paigeweb's reviews
98 reviews

Three Plays by Plautus by Paul Roche

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funny lighthearted

4.0

Delightful!
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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5.0

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden. I wonder why.

This book will always have a special place in my heart.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

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dark funny tense
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay by Anne Carson

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5.0

Forever reaching for that apple, and forever unable to grasp it.

I need this injected into my brain!
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

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fast-paced

4.0

Basically the intergalactic, multidimensional, time-traveling reiterations of Vita and Virginia.
Surprised by how much I liked this. It snuck up on me.

Antigone by Sophocles

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5.0

"Your devotion is a kind of reverence."

"She was only a stranger in our world."

"Now the dead lie in the arms of the dead."

"I and grief are blended. I am grief."


Just so beautiful and devastating, can't even describe what it means to me.
A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector

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5.0

"I went trembling to encounter myself."
"I am an abyss of myself.'"
"I am a memory of myself."

     The book in which Clarice splits the atom and becomes a god. A Breath of Life is a twisted maze of layered literary artifice: Clarice creates a narrator, who creates Angela. Character of a character. Which one is the true Clarice? Both and neither, simultaneously.
     A book about encountering the self, about splitting the self to know it, about the alienation of the self from the self. It's enormously interesting that she wrote it as she herself was dying, and completely appropriate that the last work in her oeuvre ends mid-thought with an ellipses. As she prophecied in Agua Viva much earlier in her career, "what I am writing goes on and I am bewitched."
The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza

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4.25

I saw god for the first 300 pages... after that it kind of loses the plot. 
Modesta, I will never never forget you.
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

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reflective sad

4.5

Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope for posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.