reggiewoods's reviews
391 reviews

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

dark emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Keiko isn’t like other little kids, and she herself will tell you she doesn’t understand what it mean to be human. Luckily, she gets a job at a convenience story where the training manual tells her exactly how people expect one to act; she follows the manual and people get off her back about being socially inappropriate. Murata’s novel is an interesting look at what it means to belong, to be a part of society, and finding self fulfillment. It’s a very quick and engaging read, funny, dark, and darkly funny. While nothing grabbed me about Murata’s prose style, her quirky characters and ability to make the mundane full of drama were quite enjoyable. Anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong is likely to feel a connection with Keiko and her struggle to have people just let her be. 

Slow Days, Fast Company. The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz

adventurous dark emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.5

Eve Babitz’s semi-fictional memoir is a collection of short stories that are great for the voyeur. Babitz was a writer and visual artists in Los Angeles, and this collection encompasses her time hobnobbing amongst the Hollywood Elite of the late 60s and early 70s. For a socialite, she is quite misanthropic toward her scene, almost as if L.A. has given her Stockholm Syndrome. Her stories are mostly about beautiful people living absurd lives in this fantastical world, mostly as the do drugs, sleep with one another, and have mental breakdowns. The fact that it is an insider’s look into Hollywood is not quite what makes Babitz special, but her unique and fearless voice in which her prose is composed. It’s not the scandal of it all that appeals to the reader, but how Babitz makes you feel as if you were quietly sitting next to her, observing the whole insane circus. 

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Although it starts a little slow with the narrative moving all over the place, once Wang starts playing the Three-Body Problem VR game it takes off on a wild ride. You can’t go into the plot without spoilers, but I can say that it all revolves some very advanced scientific concepts (none of which I was able to understand much of so I don’t know what was real and what was fiction). It’s an intellectual mystery with intense political stakes that make this story a race against time. It feels almost like if Umberto Eco wrote a Sci-Fi book. I’m excited to both continue the series and to see the television adaptation. Highly recommended. 

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

challenging dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Set in a small, unspecified, southern town, McCullers’ debut novel is timeless because of how wonderfully she captures the need her characters feel to connect with another human being. All of the characters share some connection with John Singer, a deaf-mute who the other characters project their own perceptions upon. McCullers manages to tackle many issues prominent in America at the time; race relations, gender roles, labor, fascism, etc… Her writing is a pleasure to read, drawing you into the inner world of each of her characters while somehow maintaining an objective third-person narration. McCullers is a part of the southern canon that you don’t hear much about, I suspect because of how radically she tackled the pressing issues of her time. 

Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense by Saul Perlmutter PhD

hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.25

A book version of the class they teach at UC Berkley, this is more or less an overview of what we currently know about separating fact from fiction and making good decisions. It is primarily meant to serve as a guide to navigating a world full of information and parsing through all the noise to get at some truth. It relies heavily on several of the books you will be familiar with if you are interested in this field, and uses examples from modern scientific discoveries to illustrate different methods of thinking and investigation. There is a little at the end of the book about how to apply this to our world and how we could make better group decisions (think of our elections) with some different approaches. Again, there is no ground breaking information here, simply a summation of what has been found and how we might apply that to our daily lives. If you’re familiar with the field, a lot of it will be a review (which I didn’t mind, as remembering to combat my own biases always needs some prompting). It’s an excellent tool for those who want to stay informed, but don’t know who out there they can trust. 

Erasure by Percival Everett

challenging emotional funny lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Monk Ellison is a novelist known for writing dense, rarely read books. Needing money to take care of his ailing mother, he compromises his artistic integrity (albeit under an alias) and writes a book he loathes: a story of a black, impoverished young man with four kids by four different women and no education. Everett challenges us to really consider whether an author, or even an author’s purpose, has any bearing on a works greatness. Simultaneously, he exams the consequences of experiencing a culture through art. “Erasure” is smart, funny, and a slap in the face for anyone imagining they have any authority over defining the black experience. I’m looking forward to the movie (I love Jeffrey Wright) and can’t wait to dive into Everett’s new book, “James,” which is Huck Finn told from Jim’s point of view. Percival Everett is an American author you should know, and “Erasure” is a fine place to start. 

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Didion’s novel feels like a modern novel set in the sixties: The chapters are brief and sparse, the narrative seems to select random mundane moments that are loaded with micro-aggressions and an inability for people to communicate with one another. Maria (Muh-RYE-uh)’s story is a tragic one: a budding starlet who is more or less eaten alive by the Hollywood system. What’s most disturbing about Didion’s representation of the swinging sixties, is how little regard the men have for women, and subsequently the women for everyone. Maria’s downfall is inevitable in this world of men. It only becomes tragic because she has the gall to say she doesn’t want to take it. It’s a devastating story, and one that is considered one of the 20th century’s most important because of Didion’s precise prose and sharp criticisms. 

Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim

adventurous dark informative sad tense fast-paced

3.75

While it seems that Slim’s life story was fictionalized to protect the still living acquaintances mentioned in his novel, it is purported to be quite autobiographical. Still, there are some pretty outlandish coincidences and other things that are hard to believe, even with the knowledge that things were different in the forties. No doubt, Slim was a hardened criminal from the get-go. He idolized pimping and the control pimps had over women. His account is bleak and gruesome. He’s violent and has no respect or care for anything other than money. It’s a disturbing book to read. While Slim’s narration in the unique street lingo of the MCM pimp is quite entertaining to read, what he chooses to exclude or breeze past in his narration is sometimes perplexing. It would better be subtitled, “The Story of My Rise” because once he becomes a successful and notorious pimp he skims through his career quickly, choosing to focus on the mistakes he made which landed him in prison. It seems Slim wrote this account to warn young men off the pimping game, to show them that even when successful it isn’t as glamorous as it looks, but you can tell that hidden beneath is a longing for a life he once had and is no longer suited for. 

Hangman by Maya Binyam

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

It doesn’t take long to see that Maya Binyam has a unique voice, some exponentially rarer to find with each passing year. Her characters narration is alien, but not ignorant; ambiguous but not evasive. A refugee receives a phone call and is told to board a flight. He learns his story and purpose simultaneously with the reader, and Binyam’s masterful construction maintains this simultaneous and gradual enlightenment until the final pages. The novel encompasses so many emotions, and illustrates many of the major political problems facing our times, without ever naming them (the narrator uses no proper nouns; sounds annoying, I know, but it works), all within 200 pages. It’s an incredibly impressive novel, and it being Binyam’s debut is all the more impressive. I had named “The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut as my favorite novel of 2023, but now “Hangman” is right there with it. I could keep gushing, but it would be all too easy to spoil this book. Just go read it. 

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

This is a fever dream of a story. A man goes on a journey to find his father whom he’s never met, but upon arrival he discovers a ghost town. The rest of the novel is hard to follow, as it seems to be a mixture of dreams and conversations that may be real or imagined people that may or may not be dead. The father’s story is revealed to the traveler through these visions and stories. It is considered a masterpiece by most. It was hard for me to follow (I rarely have undisturbed reading time), but I did thoroughly enjoy the tone of the novella. I would have to read it a second time (more focused, hopefully) to fully appreciate its magnitude and would enjoy the opportunity to do so.