Ideally, I would have found this book before I started on my smartphone/social media detox but I only heard about this book when it was recommended during the talk on the defence of self-help. But better late than never, and I was interested to see if this book could help in the post-detox month. This… Read More How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price
This was one of the new ebooks in the NLB and the title sounded pretty cool. Hacking Life is not a manual or tips on life hacking. Instead, it’s a critique of the life hacking movement as a whole. I’ve heard bits and pieces about life hacking – I’ve heard of people tracking their entire… Read More Hacking Life by Joseph M. Reagle Jr.
Now that I’m doing a smartphone detox, I’m more curious than normal about how the internet and social media work, as well as how using them affect our brains. So when I heard about The Shallows, I was extremely interested since the subtitle was “what the internet is doing to our brains”. The Shallows covers… Read More The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
This is another timely book that, oddly enough, helped me to further develop the ideas sparked by Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. In The Year of Less, Cait Flanders embarks on an ambitious project: Not to buy anything outside what is approved. This doesn’t just impact her savings, it helped her to identify triggers for her… Read More The Year of Less by Cait Flanders
This was a book that came at the perfect moment. It’s been a tough time for me lately and I needed to hear from someone who has gone through something similar to what I did (although Maggy faces much greater challenges than me). I stumbled across these lines in the first chapter and I knew… Read More How Not to Fall Apart by Maggy Van Eijk
I’ve had this on my TBR list for ages but only got around to reading it recently because I have shiny book syndrome (among other things – like TBR addiction). But once I started reading this, I finished it in a day because it’s pretty inspiring and quite short. Eat, Move, Sleep focuses on how… Read More Eat, Move, Sleep by Tom Rath
Given that I’m still on a post-vacation high, I decided to start going through the English-history books in my TBR list. One of them is Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The Wars of the Roses by Sarah Gristwood. This wasn’t a period of English history that I heard much of in my trip, apart from… Read More Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood
[There is nothing worse than writing an entire review, only to find out that nothing was saved. This is one of the reviews so let’s hope the rewritten version doesn’t leave anything out – though I doubt anyone but I will care] After reading How to Do Nothing, I was motivated to continue reading about… Read More Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
I first heard this book from the Would Quitting Instagram Make You Happier episode of Why’d You Push That Button. One of the hosts mentioned that How to Do Nothing captured her feelings about social media pretty well, and it got me curious enough to read. This is a pretty difficult book to summarise in… Read More How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
When I was in Secondary School, we had a class named “Social Studies”, which was basically studying different countries around the world and how that compared to Singapore (as well as how to analyse different texts that you find for bias and reliability). One of the topics we studied was the IRA and the Troubles,… Read More Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe