I could talk about how libraries work as an avenue for serendipitous discovery of books but I won’t because this review is going to be a paean to the golden age of mysteries. Or at least, it would be if I could write paeans. The Golden Age of Murder, on the other hand, is a… Read More The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
During the last Tea Exchange, Lavínia sent me a package from Brazil! She packed in a lot of things, including a lovely handwritten letter (if only my handwriting was that nice) and a box of roasted mate tea! I’ve never had mate tea before, but I knew that it was a tisane that actually contains… Read More Trying Mate Tea
I found this while searching for an unrelated Jane Austen book but I am a sucker for Jane Austen-related books (I suppose I can call myself a Janeite?) and so decided to hunt down this book. But, I also just checked Goodreads and it as it turns out, I’ve already read the book! That said,… Read More Book Review: A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz
I stumbled on this in the library but since I loved Galileo (which was based on his books), I decided that I had to read it. It’s been some time since I read Japanese fiction translated into English, but I think I’ve been missing out. Malice is a murder mystery about the murder of bestselling… Read More Book Review: Malice by Higashino Keigo
Warning: Extremely long post I meant to post this at the three month mark but I lost track of time (and kept procrastinating on updating the weekly stats for over a month) so this is coming to you about four months since my last update. It’s going to be a very long post, starting with… Read More Breaking the Smartphone Habit: The Four Month Mark
I have no idea how long social media and the idea of influencers will last (forever? for a few more years?) but the idea of reading a thriller based on influencers was intriguing. Now, I really hated the ending of Hello Sunshine, another book based on social media stars, but I was cautiously optimistic about… Read More Book Review: Unfollow Me by Charlotte Duckworth
Note: This is a follow-up post to my first post on caffeine in tea, which was written about a year and a half ago. Normally, I don’t really revisit tea topics because I don’t really feel the need to re-research everything, but I came across this information in 日本茶のすべてがわかる本 and I thought it was worth… Read More Tea 101: Caffeine in Tea (Part 2)
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction is one of the library’s latest ebook acquisitions and hence featured in the “new arrivals” section. That section is also pretty prominent in the Overdrive app, which is how I found, and promptly downloaded, the book. It’s not The Tale of Genji, but I thought it might be interesting… Read More Book Review: The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction by William C Hedberg
All the way back in October, I wrote about trying 3 different Japanese green tea cultivars and finding the differences (or lack thereof). In that post, I mentioned wanting to try devoting a week of tea drinking to each tea, something that I managed to do! As it turns out, I forgot that I wanted… Read More Trying 3 Japanese Green Teas Cultivars (Round 2)
I’m not quite sure how I found this book but I was in the mood for a thriller and this sounded interesting. The Chestnut Man is about a serial killer who hacks off his victim’s limbs and leaves a little chestnut doll behind. As detectives Thulin and Hess investigate, they realise that this crime may… Read More Book Review: The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup
