10 The Winner's Trilogy - Marie Rutkoski 9 Sunrise on the Reaping - Suzanne Collins 8 Mr Salary - Sally Rooney 7 Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata 6 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 5 The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity - Esther Perel 4 Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead - Emily Austin 3 The Boys in the Boat - Daniel James Brown 2 Simple Passion - Annie Ernaux 1 I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman

Scarring in a much different way than I expected it to be. I've heard that Gone to See the River Man is deeply fucked up, but I thought that was because Kristopher Triana is considered a splatterpunk author. I was ready for body horror on body horror and we got a few deeply gruesome scenes, but I realize now that the aversion people have to this book is not from the gore. It's from the brother sister rape scenes. Which yes, were incredibly disturbing, especially with the add

Carmen Maria Machado is a talented writer, but her favored structures and motifs do not mesh with mine. At the prose level, I appreciated this collection of short stories. And I was interested in several of its themes, but dismayed by others. I'll lay out my thoughts story by story and then provide my general thoughts in more depth at the end. The Husband Stitch- ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours. While I think this could have been expanded upon more cleverly,

A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise. It was worth it completing the whole series, but this installment was a lot clunkier than the rest. Even though this book dragged at points, I actually think it could have benefitted from being longer , or split into two. Because the reason it dragged was not that the plot wasn't exciting—it's that it wasn't developed. It felt like much too short an amount of time to accomplish a convincing prison camp, amnes

We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he's exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life? A exercise in grief, a portrait of postpartum psychosis, and an existential temper tantrum all rendered in 150 pages of startling prose. First, I must thank Sara for gifting me a gorgeous copy of this book (we've met