My science fiction era has begun. I picked up Project Hail Mary exactly five minutes after I dropped Blood of Hercules, so the bar was admittedly pretty low. However, this book surpassed any of my expectations, and dare I say, some of the brain cells lost during the Greek myth ‘retelling’ managed to grow back. Science fiction is still a really new genre for me, as I have only read Children of Time and The Three-Body Problem. But I managed to figure out that experimentation and technology was my favorite part of the experience. Good thing Project Hail Mary was filled with that! I particularly enjoyed the way the novel was set up. The…

Flabbergasted. That is the only word I can think of to describe my mental state after reading half of this book. This is not a review because I didn’t finish Blood of Hercules, but I am absolutely going to document every little detail that caused me psychic damage. Some context: the author, Jasmine Mas, has a degree in ancient Greco-Roman classical studies from Georgetown University. I will be referencing this fact a lot.  Hoopla is an ebook library that doesn’t have any wait time to borrow books, but this means their collection is not really the most popular or up-to-date. I found this Greek myth retelling on the app, but I…

Currently, I’m feeling rather sick. So I thought maybe it would be a good idea to go back to my roots and try a YA fantasy novel! I have seen The Sunbearer Trials a lot at my local library, so I decided to give it a shot. It was a really nice read, but I think I can say that I’ve mostly outgrown YA novels. Everything about this duology was very well written and developed, and I would have loved it a couple years ago, but it’s just hard to appreciate now. But that’s ok! YA readers should definitely check this book out, because it was a fun exploration of Mexican…

Another R.F. Kuang book, another conundrum. I was expecting another Babel going into this, but Katabasis was most definitely not. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Well, let’s get started! The first half of the book was pretty awful. Every second Alice and Peter spent in hell bickering with each other was so incredibly annoying; the writing felt very cringey and juvenile in comparison with the plot, which was supposed to be complex. For an example, I never want to hear the words “pizza anus” ever. It’s not funny or clever. It sounds stupid. It was little situations and mentions like these that made me…

This biography by Andrea Elliot was very impactful. It follows Dasani, a homeless African American girl who lives in New York City, throughout her childhood. Her story is representative of a completely different America those under the poverty line experience, and it is terrifying. The research Elliot did was remarkable to me; she gives the reader so much information about Dasani and her family. And getting to know Dasani through this book left me with so many confusing feelings. Dasani was around the same age as me by the end of the book, and we live in the same country. But that is where the similarities end. Her resilience comes…

When it comes to books popular on the internet, I always wonder whether the appeal is due to it having marketable tropes or it genuinely trying to be a work of art. For this novel by Heather Fawgett, I still can’t really place my finger on which one. On the former’s side, this book does tick a lot of boxes for the viral fantasy book: an academic who loves books, enemies to lovers storyline, and of course, faeries. Maybe it is a carefully curated product, but I can’t really say that because of the latter. There is something about this novel that doesn’t feel soulless, and gives me the impression this…

The formal systems have officially gotten a bit too complicated for me in this chapter. The system that finds prime numbers was very difficult to understand, and I didn’t understand its connection to negative space. But the concept of negative space on its own was fascinating. Meaningful images can appear as both the figure and background (the negative space) of Escher’s pieces, like shown in this image: This technique creates mesmerizing artwork. But the real A-ha moment for me was connecting the idea of negative space with Bach’s polyphonic music. When I play Bach’s inventions, the right hand and left hand both are the melody; both the figure (the right…

This chapter was a little bit more complex for me to understand; reading it again when I am older will definitely give me new insights. A main theme of GEB Hofstadter discussed in the introduction was that meaningful knowledge can be drawn out of meaningless constructs. For an example, the pq- formal system by itself is meaningless symbols with rules attached.  – – p – – – q – – – – –  But when the p is assigned the meaning plus, the q is assigned the meaning equals, and each dash represents a unit, the meaning suddenly becomes clear. 2 plus 3 equals 5.  A literary connection I made when…

Let’s keep this short. This memoir was terrifying. It’s difficult to imagine going through something so horrible and being forced to face a deeply flawed system that favors perpetrators. I’m still in shock how this memoir proves how little control women have over their own lives. The world should read and acknowledge the fact that one in five women go through this. Everyone should know the name of the author. Chanel Miller. 

This is a historical fantasy novel by Shelley Parker-Chan, about a girl who assumes her dead brother’s identity and attempts to also take his fate of greatness. I will say that this book was pretty entertaining and had some good ideas. However, there were definitely some things that took away from the overall effect the author was going for.  I just couldn’t ignore some of the plot holes in this book. In the beginning, the main character was a child living through a famine. As a girl, she had no hope for her future, and her brother and father made sure of that. Basically, when her brother was a baby,…