Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (review by Jacqueline H. '18)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gone With the Wind is a refreshing twist on your typical classic novel. It's one of those books that leaves an indelible impression on you, the kind that you find yourself re-reading every so often.

We start off in the rolling red hills of the antebellum South. Scarlett O'Hara, a sixteen-year-old debutante with a self-centered personality and a sharp mind to match, comes of age during the tumultuous Civil War. In a surprisingly short time, Scarlett's life of luxury degenerates into one of starvation and poverty. The book is a masterful subversion of many common literature tropes. Rather than becoming the sweet-natured lady she was groomed to be, Scarlett is selfish and vindictive to the core. She doesn't get her initial love interest, nor her second - despite her former status as belle of the South. Lastly, Gone With the Wind is told from the perspective of the Confederates. Racial prejudice is a glossed-over issue in this novel, which reinforces the uncertain morality of the characters.

Overall, this is an amazingly well-written novel. I loved the vivid prose, the heart-wrenching moments, and the abrupt ending that yearns to be extended. I recommend this book to anyone searching for an interesting read.

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis (review by Tiffany Z. '17)

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Picture a stock market: If you imagine yourself ringing up a broker and asking him to find a seller for, say, 10,000 shares of Google, you're about ten years behind. Welcome to the world of e-trading, where you and your seller can theoretically exchange stocks electronically without needing to go through that pesky broker. But high-frequency traders—the people behind the mysterious flash crash of May 6, 2010—are out to squeeze the profit out of you both, and a small handful of talented, dedicated people want to change that. Flash Boys is an intricate yet accessible history of the contemporary stock market and a handy introduction to the tactics (and profit-mongering) of high-frequency trading. But it's also the encouraging story of the rare few who, instead of putting their talents to squeezing every last penny out of unsuspecting investors, choose to set a moral example so that one day, we may stop thinking of the terms "fairness" and "Wall Street" as polar antonyms.

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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling (review by Melissa K. '18)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Television personality Mindy Kaling has an opinion about everything, from the ideal level of fame to men’s chest hair. In her first book, she recounts stories of photo shoot fiascos, lists her favorite moments in comedy, shares her elaborate “Revenge Fantasies While Jogging.” While her memoir may read like a series of unrelated essays—she might transition from a chapter about “Karaoke Etiquette” to a chapter about “Day Jobs” without so much as a page break—the lack of flow reflects Kaling’s writing style: spontaneous, bold, and prone to going off on hilarious tangents.

As a size eight Indian woman, Kaling is the minority in Hollywood. She could have easily preached to her readers or reveled in her own achievements. Luckily, she wrote a much more enjoyable book instead: one filled with sarcastic humor, random entertaining facts, and insightful observations. Highly recommended.

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (review by Andrew R. '17)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americanah bears all the hallmarks of the traditional epic story: between the protagonist Ifemelu’s emigration from Nigeria to the other side of the Atlantic, sparking a long process of depression, race-inspired musing, and eventual financial success, and her childhood friend Obinze’s thwarted attempt to make a life for himself in London, the novel encompasses all the heartbreak, alienation, and self-realization that characterizes the best epic novels. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted a novel that handles a difficult topic—race relations, especially in the cultural interactions between African-Americans and non-American blacks—incisively and powerfully while refusing to pander to the reader’s opinions or reservations. Every character (and, given the prodigious heft of this novel, there are many) is treated with a rare mixture of sympathy and harsh honesty, resulting in a cast that strikes the reader as impressively human. Maybe the conclusion, when Ifemelu comes to terms with the personal changes her decade and a half of Americanization has wrought, trails off less powerfully than a novel of this magnitude deserves, but overall Americanah easily proved one of the best books I encountered all year: utterly convincing and unapologetic, the kind of book that it would be a shame to miss.

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Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken (review by Andrew R. '17)

Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One character stands out above all the rest in Elizabeth McCracken’s flamboyant collection of short stories: Aunt Helen Beck, an imposing and imperious wanderer who moves from stranger’s home to stranger’s home, masquerading as a long-lost relative until she is kicked back out onto the street. Judging by the vast array of circus sideshow performers, eccentric tattoo artists, and itinerant poets with handlebar mustaches on display in this collection, colorful characters are McCracken’s forte, and the supporting casts of each of the nine stories included here are really what give the collection its drive. Sometimes, as in the case of “Mercedes Kane” (an unsatisfying sketch about a middle-aged former child genius), the author’s tendency to prioritize characters over plot becomes tiresome; often, as with Aunt Helen Beck, the tradeoff is entirely worth it. Overall, just as with so many other short-story collections, the humorous genius of a few pieces is marred by their less impressive neighbors, and, like Aunt Helen Beck, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry is best picked up, briefly enjoyed, and then cast away once more.

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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (review by Tiffany Z. '17)

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire, consists of an eponymous poem written by a fictional American poet, John Shade, and the annotations to that poem, written by the enigmatic Zemblan professor, Charles Kinbote. Fear not, however, that this work will be didactic or esoteric: Kinbote takes advantage of the commentary section in which he is supposed to elucidate aspects of Shade's poem (a quiet introspection on the poet's life) to tell his own adventure story of an assassin's tenacious pursuit of an overthrown king. His thrilling tale, placed in the middle of a placid text, jars at first. But as Kinbote's story picks up pace--in stark contrast to the mellow, unhurried rhymes of Shade's poem--little details in both narratives begin to click together, and in the book's last pages the two narratives coalesce in a bizarrely thrilling rush. I heartily commend Nabokov not just for the technical feat of composing a 999-line poem and "discarded" drafts in a fictional writing style, but also for whisking us on a maddening journey that, hours later, made me think. I only suggest that readers have a dictionary open while reading this.

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