I bought Homage to Barcelona together with Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell in preparation for my vacation in Spain. Never having read anything by Colm Toibin, and recently back from my trip to Ireland I got tempted to start with this one. The result is that Homage to Catalonia is still unread, over a month …
One of the things Barnes mentioned in his book was whether there is any point in describing and discussing art (the old words vs pictures as a method of communicating emotions). I already used words in my review, so now I decided to share with you one picture of each artist mentioned by Barnes. What pictures …
Continue reading Keeping an Eye Open – Julian Barnes – Visual Quotes
It does what it says on the tin, the book is a collection of essays on art. Most of them have been published before and they were written over several years, which makes it surprising that this book feels as coherent as it does. I started reading this book when all the bad news was …
Continue reading Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art – Julian Barnes
It is Wednesday and I hope your week is going well, but I just though a lighter post would fit in nicely, so here are some quotes from The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson that I reviewed on Saturday. It was at this point that I realized my brain was dripping on to …
Continue reading The Road to Little Dribbling – Bill Bryson – Quotes
I read the Notes from a Small Island years ago. Years before I ever set foot in UK, or even had the plan to do so, and I'm sure this book partially formed my ideas about Britain. I remember I enjoyed it a lot and laughed out loud numerous times while reading it. Because of that …
The full title of this book is one of the longest ones I've seen (not counting academic books of course), so I had to cut it down a bit in the post title, here is the whole thing: Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World. I don't read many …
The full title of this book is a bit on the long side: The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; that already explains what the book is about. Helen Russell was your typical always running exhausted, coffee-fueled Londoner, one day her husband was offered a job in Denmark, and …
Continue reading The Year of Living Danishly – Helen Russell
I have a confession to make about this book, but I'll make it at the end of this post. This is one of random cases of me reading a non-fiction book, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does I tend to be drawn to books about science and scientists. Maybe because I completely …
This book has been my first surprise this year and what an amazing one! I bought it solely judging by the title, which I thought wonderfully ironic. I didn't know much about Jeanette Winterson, other that I probably should read some of her books. I expected a novel full of irony and sarcasm, what I …
Continue reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson
It’s the second of my Christmas presents that I managed to read this year! Food for thought, I’d say. I didn’t agree with every statement but it definitely got me thinking. The main thesis (simplified of course) is that capitalism forces us to function 24/7 and that sleep being physically unavoidable is the last bastion …
Continue reading 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep – Jonathan Crary
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