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torchlab's reviews
112 reviews
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto
3.5
Many moments in this made me laugh out loud. Didn’t quite stick the landing i felt but plenty of fun nonetheless!
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
5.0
This is still one of the best and most harrowing memoirs I've ever read
The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto
Theres definitely interesting / aesthetically-enticing ways to write incest in fiction but this is not one of them
2.0
Devil House by John Darnielle
4.0
This was crazy (compliment). Love the switching POVs, a device which can be really hard to pull off but is done here so well. Love how you go into it thinking it’s going to be about horror/true crime and then it ends up being about California real estate and its discontents.
A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar
3.0
The strength of this book is in its descriptive language: lots of perfect singular images that flashed directly into my mind’s eye from the page. Plot and characterization are a bit lacking. Could have been edited down maybe 25%.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
About once a year I read a romance novel, because I like love stories and I admire well-written sex scenes. I don't feel like I can give an accurate star rating here because romance is so far outside what I typically read, but this was decent. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of Michael's family and would have happily spent more time with them.
Erasure by Percival Everett
4.0
It's crazy that this book came out within a year of Spike Lee's Bamboozled and no one seemed to even begin to understand what either was saying until literally twenty years later