I got this book from a friend of mine form y birthday in 2017. She decided to go big and bought me the entire 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist. I am still making my way through it, which clearly explains why I never even try to read any prize shortlist before the results are announced, …
I loved Reva, but I didn't like her anymore. We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did. She …
Continue reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh – Quotes
I did not read Eileen, but this book caught my attention both due to its title and cover that really stands out. The title sounded almost serene to me, but the cover was a dissonance. The blurb on the cover made it pretty clear that the title definitely is ironic, if not full-on sarcastic. Our main character …
Continue reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
My Bigger Half is a musician, a guitarist, so when I saw this book in Judd Books during my bookshop-crawl, I thought it may be a good idea to learn a bit more about the instrument. Especially that with me being completely a-musical our conversations about music tend to be a bit one-sided. It was …
I always loved Greek mythology, having read it when I run out of fairy tales and just before reaching for J.R.R. Tolkien. My first version was a pretty conservative, run-of-the-mill thing, but already then I was fascinated by the imperfect gods that succumbed to rage and passion so easily. Later I discovered a richer and a …
Continue reading Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold – Stephen Fry
I read this book a while ago, during my summer vacation in Portugal. It is a short book, you could consider it a long essay, but in just over a 100 pages it packs a punch. It unapologetically goes after our emotions, hitting exactly where it hurts the most, or where we're scared it would …
I continue to read my DI Rebus novels in random order. This time we land in episode eleven. You can find links to my reviews of other books in the series at the bottom of this post. This time DI Rebus has been assigned as police liaison to the Scottish Parliament that is just about …
Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. If only she were a little bigger, Grandmother thought. Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how …
I don't think I ever read the Moomins, when I was a child we already had the cartoon, and this is what shaped my relationship with the Moomin world. And a very rich world it was if after almost 30 years I still reference its inhabitants when describing some people. I had The Summer Book …
My end-of-year reading was quite heavy on non-fiction. This is yet another example. The title of the book is a pretty good indication of what it is about. IT explores the connection between rest and work, rejecting the dichotomy and advocating instead a deep dependency between the two. The book's thesis is that deliberate rest …
Continue reading Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less – Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
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