annaboudinot's reviews
310 reviews

I first read this book shortly after the movie came out in 2007. The film was directed by the Coen brothers and won Academy awards for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay. The Coen brothers are those rare filmmakers who understand that the book is always better than the movie: their screenplay follows the novel to a T, only omitting a couple scenes. The dialogue appears in the film exactly as McCarthy wrote it. I started rereading this book in 2024 and quickly remembered why the story had resonated with me so much. The 2005 novel and the 2007 movie were created during the presidency of George W. Bush. Though smart phones didn’t exist then, it was the first time that average Americans could track the every move of their president on the internet, which had only recently become widely accessible. G.W. Bush did a lot of things that were deeply upsetting, including lying about why America needed to invade Iraq, and those years were a sneak preview of the increasing disenfranchisement that the average US citizen would experience at the hands of political families and powerful corporations. In the novel, a small town sheriff who has descended from generations of Texas lawmen takes a special interest in a multiple homicide that occurs when a multimillion dollar drug deal goes bad. He’s close to retirement, and although something tells him that he doesn’t need the added risk and anxiety of going above and beyond after the case falls into federal jurisdiction, he can’t walk away. As he attempts to intervene and keep his local citizens safe from harm, he muses upon the futility of going up against pure evil. I remember a friend and I stumbling out of the theater after seeing No Country for Old Men and not being able to speak for almost an hour. The book has the same impact. It manages to capture, without hitting you over the head with the allegory, the powerlessness you feel when you live in a country that only PRETENDS to be a democracy.

Content Warnings

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious medium-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

3.5

C. Pam Zhang’s first novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, is one of my favorite books of the past five years, so I was ecstatic when I found out she’d published another book.

I love a good dystopian novel, though billionaires eating caviar while the rest of the world suffers can hardly be called fiction. The dystopia described in the book was too real for me to get lost in the fantasy; as such, it was hard for me to feel anxiety about high stakes — or feel any sense of relief, for that matter.

Zhang has a beautiful imagination and is such an expert at descriptive language that she transports her readers through time and space with ease. I could easily picture life inside the compound and the crossroads at which the chef found herself. Not to mention that the way Zhang wrote about food was spine-tinglingly sensual. Yet the romance between Aida and the chef lacked sufficient detail to make me invested, and I didn’t ever feel like I connected to the chef well enough to be engrossed in the decisions she made. The last chapter of the book was where Zhang’s mastery of prose really shone through, but it didn’t come soon enough.

Content Warnings

Self-Care for People with ADHD: 100+ Ways to Recharge, De-Stress, and Prioritize You! by Sasha Hamdani

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informative lighthearted fast-paced

2.5

Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings

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5.0

Surrealist Poetry in English by Various, Edward B. Germain

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5.0

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

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5.0

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annaboudinot's reviews 310 reviews

annaboudinot's reviews
310 reviews