takecoverbooks's reviews
208 reviews

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

5.0

There’s nothing I can say about this that wouldn’t feel cheap. Read this book.

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Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

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dark emotional funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead is Emily Austin’s ingenious answer to Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In Gilda, we’re given a complex, depressive, neurotic perspective that shows why we fight nihilism in the face of our own mortality: we must. We have no other alternative. Hilarious, revelatory, and existential, this book is criminally underrated.

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Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney

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emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

A harrowing and strange look at the violent undercurrents that lay just below the surface of our contemporary society. While ostensibly about relationships, Our Winter Monster reflects upon the ways lives and neighbourhoods are torn asunder by unpredictable ruptures in shared notions of safety.

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Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Monsieur Pain is Roberto Bolaño's first published novel, and it contains the seeds that would blossom in his subsequent work: the immortality of fascism; the absurdity of applying reason to reasonless world; history as contingent on the historian.

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

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hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

A very different type of Rock 'n' Roll memoir, Kim Gordon's (Sonic Youth) A Girl in a Band is impressionistic and nonlinear. Rather than present us with an exhaustive document of New York punk and No Wave scenes out of which Sonic Youth emerged, Gordon constructs a delicate prism around her musical and artistic career. Starting with the dissolution of her marriage to Thurston Moore and moving backwards and forward through time, A Girl in a Band feels like both an indictment of male-dominated arts cultures and a hopeful look forward at what could be coming next.

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We Do Not Part by Han Kang

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

We Do Not Part is a difficult book. It’s a story about dreams, about trauma, about family, and most of all about powerlessness. Kahn’s choice to structure the book as a stream-of-consciousness ghost story is unique and compelling, but certainly alienating at times. It’s definitely worth checking out, even if I already feel like I’ll need to read it again soon (and not in a joyful way).

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