Notes of a Native Son
Every essay is a painstakingly, achingly beautiful construction of argument. From word choice to phrasing, he has a way of driving to the point, but also doing so with a biting simplicity.
Bandersnatch
Bandersnatch is a scruffy orange tabby with a big, bossy personality. She is loud and demanding and never takes ‘no’ as an answer.
Adopted a year after Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch is the second youngest cat. Despite having been taken from a barn to a very nice shelter, she was a tough little biter. Just what we needed to play with Jabberwocky.
She does get along well with her sisters — especially Wesker.
Bandersnatch is Hargrave’s second little monster. You can usually find her running laps around the house, climbing up the wrong side of the tallest cat tree, balancing on someone’s shoulders, or dead asleep inside a cushy cat bed. She loves attention, and will literally climb you like a tree to get it.
Some other things she likes include margarine, feathers on a string, winning at wrestles, and folding her paws. Because she has such an attitude, Bandersnatch takes a great glamour shot.
White Out
Usually, I would consider White Out too new to review here, but I made an exception because it has that certain something more that makes a book timeless. It looks at a subject in a way that is entirely unique and entirely new.
Trainspotting
Punks. Rebellion. Drugs. Death. Yes, emphatically all those things. More than that, Welsh has constructed a searing novel of what it means to be young, lost, and trying to become an adult in a world that’s on fire due to the HIV epidemic in nineties Scotland and the rampant level of addiction and death.
Brideshead Revisisted
I think what primarily draws people to Brideshead Revisited novel is its themes of decadence, ignorance, and privilege.
Memoirs
While Lowell is perhaps not exactly a well-known name outside of academic and literary circles, Lowell has a lasting influence on modern poets, writers, and scholarship.
Millennial Crime Trilogy
The three books are substantial, but not overbearing at 300–375 pages each. Each of them is based on a criminal case and uses that case as roman à clef to explore a snapshot of different aspects of society at the turn of the last century through the lens of real events barely veiled.
Asylum Piece
She not only describes depression in a way that goes beyond the hallmark of profound sadness — she also discusses the feelings of being overwhelmed and the incapability of focussing on even simple tasks. She discusses the desire to see life in small objects like birds and flowers when one feels so utterly lifeless themselves.
Lover Man
What I admired most about Anderson’s writing was his ability to take a subject that seems so simple — like two children playing the dozens and going fishing — and turn it on its head. He layers meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning until every narrative is rich and strays far from just the subject at hand into a complex tapestry of politics, tension, and the injustices of the world at large.
HERmione
This novel was an examination of identity as Gart struggles to determine who she is and whether she is at risk of losing whatever grasp she has on herself in the face of Lowndes’ domineering presence.
After a Funeral
Diana Athill’s After a Funeral details her experience of being friends with a man who is profoundly destructive both to himself and to everyone around him.