Thought Train to Pusan

This is a tough one… the characterization of the protagonist in this novel is absolutely fascinating, yet I don’t know that the book as a whole worked for me. Such a specific tone was slowly developed throughout the first 2/3 of the story, easing along gentle to the inevitable conclusion, which then came about so quickly that I felt like there had to be more. Eileen is named after it’s protagonist, Eileen, as she recounts the story of how she disappeared from her small hometown as a young woman over 50 years earlier. At the time, she had been living with her alcoholic father, working at a children’s prison, and planning on one day running away from her small and lonely life there. But upon the arrival of a new co-worker, things quickly change for Eileen as she is drawn to this individual who may be more than they appear. Eileen’s existence is a perplexing one, but Otessa Moshfegh takes so much time and care to develop such a strong picture of who this woman is...

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what my true feelings are on The Goldfinch … at first I had a hard time getting into it (and I thought, “how many pages are there in this brick of a novel?”), but then the majority of the rest flew by and I was captivated as to where it would go next, with only a few patches here and there where my interest wavered, only to then stall out within the last couple of sections and lose me once again. I remember feeling a similar way when I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a few years ago, too, in that at times I wasn’t sure how I was really feeling (though overall I enjoyed it), but what kept me going through both is Tartt’s beautiful weaving of words: I love her style, even if the stories sometimes get away from themselves. The Goldfinch tells the story of a young boy named Theo, who, along with his mother, is present at the site of a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While Theo survives this event, his mother does not, thoug...

I previously read John Dies at the End by David Wong about two years ago, and just now remembered that there was a sequel to it after my friend mentioned that I could borrow her copy should it ever be returned to her from a previous reader… I myself ended up checking this book out of the library not a single day before my friend got her own copy handed back to her literally right in front of my own two eyes. Isn’t that coincidental… or is it?? This Book is Full of Spiders begins a while after the events of the previous novel, with our slackish and somewhat selfish but generally good-hearted friends David and John, while David’s girlfriend Amy is away at college. For the most part they live their lives normally, except for the fact that the effects of the “soy sauce” drug taken in the previous novel have lingered, most prolifically in the form of them being able to see dangers and creatures that most people cannot. And so they deal with things as they come. That ...