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“Assembling California” by John McPhee
Assembling California by John McPhee My rating: 5 of 5 stars “The two time scales—the one human and emotional, the other geologic—are so disparate. But a sense of geologic time is the most important thing to get across to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes—centimetres per year—with huge effects if continued for enough years. A million years is…
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“The Brides of High Hill” by Nghi Vo
The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo My rating: 3 of 5 stars Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills novellas from the beginning have centered on the stories as they are remembered and retold and lived out. Their framework at the start has been a story within a story; a traveling cleric Chih being the recipient of a story or…
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“Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos” by Lisa Kaltenegger
Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger My rating: 4 of 5 stars “So yes, Luke Skywalker could have enjoyed a warm day under two suns—but I always wondered where his second shadow was.” Looking for potentially habitable planets has different meanings to different people. It can be a way to satisfy intellectual…
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“Death in the Spires” by K.J. Charles
Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles My rating: 4 of 5 stars “That was a foul thought, planning to trap his friends into admissions, but they weren’t his friends any more, and one of them had murdered Toby.” Apparently this is being referred to as “dark academia” by quite a few people, but not knowing much about that subgenre…
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“The Menopause Manifesto” by Jen Gunter
The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Jen Gunter My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Women are so much more than just their ovaries, so it’s important to sit back and look at the whole picture for perspective.” Menopause inexplicably seems like a firmly-kept secret. It will happen to most of that half of the population…
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“Breath” by Tim Winton
Breath by Tim Winton My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’ve never been an adrenaline junkie. No, thanks. Facing my own mortality just makes me feel dread and not that rush that gets others addicted. I never needed to face dangers and thrills in order to feel alive — I like calm and have seen too many people end up…
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“A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up” by Margaret Wappler
A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up by Margaret Wappler My rating: 2 of 5 stars Of course I had a crush on Luke Perry’s iconic character Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills 90210. I mean, I used to be a warm-blooded preteen when I first saw the troubled brooding rich “bad boy” with the heart…
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“James” by Percival Everett
James by Percival Everett My rating: 2 of 5 stars I am very cautious with book reimaginings since, honestly, most of the time they are quite unneeded — but here the idea of it indeed seemed necessary. I understand why Jim of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needed his own story not filtered through the perspective of a…
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“City of Miracles” by Robert Jackson Bennett
City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett My rating: 5 of 5 stars “To live with hatred,” says Sigrud, “is like grabbing hot embers to throw them at someone you think an enemy. Who gets burned the worst?” Surfacing from under the absolute immersion into the world of this series feels almost unreal. I don’t want to say goodbye to…
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“Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds” by Thomas Halliday
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant.” On the timescale of life on Earth, our lifespans – even the timespan of our entire civilization from when we as a species started scribbling on cave walls – seem like those of suicidal…
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“Basin and Range” by John McPhee
Basin and Range by John McPhee My rating: 5 of 5 stars If you had told me that I’d absolutely adore a nonfiction book about geology, a book now over 40 years old, I would have seriously doubted your sanity. But that was before I discovered (thanks, Justin!) the works of John McPhee. And now, in the nerdiest pun ever,…
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“Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness” by Patrick House
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by Patrick House My rating: 2 of 5 stars “The brain is messy and venous and dense and soaking wet, all the time, and is about as heavy as a hardback copy of Infinite Jest. It is not designed, perfected, or neat. It is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery,…
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“Abandoned Towns” by Chris McNab
Abandoned Towns by Chris McNab My rating: 3 of 5 stars It’s hard to resist a book titled Abandoned Towns. The introduction explains the appeal very well: “Abandoned towns have an undeniably haunted aura, the sense that the hollow rooms, wind-swinging doors and silent roads still bear the imprint of those who once lived there, sometimes with unnerving immediacy.” I’ve…
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“Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad” by Matyáš Namai
Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad by Matyáš Namai My rating: 4 of 5 stars This may be the first nonfiction graphic novel I’ve read, and it was absolutely worth it. I’ve always been interested in the Chernobyl disaster, being a Soviet-born kid of the 1980s, knowing a few kids whose parents were Chernobyl liquidators, having to do school assignments on…
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“Space Oddities” by Harry Cliff
Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe by Harry Cliff My rating: 3 of 5 stars It may be time to accept that particle physics may be just a bit over my head. By the time we get to “strange quarks” and “beauty quarks” I may be justified in thinking that those physicists are just messing…
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“How To Be a Tudor” by Ruth Goodman
How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life by Ruth Goodman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Just like with her How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman is going for the immersive everyday experience of what life in another often-depicted historical period in Britain would be actually like. This time it’s Tudor England – and we…
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“The Vagina Bible” by Jen Gunter
The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine by Jen Gunter My rating: 5 of 5 stars “It’s a vagina, not a piña colada.” It says a lot about our culture and ingrained views that the title “The Vagina Bible” is likely to elicit more mirth and giggles than, for instance, the hypothetical “Pancreas…
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“City of Blades” by Robert Jackson Bennett
City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett My rating: 5 of 5 stars Violence begets violence. War begets war. And pain and trauma is what remains. And there must be a way out, or at least the way to minimize the casualties and the fallout. “What wild promises we make in order to justify the worst of decisions.” This is…
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“City of Stairs” by Robert Jackson Bennett
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett My rating: 5 of 5 stars “The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.” Isn’t that true, Robert Jackson Bennett, isn’t that so always sadly frustratingly true. It may be tempting to blame all kinds of higher powers for whatever happens,…
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“The Tainted Cup” by Robert Jackson Bennett
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Perhaps it is a wise thing, to prepare for death every day, just as the Empire prepares for death every wet season.” I inhaled two books by Robert Jackson Bennett over the last week and a half, and both were excellent. I think I can call myself…
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books are life 
Hi! I’m Dania Khan, a book reviewer on Instagram and would like to quote a line from your ‘Piranesi’ review. It’s the line – ‘This is like a dream, slow, strange and intensely atmospheric, unbelievably immersive and engrossing.’ I would not be plagiarising your work, but instead, I will be using it to prove or further a point I will be trying to make in my review. My account is @bookomaniacal if you want to DM there about your response as I wasn’t sure as to how to contact you.
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As long as you credit it, I don’t see a problem.
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Ok! Thank you so much!
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