I heard about this book from Tim Harford’s blog and was immediately intrigued because… I like rest but I also like creativity. And now that I’ve got a bit more time thanks to the fact that I’m lowering my handphone use, I’m also looking to see if there any changes I can make to have… Read More Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
While I’m fairly familiar with the term Asperger’s syndrome, I don’t actually know anything about the history behind it. So I was a bit shocked when I saw the cover of this book and found out that the origin of this diagnosis has its roots in Nazi Vienna. The term “Asperger Syndrome” was popularised by… Read More Asperger’s Children by Edith Sheffer
I was listening to the podcast Cults by Parcast when I realised that their episode on the Symbionese Liberation Army covered one of the books that’s been on my Overdrive TBR list for a couple of years – American Heiress. After so much time, I can’t remember who introduced the book to me, but I’m… Read More American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin
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