Earlier this year, I read a book about the history of English magic and wondered, not for the first time, about the relationship between magic/folklore/fairies and the Church. So I was really excited when I found out that my questions have been at least partially answered in this book: Elf Queens and Holy Friars by… Read More Book Review: Elf Queens and Holy Friars by Richard Firth Green
This is a bit of a different book review from the usual, mostly because this was originally supposed to be a SingLib recap. I heard about How We Read Now when I attended the NLB’s talk “Read to Focus: The Art of Focused Reading in an Age of Distraction”. One of the guests was Naomi… Read More Why Everyone (not just teachers) should read How We Read Now by Naomi S. Baron
Ok, this is definitely a book that I selected based on the cover. I mean, it looks gorgeous! And to make things better, it has a lot of beautiful illustrations and gorgeous poems and texts as well. As the title indicates, Pleasures of Nature collects various poems and short texts about nature into one place.… Read More Book Review: Pleasures of Nature – A Literary Anthology selected by Christina Hardyment
I have procrastinated on this review because I wanted to write something longer and more in-depth, but it’s time to accept that that review is not going to happen, because there’s not that much I have to say about the book. I’ve heard about the concept of flow so much that I wanted to read… Read More Book Review: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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