I’ve heard of Mary Beard for quite a few years, and have always intended to read her books, but as you know, my TBR list is long and I haven’t quite gotten around to all of them. But when I saw a copy of Confronting the Classics at an extremely reasonable price, I decided that… Read More Book Review: Confronting the Classics by Mary Beard
If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen me share stories from this hilarious book. Ask the Past is a collection of some of the weirdest (and not so weird) advice found in various books. There’s not much to say about this, but I wanted to share some of my favourite pieces of… Read More Book Review: Ask the Past by Elizabeth P. Archibald
This is one of those books that I thought was about one thing (A) but it was actually about another (B) but B turned out to be so interesting that I didn’t mind that it wasn’t about A. At first, I thought that City of Light, City of Poison was going to be about La… Read More Book Review: City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker
It’s the mid-19th century and London is a city. Almost miraculously, a group of people have organised themselves into a class of scavengers, taking on the responsibility of most modern sanitation departments and thus helping two million people get rid of their waste. However, this effort does have some cracks and not all waste is… Read More Book Review: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
This is actually my cousin’s book but I borrowed it during his housewarming party last month. Yes, I am the person who takes things away during a housewarming (but with every intention of bringing it back!). Jerusalem is a sweeping biography of the city, starting from the reign of King David and ending in the… Read More Book Review: Jerusalem, The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore
This is one of the Kickstarter projects I backed last year when I was a little bit too obsessed with Kickstarter in general (I still check the site but I’m probably more interested in vintage teacups right now). Their Darkest Materials appealed to me because I’ve tried knitting and sewing but never really considered the… Read More Kickstarter Book Review: Their Darkest Materials by Penelope Hemingway
If you look at the cover, you’ll know the reason why I picked up this book. The synopsis pretty much sealed the deal – it promised to explain the history of why we’ve fallen in love with murder. To That End, Murder by Candlelight focuses on not one but five murder cases: The Radlett Murder… Read More Book Review: Murder by Candlelight by Michael Knox Beran
There isn’t a good reason for me to be shocked by the fact that butter has a book dedicated to it, given that I have multiple books dedicated to tea and that is also a food product, but I was surprised and very intrigued. I grew up eating margarine on toast but in the past… Read More Book Review: Butter by Elaine Khosrova
Do you know what I thought of when I read this book? Dressed, the podast about the history of fashion. And I was reminded that I prefer reading to listening, not least because you can insert pictures into a book. As the title says, Great War Fashion is about what the women of Britain war… Read More Great War Fashion by Lucy Adlington
So this has been on my TBR list for a couple of years. I had pretty high hopes for this because I love histories that focus on one unexpected subject, but I found myself rapidly losing interest in this. I had thought that Paper would be a history of paper. However, it’s really more a… Read More Paper by Mark Kurlansky