Everything to do with books! Mostly book reviews, but occasionally, I have the non-review bookish post too.
When it comes to books on the history of Okinawa, I haven’t been able to find much in English. Most of the books I can see cover the battle of Okinawa, or they talk about Okinawa’s diet or karate traditions. So in this way, The Ryukyu Kingdom fills an important void because who doesn’t want… Read More Book Review: The Ryukyu Kingdom by Mamoru Akamine
I stumbled across this book in the library and was very intrigued the subtitle: Searching for the Image of God in the Digital Age. Since selfies and more broadly, social media, is something that we are all affected by, I was curious about what a Christian response would look like. Drawing on art and art… Read More Book Review: Selfies by Craig Detweiler
A while back, I spent some time looking at “Princess” Der Ling, a fascinating figure who lived during the end of the Qing dynasty. Now, I went back a bit further in time to the Taiping rebellion, or as Platt characterises it, “the Taiping civil war”. Although he started this research with the opinion that… Read More Book Review: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt
This book is technically for children but I could not resist keeping it for myself – after all, it’s a collection of 52 folktales and legends from around the world! Beautifully illustrated, A Year of Stories contains one story for every week of the year. At first, I wasn’t sure if it would truly be… Read More Book Review: A Year of Stories by Angela McAllister
It has been a while since I dug into a tea-related book, so when I saw this in the library’s online shelves, I thought it was too interesting to pass over! As it happens, the book is a little dry but no matter, the subject matter of the history of Japanese green tea in America… Read More Tea Book Review: Green With Milk And Sugar by Robert Hellyer
Hi, after writing this review, I found out that I have already read it way back in 2017! But apparently, my experience reading this the second time around is the same and I made many of the same points but in a different way. Still, I’ve not posted a review on this blog specifically so… Read More Book Review: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling translated by Herbert A. Giles
My heart. Oh my heart! I was intrigued by this book after learning about it from The Orangutan Librarian’s mini reviews since it was pitched as a post-Narnia type of book but I did not expect The Light Between Worlds to spend its whole time breaking my heart. We all know what happens in Narnia.… Read More Book Review: The Light Between Worlds by Laura E. Weymouth
According to Goodreads, the last Shardlake book I read was away back in… 2017. And it’s kind of weird that I never continued because I love historical mysteries (the Owen Archer series is set in the same era and I’m more or less caught up to it, for example)! But no worries, a friend of… Read More Book Review: Revelation by CJ Sansom
I’ve had this book on my radar ever since The Literary Escapade talked about it (the site is currently private but I’ll link to the post in case it ever comes back) but somehow, it escaped my notice when I was doing my binge reading on social media! But it’s never too late to read… Read More Book Review: The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher
I am writing this review somewhat handicapped because: 1) I did not write the review straightaway and 2) I had to reset my kobo and lost all my annotations. So here is a somewhat fuzzy review of this book on curry’s diverse history. Curry is the tale of how cultures influence food. In this book,… Read More Book Review: Curry by Lizzie Collingham