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On the World Going to Shit | Crudo
Kathy is getting married, but she's not quite sure about love and if she's really capable of it. She's preoccupied with the world around...
Jun 21, 20202 min read
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Romance, Racism, & Coming of Age in Japan | Go
Sugihara is sitting alone at his friend's birthday party when a breath-taking girl named Sakurai walks up to him. He can't help but fall...
Apr 26, 20202 min read
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Murder, Mystery, & Gold | The Luminaries
1866. The New Zealand gold rush. Walter Moody has just stepped off a boat on the New Zealand coast. A London gentleman, he's come to try...
Apr 12, 20202 min read
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Serial Killers Amid Splendor in 1890's Chicago | The Devil in the White City
A handsome man buys a pharmacy in Chicago. He's warm, charismatic, kind. He's also built a sound-proof gas chamber and a hot, hot kiln...
Mar 29, 20202 min read
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This Is What It Means to Be a Mother | The Expatriates
Mercy is a recent Columbia graduate with no direction in life. Margaret is (was) the mother of 3. Hilary is in a transactional marriage,...
Mar 8, 20202 min read
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Mixed Race Family Trauma in Everything I Never Told You
This past spring I had the pleasure of meeting Celeste Ng when she came to Pittsburgh to promote her second novel Little Fires...
Mar 1, 20203 min read
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Wuthering Heights: My Take on the Romantic Classic
Perhaps this makes me a "bad" reader and lover of literature, but I haven't read anything by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily...
Feb 16, 20202 min read
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The Thief Battles Existentialism in Tokyo
Nishimura is a seasoned pickpocket. He roams the streets of Tokyo looking for rich men to rob, deftly sliding his fingers into their...
Feb 9, 20202 min read
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No One Writes Back: A Journey of Words
One of the best ways to know a culture is to consume its art. Film and literature especially give me glimpses of the cultures key...
Feb 2, 20202 min read
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White Teeth Doesn't Glitter
London. The second half of the 19th century. Three families inextricably tied together. British-Bengali Samad Iqbal and Englishman...
Jan 14, 20202 min read
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Beyond Power & Privilege: Ghosts, Murder, and Secret Societies in Ninth House
Galaxy "Alex" Stern sees ghosts. They've been a permanent fixture in her life and are usually harmless. But after one tries to assault...
Dec 23, 20192 min read
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Exquisite Flavor in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
I've been reading a lot of good books this year. But it's been a while since I read a great book, one that resonated with me and stuck in...
Dec 8, 20192 min read
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Reimagining the Manson Cult in The Girls
Fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd first spies the group of girls in the park, digging through the trash cans for food. The most striking of...
Dec 1, 20192 min read
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A Korean Cult & Religious Tensions Spark in The Incendiaries
R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries purports to be a novel about a college cult "with ties to North Korea," but it's really an examination of...
Nov 24, 20193 min read
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A Light, Quiet Touch in The Nakano Thrift Shop
I'm convinced antique and second-hand stores occupy a different place in time-space than the surrounding world. They exist in both the...
Nov 10, 20192 min read
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Perfect Weather to Read Strange Weather in Tokyo
Despite it being officially Autumn on the East Coast, it's already quite cold, with blustery winds that funnel down the back of my neck...
Nov 3, 20192 min read
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Sorceress Circe Alive Again in this Grecian Re-imagining
Marketed as a feminist retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, Circe by Madeline Miller is told from the titular female's perspective. From her...
Oct 27, 20192 min read
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The Bond Between Humans and Cats Realized in If Cats Disappeared from the World
I often say that I would die for my dog and cats. And I truly think that I would. But how well do I really know myself? If I was actually...
Oct 20, 20192 min read
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Urban Natives Tell Their Story in There There
During my final year of elementary school (or maybe it was my first year of middle school), we learned about Native Americans. I don't...
Oct 13, 20192 min read
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Millennial Workplace Despair in The New Me
Any book that's hailed as existential immediately grabs my attention. I enjoy seeing characters struggle with the same questions I have,...
Oct 6, 20192 min read
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Eeriness & Whimsy Collide in We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The occult, the maddened, and the dark have always weighed on our minds. We devour ghost stories, murder mysteries, and haunted houses...
Sep 29, 20192 min read
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Entering the World of Dreams
As an avid dream-journaler and interpreter, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and jot down notes on my phone before falling back...
Sep 22, 20193 min read
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Delicate Balance of Beauty & Pain in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
I don't like hardback books, and it forever grinds my gears that books come out in hardback first, as I have to wait months to buy my own...
Sep 15, 20193 min read
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Navigating Post-WWII in Warlight
I'll admit, I only read this book because I saw that Michael Ondaatje was coming to Pittsburgh as part of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lecture...
Sep 8, 20193 min read
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Spine-chilling Thrills & Questions of Existence in I'm Thinking of Ending Things
I can't remember how old I was when I experienced the most terrifying moment in my life. I remember a gaping black door, wind whipping...
Sep 3, 20194 min read
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Korean Pressures Explode in Mina
Going to high school for 8 hours a day and then staying after for an hour or two for band practice and cross country was grueling enough....
