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
I’ve had this book on my radar ever since The Literary Escapade talked about it (the site is currently private but I’ll link to the post in case it ever comes back) but somehow, it escaped my notice when I was doing my binge reading on social media! But it’s never too late to read… Read More Book Review: The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher
I am writing this review somewhat handicapped because: 1) I did not write the review straightaway and 2) I had to reset my kobo and lost all my annotations. So here is a somewhat fuzzy review of this book on curry’s diverse history. Curry is the tale of how cultures influence food. In this book,… Read More Book Review: Curry by Lizzie Collingham
I found this book while looking for other books that Dorothy Ko was involved in (she wrote the excellent Cinderella’s Sisters) and was instantly intrigued by this memoir by a crown princess of 18th century Korea. Ko wrote the foreward to this translation, which is how I found it. To make things more interesting, Lady… Read More Book Review: The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong translated by JaHyun Kim Haboush
After watching A Haunting in Venice, I wanted more Poirot and while going through my library’s collection, I came across Agatha Christie’s Poirot. I’ve heard of the author, Mark Aldridge, on a Christie podcast so I felt fairly confident borrowing this. As indicated by the title, this book follows Poirot through the books as well… Read More Book Review: Agatha Christie’s Poirot by Mark Aldridge