Read 1 of 2024. First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
1M ago
Title: First Lie Wins Author: Ashley Elston Publisher: Hachette Imprint: Headline ISBN: 9781472295330 Genre: Thriller/Mystery Pages: 376 Source: Publisher Rating: 4/5 It is absolutely the best feeling when a thriller delivers, because you never know with books in that genre. I think there are about hundreds of thousands of them, and well, while most start very promisingly, they also often lose steam in the middle, hurtling towards the end with great speed, and often gaping holes in the plot. This wasn’t the case with, “First Lie Wins”. It is heady, super-fast, and well-etched characters that ..read more
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Read 3 of 2024. So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
2M ago
Title: So Late in the Day Author: Claire Keegan Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 9780571382019 Genre: Short Story, Novella Pages: 47 Source: Personal Copy Rating: 5/5 Claire Keegan’s short story is everything that you expect a Keegan work to be – simple, subtle, layered, full of brevity, and yet saying what it must in every single sentence. A simple story – well, not so simple come to think of it, becomes something else when Keegan infuses life in it. A man – a seemingly regular man and a regular day in his life, leading to a catastrophic event, and what led to it, makes you want to hug him ..read more
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Read 2 of 2024. The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories by Tennessee Williams.
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
3M ago
Title: The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories Author: Tennessee Williams Publisher: New Directions ISBN: 978-0811232326 Pages: 112 Genre: Short Stories Source: Publisher Rating: 4/5  “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers” from Williams’ most famous play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” for most part of my life became my go-to quote, the one that I would use every single time, sometimes without knowing what it meant, since I read the play when I was all of thirteen, and sometimes with full awareness of the heft it carried, since I reread the play and watched the movie starri ..read more
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Read 1 of 2024. Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell.
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
3M ago
Title: Bizarre Romance Stories by Audrey Niffenegger Illustrated by Eddie Campbell Publisher: Vintage Publishing Imprint: Jonathan Cape Genre: Graphic Stories, Vignettes, Short Stories Pages: 164 Source: Personal Copy Rating: 5/5 What a fantastic way to start the new year! By finishing a book of short graphic and non-graphic stories by Audrey Niffenegger, all illustrated by her very talented partner, Eddie Campbell, who I remember from illustrations of the extremely engaging, “From Hell” by Alan Moore. But we are speaking of this charming, eccentric, emotional, real, fantastical, and absolute ..read more
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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
5M ago
I literally read this one with a fervour that I hadn’t known in a while. “Biography of X” is all over the place and that’s why I loved it so. It is funny, it is philosophical, quite a rollercoaster ride of the human condition, and above all it is audacious and masterfully constructed. Biography of X is the biography of a deceased woman who called herself X. It is her life seen through the eyes of her wife who is left behind. There is a lot of angst, layers of revelations, emotions that run high and low, and above all a sense of “how much do we know people”, or “do we know them at all” kind o ..read more
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Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
5M ago
I enjoyed this one a lot. It took me on this rollercoaster ride and brought me back – all grounded, and introspecting on the nature of human beings. It is brutal, dark, funny, and humane in a very strange way – ironical and also heart-warming at the same time, if that makes any sense.  Sing Her Down is a feminist Western through and through – about two women and the obsessive nature of finding out more about the other, even to just undo them in public. Florence and Diosmary are characters that Pochoda has built with great ambition, grit, and also humour to a very large extent. Both so di ..read more
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Read 18 of 2023. The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
10M ago
I do not know how to describe what I am feeling after finishing this book. It made me joyful, made me very sad, I was left feeling hopeful, feeling that I have lost someone, and made me want to dream all over again. The book begins in Sarajevo. The book transports us to 1914, the assassination that triggered the first world war. In all of this action there is Rafael Pinto – Sephardic-Jewish, Vienna education pharmacist, who is homosexual, uses opium to free himself, and is bold enough to kiss cavalry officers who come to his shop. The war sends him off all the way across to the Eurasian landm ..read more
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Read 17 of 2023. Couplets by Maggie Millner
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
10M ago
  I absolutely loved reading this collection of poems. It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special. It is about the love after coming out as queer. For a woman who has only known how to love men, suddenly falls in love with women, and that’s when the storytelling tone changes – the personal also becomes political, and the question of falling in and out of love is not just experiential. Millner’s verse is neat, simple – with all the heartache, the longing, the confusion of falling in love with anoth ..read more
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Read 16 of 2023. Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan. Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
10M ago
Occasionally, there comes a novel that shakes you out of your reality, places you in its reality, and makes you want to live there forever, no matter how trying the circumstances, how matter how brutal the lay of the land, and no matter how beastly some characters who inhabit that world. Whale was one such novel for me this year, and maybe for a long time to come. Whale is a book that breaks all compartmentalisation of the novel. It is literary and then it isn’t. It is fantastical, and then you see reality overflowing from its pages. It dons the hat of magic realism, only to for the magic to ..read more
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Read 15 of 2023. Hospital by Sanya Rushdi. Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha
Of Books and Reading
by thehungryreader
11M ago
I read “Hospital” with trepidation. I was apprehensive about getting triggered regarding my mental health issues, but if anything, I am glad I read it, because while it may seem that the book is about descent into madness and maybe to some extent it is, but it is also about so much more. It is primarily about language, and Arunava Sinha being the translator par excellence that he is uses it sometimes playfully, sometimes using melancholia, mostly matter-of-fact, and sometimes as a means of self-exploration for the protagonist Sanya (yeah, it is a metanovel inspired by real-life events). He is ..read more
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