma victims. In Part One, Conti defines trauma, breaks down the different types of trauma, and suggests some conceptual frameworks for how to best understand trauma’s effects on individuals and [...]
Summary: Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides is the story of the Wingos, a family from South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The main characters are three siblings who are born at the beginning of the American postwar period: Tom and Savannah (twins), and their older brother Luke. Tom, our narrator, has spent most of his adult life ignoring the [...]
Summary: bell hook’s The Will to Change is a work of feminist philosophy that seeks to articulate and subvert the patriarchal constraints that make it difficult for men to give and receive love. “Masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their [...]