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Lark Benobi

Goodreads Author

Born

in Menominee, Michigan, USA

Website

http://claireoshetsky.com

Twitter

Genre

Fiction

Influences

P. D. Eastman, Fred Gipson, Eric Knight, Jim Kjelgaard

Member Since

November 2017

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/larkbenobi

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I'm the avatar of author Claire Oshetsky, who wrote the novels Poor Deer , published in January 2024, and Chouette , published in November 2021.

Even though I'm a lowly avatar, I am an author, too, of The Book of Dog , a lighthearted apocalyptic romp in which women inherit the earth, just as Laura Dern predicted they would in the 1993 classic Jurassic Park. It has pictures.

I'm a big reader and I love exchanging views with other book lovers here on Goodreads. The comments I leave after reading a book aren't recommendations. They aren't strictly reviews. They're snapshot reflections of my reading experience. If I don't like a book very well the first time I frequently go back to read it again, to see what I mi ...more

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Combine Editions
Lark Benobi’s books

Average rating: 3.91 · 174 ratings · 78 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

The Book of Dog

3.91 avg rating — 174 ratings — published 2018 — 7 editions

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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

Lark is Currently Reading

Lark Benobi is currently reading

Mothers and Sons

by Adam Haslett (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Jun 30, 2024 09:05PM

Lark Benobi is currently reading

Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: male-identified-authors, books-i-ve-read-at-least-3x, fsg-originals, those-books, currently-reading

read in December 2018

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Lark Benobi said: " Second Read, 2018:
When I read a book written in first person, it often feels as if I'm building a relationship with the narrator in my head. I'm gathering impressions based on what the narrator is telling me from the first page on. These impressions, Second Read, 2018:
When I read a book written in first person, it often feels as if I'm building a relationship with the narrator in my head. I'm gathering impressions based on what the narrator is telling me from the first page on. These impressions, this relationship between narrator and reader, affects my experience of the book. Do I like her? Do I trust her? Could she be my friend? Is she genuine? And so on.

This way of reading is all the more apparent on a re-read. The first time I read Annihilation I thought "The Biologist" was yielding, caring, and a great observer of life. I was very much affected by an early scene where she describes her childhood practice of sitting by a neglected swimming pool, and observing the coming wildlife as it invaded this formerly civilized space.

Reading Annihilation a second time, I thought The Biologist was cold, robotic, sinister. I was impressed by the way she coldly watches a colleague die, choosing to interrogate a dying woman for information rather than try to give her any aid or comfort.

I loved the book just as much. It's just that it was almost like reading a different book. This is one of the reasons I love to re-read.

First Review, 2014:

Annihilation feels like someone put an H.P. Lovecraft story into a blender with Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle." Wow. As I read I kept thinking "I have never read anything like this before, and it's amazing." The strange thing, though, is that I had this same feeling--that I was reading something entirely unique--with a different book, and less than three weeks ago: THREATS by Amelia Gray. I felt very smart when I realized that Gray and Vandermeer share the same editor, Sean McDonald at FSG. I'm eager to read the other two books in Vandermeer's trilogy and also to explore this editor's other authors.

The protagonist and every other person in this novel, except in flashbacks, are women. There is really not a thematic or a plot-related reason that I can discern for this choice, but it did unhook this novel spectacularly and marvelously from typical sci-fi tropes. It was really refreshing to read a novel where women characters were a completely neutral thing, rather than women characters being used as plot devices in a gendered/sexist way (e.g. "women are the characters who need to be rescued by men") , OR women characters being used to support some kind of underlying feminist theme ("women are good at shooting arrows, too"). In this novel they are neutral, they are people. I really loved that. ...more "

Dec 06, 2018 07:44AM · see review

Lark Benobi is currently reading

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories

by Sarah Coolidge

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Jun 26, 2024 02:18PM

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Lark Benobi made a comment on their review of Frontier " What amazed me, what I can’t remember ever happening in any other book I’ve read, is the way some image or phrase would captivate me so much that I wo ...more "
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More of Lark's books…

Quotes by Lark Benobi (?)

“I am a mammal, a dog, and a bichon frise--in that order.”
― Lark Benobi

5 likes

“It was a town mostly populated with elderly John Wayne fans and their caregivers.”
― Lark Benobi, The Book of Dog

tags: conservative, elderly, humor, john-wayne

4 likes

“All of you losers, the Great Woolly Mammoth said. The undocumented and disabled. The forgotten ones. The left behinds. The last will be first. It's our turn. All of you need to fight together, every which way you can, and then some, and then some more, and even after you do all that, you will probably fail, and then die.”
― Lark Benobi

tags: the-book-of-dog

2 likes

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Polls

Sept Book of the Month Poll: Assassins, Rogues and other Outlaws

Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling

13 votes, 32.5%

Hemovore by Jordan Castillo Price

8 votes, 20.0%

Ghost by Carole Cummings

6 votes, 15.0%

The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie

4 votes, 10.0%

Khalshir by Jaye McKenna

4 votes, 10.0%

Rulebreaker by Cathy Pegau

3 votes, 7.5%

Two to Tango by Nicola Cameron

2 votes, 5.0%

The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi

0 votes, 0.0%

40 total votes

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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Read Women: Women Author Challenge 2018	33	181	Nov 15, 2018 08:42AM
2024 Reading Chal...: The TBR Jar Challenge - 2018	614	1850	May 31, 2019 07:44PM
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Lark’s Quotes

“These are the days that must happen to you.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: live-in-the-moment, live-life

698 likes

“Then, for a moment, silence dominates the path to the summit of Everest. If the furious race of monsoon winds blasting the outlines of the Nepalese mountain range can be considered silence.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

1 likes

“I learn more from books than from people”
― William Sleator, The Beasties

23 likes

“Time moves sideways through the most important moments of our lives.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

1 likes