Gluten Free Brötchen: Book Reports

  Finished: 29/07/2024 Full disclosure right from the start: I didn't actually finish this book. I read about half of the way through and then just skipped around for the next 140-ish pages. That may disqualify me from giving an accurate book report in some eyes, however I think the pages and sections I missed would not have swayed my (mostly negative) opinion on this book. A bit of a background of that this book was about: this is an autobiography by Katherine Verdery's about her life as an anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnographer in Romania back when it was in the Soviet Union. In this book, she, in the early 2000s, requests to see the secret police file that was kept on her while she was doing her fieldwork in the 70s and 80s. She knew the Securitate (Romanian secret police) were watching her, but didn't know the extent of it. Her file ended up being one of the largest ever kept by the Securitate. While reading it she got to experience her time in Romania through a ...

  Finished: 13/07/24 I got this book a couple of Christmases ago and only read the first 5 chapters before setting it down. I picked it up again right after I finished Dorian Gray and I'm so glad I did! I was a big fan of the original Hunger Games trilogy, but I was a bit skeptical about reading a prequel surrounding the main villain. Prequels in general give off a weird vibe: the ending is already known. It's hard to think of a way for them to be interesting since the information they provide won't necessarily be "new." But Suzanne Collins did a great job with this, like the original Hunger Games , it is such a sweet book. It is a villain origin story, but at its core, it's a love story.  The main characters in this are Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird. Coriolanus, of course, lives in the Capitol just a couple years after the war between the Capital and the Districts ended. His family fortune is quickly going down the drain but he tries his best to be a ...

Finished: 29/06/24 I'm a big fan of Victorian Era literature so I knew I was going to like this one. This is Oscar Wilde's only novel and it's really apparent that his main focus in life was poetry; the language in this book is very "frilly" so to speak. This version of the book is the 1891 version, or the censored/edited version, but it has notes about what was deleted and added from the 1890 version, which gave a fuller look into the story and its history. It also contains reactions to the story and analyses as well as a short summary of Oscar Wilde's life. I really liked how this book addressed the concept and power that comes with beauty. In older literature, especially older European literature, personality and appearance always went hand in hand; if someone was beautiful and young they were righteous and good, if they were old and ugly, they meant you harm. In this book Dorian Gray is the complete opposite, or is it? In this story, Dorian Gray prays to a...