Last year, I listened to the BBC podcast Incident at Ong’s Hat and found it fascinating. So when I found this book, Legend Tripping Online, I was intrigued. It covers Ong’s Hat and the Incunabula Papers AND it’s from a folkloric point of view, which you know are two topics that I’m interested in. Legend… Read More Book Review: Legend Tripping Online by Michael Kinsella
When I first heard of the Folklore podcast, I decided to start from the first episode, which turned out to be on Slender Man. Intrigued, I googled the Contemporary Legends journal mentioned in the episode and found this book that was based on the journey/ Slender Man Is Coming is a collection of essays on… Read More Book Review: Slender Man Is Coming Edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill
What do you think about when you travel? If you’re like me, you’re probably just thinking about how to optimise your trip (for me, it’s finding a bookshop and a teashop no matter where so I can get a book and try some tea). But whenever I see articles about the problem of over-tourism or… Read More Book Review: The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan
I didn’t realise (or rather, had forgotten) that July was Jane Austen July when I picked up this book but look at what nice timing it was! The Jane Austen Writers’ Club was an impulse purchase made because the book promised to be about Austen and you know what? It seems to be more practical… Read More Book Review: The Jane Austen Writers’ Club by Rebecca Smith
I chanced upon this book at an online bookstore and immediately bought it because of its title. But when I read it, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was quite a lot of substance in this beautiful book! Broken into five sections, Kimono Now aims to explore the world of the contemporary kimono (at… Read More Book Review: Kimono Now by Manami Okazaki
Since I have been reading books that look at culture more broadly (and through a lot of examples of modern art), I thought it might be time to reread How to do Nothing. As it turns out: yes, the book felt a lot easier to read this time, no doubt helped by the difficulty level… Read More Rereading: How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell
What has Amazon done to the novel? An easy answer (at least for those of us who have followed self-publishing circles) might be to bring up the “tsunami of crap” argument that was really popular in first half of the 2010s. But with Hugh Howey’s Wool, E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and much more,… Read More Book Review: Everything and Less – The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl
I am, as you know, oddly fascinated with the Internet and Social Media (see: last year when I decided to binge read a bunch of books on social media). So when a friend shared a long-form article about how internet algorithms were leading to oddly homogenous coffee shops, I knew that I had to read… Read More Book Review: Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
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