Nikos Kazantzakis
Incredible stuff. My takeaway is that writing is stupid and dumb and that I need to embrace the spirit of deadbeat father-dom.
Madeline Cash
This is a direct consequence of the Red Scare Podcast. Completely vapid, shock-jocking for the sake of it. All the hallmarks of the Red Scare girl-writer type.
Belle Burden
Very self-aware and avoided the typical upper crust whininess of this genre. Her (ex)husband sounds like a nightmare.
John Williams
This book gave me nightmares.
Lena Dunham
Oh let's make fun of the girl who took a risk and put herself out there creatively.
Flannery O'Connor
Metal af. Unfortunately lack the biblical knowledge to fully appreciate this book.
Bret Easton Ellis
I can't. I get it. Consumerism bad. Capitalism, cancer of the 80s. I just can't stomach violence — wanted to puke and had to skip over most of it.
Haruki Murakami
Feeling inspired to start running so I can stop being bad at writing. I need to find my inhaler first.
Jonathan Bernstein
Very bleak. Unsurprising considering most JTE songs are in some way about wanting to drown in a large body of water.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Diary of a Wimpy Kid for pretentious losers...
Carrie Brownstein
Wasn't much of a memoir — more a historical account of Sleater-Kinney. I LOVE SLEATER-KINNEY.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Made me laugh out loud. Like a well-articulated version of listening to my guy friends tell me about their girl problems.
Robyn Ryle
Very cute, which I did not expect given the title. Little glimpses into the interior lives of people living in a small midwestern town.
Hans-Georg Moeller
Good philosophy distilled for someone who doesn't know anything. Referenced Girls and Bob Dylan — I'm a fan.
Philip Roth
I know so much about glove making now. Really good, but sometimes it was too much and I couldn't take any of it seriously.
Clarice Lispector
Woman's philosophy professor boyfriend (?) won't have sex with her until he decides she understands the full depth of the human experience. And somehow it works.
Sarah Wynn-Williams
This woman ANNOYS ME. She was an EXECUTIVE at Facebook for SEVEN YEARS and only stopped because she got FIRED. Yet takes no responsibility for any of it.
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor loves Jesus. And I love Flannery O'Connor. And now I guess I love Jesus too. So into this book I finished it in one sitting.
Aiden Arata
Really wanted to like this more. Full of very good sentences and unfortunately not much else. My main problem with "modern internet" essayists.
Denis Johnson
A great read. A very disturbing piece-of-shit-junkie-man-goes-on-adventure book. Reminds me of a lot of people I used to know.
Flannery O'Connor
"She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
William Faulkner
Incredible, but so sad it made me wanna puke several times. I wanted to do this for book club — I'm glad I didn't. Genuinely impressive how Faulkner captures interiority.
Stephen Deusner
A great book about one of my favorite bands ever. Does a wonderful job capturing the "duality of the Southern thing" in the same vein as the Truckers themselves.
Bob Dylan
Always admired Bob Dylan's ability to be unapologetically annoying. Some very good bits of music criticism, but also a lot of old man yelling at clouds.
Karen Hao
We live in a society :( Incredibly, often painfully, thorough reporting. Very depressing to follow the development from starry-eyed non-profit to what it became.
Charles Bukowski
Henry Chinaski is a fat, loser CHUD who still somehow manages to fuck like every other chapter. I believe this is some sort of self-insert fantasy thing.
Carson McCullers
Should be required reading. While it's a book about the South during WWII, it's a story about the fundamental American thing that will forever be true.
Richard Brautigan
Beautiful prose. I'm obsessed with the way he describes things. Will need to reread a couple times to really appreciate it.
Richard Brautigan
Favorite poem was "Machines of Loving Grace." Also loved the Baudelaire fanfic poems. Some others were too horny.
Joan Didion
Love Joan, but I just didn't really care about the topics in this book — other than the essays about California.
Jennifer Egan
Time is a goon. Flash in the pan type of good book you read and tell everyone to read for the rest of your life.
Patti Smith
What a time to be alive. Spent my entire life worshipping these bohemian artist types and this specific NYC art scene from the 70s.
Alexander C. Karp
This would probably go hard if you are stupid. He makes some valid points. I'm not a fan of consumer tech — I think engineers should serve the state.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A rare self-help book I enjoyed. About the level of out-of-touch, well-meaning whimsy you'd expect from the lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, but I still liked it.
Arundhati Roy
Caste system bad. Gandhi bad. Good to dispel the belief that Hinduism is the mystical peaceful religion of the East. Roy's writing was dense but powerful.
Thomas Pynchon
I wish I could write like this. Will probably have to read it a couple more times to even understand what it means — hence 4/5.
Gabrielle Zevin
Sure was a good book for book club! Very fun to read, but the impulse to address every issue under the sun made it difficult for any theme to really land.