My Education

you see literary fiction with a low average rating, i see an opportunity to be unique. and baby, we got there. i found this riveting and powerful! parts of it were stupid (like...writing so tryhard-y that it contained consistent errors in referencing itself; lit fic sex scenes, a noted crime against h......more

I’ve been thinking about unlikeable characters in books. Unlikeable not because they are “evil villains”, but unlikeable because their inner selves are revealed with tremendous depth. In my opinion, a genuinely “unlikeable” character is one the reader observes in all of his or her complexities. If a......more

My Education is a brilliantly written, incomprehensibly boring novel. I use “incomprehensible” not merely as a substitute for “stultifyingly” or “incredibly,” but to convey the mystery of why and how it is so boring. The jacket notes that Choi “teaches at Princeton”), but I’m sure that has absolutel......more

Novels about naïve college-aged students who fall into the throes of older, charismatic professors are nothing new; neither are novels about love that veers into obsession. Susan Choi’s latest novel incorporates both these themes, but in a distinctive way, spiced with strong insights into the very n......more

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | 2 ½ stars (rounded up) “Love bestows such a dangerous sense of entitlement.” Sometimes books really deserve their average rating...and this is one of those cases. As I am writing this the majority of readers have given My Education three stars, and more reviewers have......more