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One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
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Mieko Kawakami's books are of the mesmerising and quiet kind, and they often explore friendships. Her characters are gentle, tender, and somewhat passive, but her words sparkle, and in every of her novels translated into English, they leap from the pages. Continue reading →
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Ed Yong – An Immense World (2022)
MAR 2023Now and then, I like to read a big book. Vast and memorable biographies, monumental essay collections, or sprawling, epic works of fiction—books that cover long, impressive lives or astonishing topics, and leave you sitting in awe when you close them. Continue reading →
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If you're looking for a straight-forward memoir from the curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum (a position she has held since 2004), this is not that. Instead, she weaves together memories—I would say ‘string’, or ‘piece’, but ‘weave’ really does best describe her way of writing—and sometimes offers glimpses of her family, of her upbringing, of motherhood, before quickly moving on to the next subject, as if the most personal revelations were muttered under her breath. Continue reading →
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Andrey Kurkov – Grey Bees (2020)
JAN 2023I've spent a lot of time thinking about the subtleties of this war novel. The ways in which its writer, Andrey Kurkov, manages to convey the horror of living through a seemingly never-ending war by carefully lifting out its most minute details... Continue reading →
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I had this 832-page mammoth waiting on my bookshelf for two years, as there's something so very daunting about the prospect of diving into a biography of someone's life. Biographies can read like endless Wikipedia entries (the first that comes to mind is James Baldwin's, written by Bill V. Mullen; an eternal shame). Thankfully, the Pulitzer-winning Sontag: Her Life, written by Benjamin Moser, is a joy to read. Continue reading →