I bought this book towards the end of last year when I knew we were moving to a bigger apartment. The idea was that we'll turn the second bedroom into an office and I'll have a 'room of one's own' (another book on my TBR). This was supposed to give me the mental space to …
Continue reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King
I know it is a lot of quotes, but I did find this book very important and Solnit has a gift of writing succinctly and directly about the things we'd rather not consider. Naming is the first step in the process of liberation. There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie …
I read this book over Christmas (yes, I know it was a long time ago, but I'm doing my best to catch up) and despite it being quite short (just under 200 pages) it took me several days to finish it. Every time I stopped reading it I didn't feel like going back. Don't get …
Continue reading Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) – Rebecca Solnit
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 …
In Silicon Valley, where I live, the reigning assumption is that success is a race against time and obsolescence. If you're not rich by the time you're thirty, before your skills become obsolete and you become too decrepit to work hundred-hour weeks, you never will be. This is a model that works fabulously well for …
Continue reading Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less – Alex Soojung-Kim Pang – Quotes
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
Small interruptions, ordinary intrusions. Shocking only because they happened too early, or because we see the consequence; the way they change our behaviour. At the time these play out as so trivial, so common, we learn to forget them. Nothing really happened. Like Claire, like Delilah, we make change ourselves, to what we wear, to where …
Continue reading The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety – F. Vera-Gray
I suppose it’s conflicting messages, isn’t it? It’s take care of yourself but then if you imagine that someone is maybe a danger you’re being a silly woman. You have to do just the right amount of panicking, don’t you? I liked this book a lot, but it’s taken me forever to review it because …
Continue reading The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety – F. Vera-Gray
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