Others: Mostly positive Translation of Ch'aesikchuŭija (Published 2007 by Ch'angbi)
Genres: horror, literary fiction
Lists: …
Ashley Hutson
2022 · 1 review
Others: NegativeOne of the New Yorker 's Best Books of 2022 So Far and BuzzFeed 's Must-Read Summer Books For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination. Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the ghosts of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company . When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision―to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity―takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate binge-watch.
What made the match, strongest first
Hanna Bervoets
2021 · 148 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveFor readers of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny or Ling Ma's Severance: a tight, propulsive, chilling novel by a rising international star about a group of young colleagues working as social media content monitors—reviewers of violent or illegal videos for an unnamed megacorporation—who convince themselves they’re in control . . . until the violence strikes closer to home. Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments. Yet Kayleigh finds a group of friends, even a new love—and, somehow, the job starts to feel okay. But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they’re meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She’s still totally fine, though—or is she?
What made the match, strongest first
Sarah Rose Etter
2019 · 262 pages · 1 review
Others: NeutralThe Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.
What made the match, strongest first
Cormac McCarthy
2006 · 287 pages · 17 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveCormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs. The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
What made the match, strongest first
Max Porter
2019 · 224 pages · 3 reviews
Others: MixedThe Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller and Booker Prize Longlisted novel Lanny by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth. Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
What made the match, strongest first
Halle Butler
2015 · 179 pages · 2 reviews
Others: NegativeMegan, de veinticuatro años, tiene toda su vida por delante pero la siente como un callejón sin salida en lo que considera un terrible trabajo como recepcionista en una clínica y su tremendo resentimiento por el éxito y la felicidad de todos los que la rodean. Pero nadie aviva la amargura de Megan como su compañera de trabajo Jillian, una madre soltera de treinta y cinco años insoportablemente optimista cuyo alegre positivismo se ve oscurecido por sus constantes tropiezos. Las vidas de Megan y Jillian se vuelven cada vez más precarias a medida que sus mecanismos para afrontar sus problemas —negación, libros de autoayuda, alcohol, religión, analgésicos recetados, críticas obsesivas, novios alienados y, en el caso de Jillian, la adopción de un perro— las meten en un círculo de autodestrucción. La verdadera villana del libro no es ni Megan ni Jillian, ni ninguna persona en sus vidas, sino sus propias trampas, así que descargan su ira sobre ella mismas y contra todos los que las rodean. Malvadamente auténtica y brutalmente divertida, Jillian es un retrato subversivo de dos mujeres atrapadas en ciclos de autoengaño y autodestrucción, cada una más parecida a la otra de lo que les gustaría admitir.
What made the match, strongest first
Loved itThe Vegetarian by Han Kang, incredible and also short book but it makes me so uncomfortable that I can only read it for little bits at the time. I do think it's just a really interesting take on women deciding to not play according to the rules of society anymore.
NeutralThe Vegetarian was my first experience of her writing. She won the Booker Prize with that novella. It's about someone who chooses to be vegetarian in a culture that doesn't really accept that way of living and that lifestyle choice. But I think it becomes an allegory for other things too.
MixedOverall, I don't think I was excited about it as I had hoped. It's certainly not a bad book, but it's one that I kind of had mixed feelings about. I do recommend it, especially for the first story, which I think is really great.
Loved itit is so incredibly well written
Loved itSo this is a book that I was definitely intimidated by. I had no reason to be was absolutely beautiful, and I'm really glad I read it.
Mixedit had a lot of interesting qualities and things that i should have enjoyed so that's why i have to put it into oh no because as i was reading i realized it wasn't going to be a book that i connected with even though it was perfectly weird i just didn't like the things that the book did
MixedThis is exploring something really interesting. The writing style is interesting, very well written, but the character is super cold and detached. I struggled with that.
Loved itthis book just made an incredible impression on me I cannot stop thinking about this I'm still randomly thinking about what this book had to say because it's not something you're going to forget
Loved itI'm almost done with it and it is a quick read but it made me think in terms of food marriage and mediocrity in the context of Korean culture and also in the dark slh horror esque genre.
