Tag: Fiction
Review: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
Stephen King is an author I have never really engaged with since I was a young boy, yet have seen quite a few films based on his works. Having watched the motion picture of The Shawshank Redemption a handful of times in the last decade, to which I rank it highly amongst my favourites, I…
Review: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The Irish, perhaps due to a history of civil divide and holding onto staunch personal beliefs of what is right or wrong for the people of the Emerald Isle, are immensely good at producing guttural stories that are infused with a charming charisma and bitter edge. Today’s example is Small Things Like These, a rather…
Review: Diary of an Oxygen Thief by Anonymous
Sometimes it takes more than a good story and positive reviews to entice someone to read a book; sometimes it takes a unique quality or a certain catch. In the case of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, its unique qualities are an extremely self-aware narrator and an anonymous author, both of which are interesting cherries…
Review: A Village After Dark by Kazuo Ishiguro
It has been quite some time since I last reviewed one of Ishiguro’s works here on The Steady Read, and I think A Village After Dark was a bad place to jump back in. This short story seems enigmatic. I cannot find a single scrap of definitive information on when it was published, where it…
Review: Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser
Across the last few months, I took an interest in the rather significant event that was the April 1999 Columbine Massacre (see here, here, and here). After reading three different books on the topic, I had considered myself done with the whole matter for the meantime… until I discovered Todd Strasser’s Give a Boy a…
Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney
Over the last year or so, I have actively been trying to read new authors and pick up a few best-seller books that seem to be universally recommended. Sally Rooney’s Normal People was one such novel that everyone—and I mean everyone—seemed to rank at the top of the must-read lists. Naturally, I was sceptical about…
Review: Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami is one of my favourite authors, at least regarding works from the twenty-first century. All of her works have scored four stars and above here on The Steady Read, which should indicate my fondness for her writing style and handling of stories. However, as this introduction (and the rating above) may allude to,…
Review: The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
Murakami is an author who has grown on me. I have many of his acclaimed novels and non-fiction works resting on my bookshelf, but I have yet to read most of them because Murakami is an author that requires you to be in a certain mood—an attentive, glum, and thoughtful one. Because I cannot get…
Review: Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera
After spotlighting it in a recent Book of the Week post, I was spurred to give Milan Kundera’s Faber Stories release a read. I also learned that the author himself passed in July 2023, which surprised me upon seeing that many of his other works were now forty or fifty years old. Let the Old…
Review: Autumn by Ali Smith
Writing is hard to spice up, especially when it comes to the way in which a story is told. A typical novel follows a largely chronological telling of a story from a limited amount of perspectives, and that’s that. Ali Smith’s first entry of her Seasonal Quartet of works, Autumn, seeks to challenge how cohesive,…
