I have read books that talked about Arthur Conan’s Doyle non-author life, like The Man Who Would Be Sherlock, but I never realised how deeply important spiritualism was to him until I read The Witch of Lime Street. And he’s just one of the three main “characters”. The Witch of Lime Street is a detailed… Read More Book Review: The Witch of Lime Street by David Jaher
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, another book I found on Instagram! The lovely AqilahReads talked about this book and it intrigued me so I added it to the TBR list! If you are familiar with the criticisms of social media, not much of this book will be new to you. However, The Insta Food Diet’s food-specific… Read More Book Review: The Insta Food Diet by Pixie Turner
A while back, the In Our Time podcast made an episode on Li Bai and Du Fu, two very famous Chinese poets. One of the guests was Tian Yuan Tan, whose accent sounded rather familiar – and then it hit me, he was from Singapore! So I looked up his work and saw a book… Read More Book Review: 1616 – Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China edited by Tian Yuan Tan, Paul Edmonson, and Shih Pe Wang
How could I pass up a book about one of Agatha Christie’s books? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of Christie’s most famous works, with its ending stoking controversy over whether Christie had played fair with her readers. So I was very intrigued when I read the blurb of this book, which claims that… Read More Book Review: Who Killed Roger Ackroyd by Pierre Bayard
Does where you come from influence how you think? We know that different cultures have different values – I’m thinking of Lee Kuan Yew talking about ‘Asian Values’ for Singapore and the region – but do our differences go beyond values? Do we, quite literally, see the world in different ways because of the way… Read More Book Review: The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett
“Instead of looking different in how we treated women, Christians looked just like everyone else.” With the news of how the Southern Baptist Convention failed victims of abuse in order to protect male leaders in the Church coming so soon after news of how John MacArthur shamed and excommunicated a woman who refused to take… Read More Book Review: The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr
It’s funny that I went to America and ended up buying a book about England, but it is what it is. I am always fascinated by myths and legends and thought that this book was going to be a history of how magic was treated throughout English history, and I was sort of right. The… Read More Book Review: The Book of English Magic by Philip Carr-Gomm & Richard Heygate
I heard about this book from Rosamunde_Reads on Instagram and as someone who generally enjoys English history, I thought I would enjoy this book! Mantel Pieces is basically a collection of essays – mostly book reviews but with at least one memoir piece – written by Hilary Mantel for the London Review of Books. Most… Read More Book Review: Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel
Is there such thing as a “happiest place on earth?” (no, not Disneyland) In The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner travels to both the supposedly sad and happy countries in the world in order to find out what the secret of happiness is. The countries are: Netherlands (for research) Switzerland (supposedly very happy) Bhutan (for… Read More Book Review: The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
So it turns out that How to be Bored was the book that I thought How to do Nothing was going to be. I picked it up because of its title and because one of my keywords for the year is ‘balance’ and I like I expected, it was an interesting exploration into why we… Read More Book Review: How to be Bored by Eva Hoffman