Commonwealth review

It is a simple story. There are no spaceships, no explosions, no frantic action, no grandeur. Just people in a broken up families. Patchett’s own life patterns are visible; she’s from a divorced family, and she’s divorced herself (albeit without children). In Commonwealth, she writes a fictional story that is simple in structure that tells […]

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Thirty Rooms To Hide In review

I bought this book because ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze This’ is my bible and got me into advertising. I didn’t expect such a private and personal book, nor Luke Sullivan to be able to write such a thing. But this book is totally separate of the other, and creates a thirty-room-world of its own. The stories […]

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De opkomst van het Oosten review

Interesting theses which I want to believe, but the book is merely a collection of anecdotal evidence, and sadly never makes the choice between being a personal recollection, or giving a wide objective view on the world, nor does it ever give a complete answer to its outset. To introduce this book as a ‘personal […]

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The Circle review

Although written slightly dry, it’s a gripping read. Not as apocalyptic as 1984 or Brave New World, but definitely in that category, as perhaps this near reality scenario is equally frightening. What’s compelling is the total descent into a world without privacy that happens with reason, albeit the wrong kind of reason, and the fact […]

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Day of the Jackal review

Exponential storytelling. Slow to start, but after three-quarters of the book, it becomes utterly gripping. There’s a great level of detail and the amount of work put into an assassination is made clear, and works around the central theme of how a professional is less likely to make mistakes rather than a murder committed in […]

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Lolita review

If you want a joyful or entertaining book to read, look elsewhere. Lolita is slow to read and the story itself, dare I say it; boring. Yet Lolita consists of prose perfection on a grim subject, and I learned afterwards that the book helped introduce the idea (and policing) of sex abuse of children in […]

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Light Years review

I love Salter’s confidence in writing, his poetic style, his sense of rawness. But the story barely has a narrative, and the story it does tell is generic. Every paragraph filled with a metaphor, which becomes annoying and causes the pace of the book to be sluggish. This book is easy to admire, but for […]

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Libra review

History books normally follow a collection of facts, carefully plotted on a chronicle timeline, devoid of detail, but DeLillo’s Libra blends facts with fiction, and the storytelling to what it meant on both the individuals as well as American society is gripping to its finest details.

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Lincoln in the Bardo review

Sure, this book requires some getting used to and strike you as odd — but if books are meant to take us places, this one just took me the to the weirdest; inside the mind of the living nor dead. Moreover, is that this is a typical book to read again soon, for it’s full […]

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Homo Deus review

The book shows how people first worshiped nature and animals, then religion, and it shows that our current phase, humanism, is only just that. Do people have a soul? Do we have a consciousness? Aren’t feelings just algorithms? What happens when the future will create better algorithms than our feelings? The book speaks in logical […]

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