Aug 26, 20193 min read
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Normal People Is Just That: Normal
Contrary to what the cover implies, this book is not about two people embracing in a cold sardine can that looks terribly uncomfortable,...
Aug 18, 20192 min read
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Supermarket Doesn't Sell
Supermarkets are one of the scariest places on earth. Identical aisles of bags, cans, and boxes paralyze the mind, force shoppers to...
Aug 11, 20193 min read
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The Fifth Season Cracks Post-Apoc Fantasy Wide Open
The recent spate of earthquakes on the West Coast sent ripples down my spine, as I sat on my porch baking in the summer sun, thousands of...
Aug 3, 20193 min read
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Humanizing Prisoners: Necessary and Beautiful
Growing up around Pittsburgh, every time I ventured into the city, whether with my mom when I was younger, or by myself or with friends...
Jul 21, 20193 min read
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Mutes, Motorcycles, and Evangelism in Modern Seoul
When I travel internationally, one of my favorite things to do is read a book set in that country by a native author. Of course, you...
Jul 14, 20193 min read
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Bolin's Dead Girls Stay Dead
In middle and high school, one of my favorite shows was Pretty Little Liars. I waited for new episodes to come out, and if I was busy at...
Jul 3, 20192 min read
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The Heart of Loneliness
Recently (within the past two years), I've been drawn to Japanese literature. It started with Haruki Murakami and then quickly extended...
Jun 6, 20192 min read
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Into The Diving Pool
Book cover design is immensely important, not only because because people really do judge books by their covers, but also because books...
May 30, 20193 min read
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Pills for a Purpose
There are weekends when I don't leave my apartment. Not a single toe steps out the door. And I'm perfectly fine with that. But a whole...
May 23, 20192 min read
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Less in Love
I often feel like I'm in the throes of an (almost) mid-twenties crisis, which is why the impending midlife crisis terrifies me to no end....
May 6, 20192 min read
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Undercover In North Korea
Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Suki Kim moved to America with her parents at the age of 13. She later began a career as a...
Apr 27, 20192 min read
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![[tw] Death Is the Only Excitement in the Modern World](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6269a1_3bfae232a92d4193a307649e3e060b92~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_290,h_250,fp_0.50_0.50,q_30,blur_30,enc_avif,quality_auto/6269a1_3bfae232a92d4193a307649e3e060b92~mv2.webp)
![[tw] Death Is the Only Excitement in the Modern World](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6269a1_3bfae232a92d4193a307649e3e060b92~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_412,h_355,fp_0.50_0.50,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/6269a1_3bfae232a92d4193a307649e3e060b92~mv2.webp)
[tw] Death Is the Only Excitement in the Modern World
The big city of Seoul pulses. Cars zip along freeways, people rush to and from work, and buildings are always open, no matter the hour,...
Apr 17, 20192 min read
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A Millennial-Style Apocalypse
A new fungal disease known as Shen Fever begins to spread, and the infected are mindlessly stuck repeating their daily tasks (reading,...
Apr 7, 20192 min read
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Out of Giovanni's Room
Paris, the city of love. Or rather, the city of love and then loss, those winding alleys and riverbank paths where the sun that once...
Mar 26, 20192 min read
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Changing China
Before there was bubble tea, there was regular old tea (archaic, I know) that originated deep in the Chinese mountains. Li-yan, a member...
Mar 17, 20193 min read
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Calling All Loners
Loners, lone wolves, and people who are simply lonely - we get a bad rap. To be alone, to like being alone, is considered abnormal in a...
Feb 23, 20192 min read
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Eternal Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness
A fitting book for these cold days, but you won't find a warm refuge in the pages of Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi novel The Left Hand of...
Feb 7, 20192 min read
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I am a Victim of Well-Placed Advertisements
When I was in London, I saw this book cover plastered everywhere: the plasticky, raindrop studded sides of bus stops, the rounded tube...
Jan 28, 20192 min read
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You're at a Club in NYC...
...and the lights pulse in your head, reminding you of the sun that is, by now, surely rising outside. It's nearly 6 a.m. and maybe you...
Jan 20, 20192 min read
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Myths Brought to Life in American Gods
My gut response to Neil Gaiman's American Gods is to call it a "Percy Jackson for adults." In both, gods and "mythical" creatures exist...
Jan 12, 20192 min read
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Diving into On Such A Full Sea
In a near future, pockets of the world have deteriorated from environmental pollution, rendering most of the open land wild and lawless....
Jan 7, 20192 min read
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Top 10 Books of 2018
I somehow managed to read 84 books in 2018. Here are my favorites. (These are not books published in 2018, but books I read in 2018.)...
Dec 31, 20183 min read
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What We Were Promised Fails to Keep Its Promise
Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised centers on the Zhens, Wei and Lina, a Chinese couple who move to America and then return to Shanghai as...
Dec 31, 20181 min read
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Currently Reading
Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
by Maria Semple
A Note on My Rating System
So many books and so little time. If I'm reading a book, it's because I've chosen that book out of the millions of others I could have read instead. Because of this inevitable force of selection, I start each book off at a 7.
What gets a 10/10 📕??
You're a rare gem. I love you. You're compelling and well-written. You made me feel something strongly. Years will pass, and I will still remember your name, the characters you hold in your pages. I will reread you, and gain something new every time.
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