I heard about this book when Sara Tasker interviewed the author, Nir Eyal, for her podcast Hashtag Authentic. The podcast introduced the idea of timeboxing, which was an idea that I immediately wanted to try. So I decided to read the book as well, to see what else I could learn. Indistractible is broken into… Read More Book Review: Indistractible by Nir Eyal
Pretty much everyone around me who reads has raved about Billion Dollar Whale online. But it’s popular status also means that it’s been hard to grab a copy in the library (or perhaps I’m just lucky). So when I saw the ecopy in Overdrive, I decided to download it and woah, this is basically Crazy… Read More Book Review: Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope
This is pretty rare but I borrowed this book because of the author. I’ve heard of Tony Gebely’s tea-rating website Tea Epicure, which meant that I was curious to see what he had to say about tea. The Philosophy of Tea is a slim volume that manages to pack a lot of information about tea.… Read More Books about Tea: The Philosophy of Tea by Tony Gebely
Fashionopolis, as you might expect, was eye-opening. Apart from talking about my book to everyone around me (probably annoying my taobao-loving friends and family), I also did a mini-reading binge and found these three books to be very helpful. Fashionopolis: Read this for an introduction to the ethical and ecological problems facing fashion Published just… Read More 3 Books to Change the Way You See Fashion
It should be pretty obvious that I like fairytales and folklore. So when I heard about this book on Netgalley, I was immediately intrigued. It’s supposed to be a comprehensive resource on all things about the Good People and it definitely delivers. Organised alphabetically (duh!), A New Dictionary of Fairies covers subjects like Elf-Shot and… Read More Book Review: A New Dictionary of Fairies by Morgan Daimler
I kind of went into this book knowing that it was going to change the way I was thinking about clothes and I was right. I heard about Fashionopolis from the Dressed Podcast interview (which was great, except for an advert for Fabletics that felt out of place) and knew that this was going to… Read More Book Review: Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
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
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
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
So this was something recommended in the self-help talk at the NLB (I really should sign up for more talks) and since I really enjoyed Digital Minimalism, I decided to read this. Plus, I tend to get a bit reflective around December (or any other trigger, really), and I thought it would be nice to… Read More Deep Work by Cal Newport