Afterward, I went back to my dorm room and typed “Connie” into the campus Facebook. I found the girl from the sandwich line — and I also found many, many more. In my freshman class alone, there was a Connie Zheng, a Connie Guo, a Connie Xu, a few Connie Chengs, and multiple Connie Wangs. No wonder the university email address I’d wanted had been taken.
All this time, I’d thought the story of my name was special; little did I know it was the story of a generation.
It's hard to imagine a darker start to a novel, and Lone Women is indeed infused with creeping dread and chilling horror. But there's more to this book than just that — it's an excellent novel that blurs genres and looks at early-20th-century America from a perspective that's been ignored for far too long.
Charlie, Love and Clichés may just be my favourite Ella Maise novel yet, and not least because it seems to be following in the footsteps of The American Roommate Experiment to give romance readers everything they’re looking for in one, easily readable novel. With her fifth book, Maise gives herself over to the romance genre entirely, delivering a hopeless romantic heroine who is searching for the cheesiest, most clichéd love story possible and a hero who’s more than happy to play his own part. What follows is a swoony, slow burn story that’s packed full of romantic tension and happily delivers on the promise of its title and then some.
Still, Search History is a pacy, compulsive read that illustrates the double-edged sword of living in an information-rich world. By the end of it, I felt exhausted and embarrassed thinking back on my past behaviour but also somewhat comforted knowing that maybe this is just how it is for us now. I made a mental note to log off more often – but I know I won’t.
“Harold” is a strange and wonderful book, written by the strange and wonderful comedian Steven Wright, whose dry delivery and brand of absurdist one-liners made him a household name beginning in the mid-1980s. The book is set on a single school day in December of 1965, in Ms. Yuka’s third-grade classroom at Wildwood Elementary School. The action takes place almost entirely in Harold’s mind as he meditates on, among many other things: time, love, piñatas, silence, sanity, God and the sartorial choices of the astronomer Carl Sagan.
The problem is that some literature of suicide suffers from being rather convincing. Suicidal speech has a contagious quality, pulling you into its orbit, spreading negativity and exacerbating forms of destructive enjoyment. The literature is less dangerous to those who are not actively suicidal, but that doesn’t mean those who are should avoid reading about the experiences of others. To the contrary, it is important to read accounts of similar hardships so one doesn’t feel isolated and fail to reach out for help. The trouble is that doing so can also provide the wrong kinds of comfort, persuading when it should reassure.
Never have I read a book so aware of this dilemma as to be practically swimming in it as Clancy Martin’s “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.”Martin is a professor of philosophy and an acclaimed novelist and essayist. This book is the story of his many suicide attempts, his descent into alcoholism and attempt to sober up, his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as the disintegration of several marriages and his relationships with his children.
Sometimes
I write a poem
in the moment
and I wonder
whether it’s any good