REVIEW: Untold Night and Day – Bae Suah

Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day is a hard book to read, and perhaps even harder to write about. It's hard not in terms of subject but structurally - because by its very essence, it's not a story in the singular nor is it linearly told. Instead, as the translator Deborah Smith puts it, the …

Nature Sciences, Gothic Mysteries, and Tree Growth | The Lie Tree – Frances Hardinge

On my quest to read my own damn books (a.k.a. the books I own and keep ignoring for any other book coming my way) I decided to give The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge a listen through the audiobook, narrated by Emilia Fox. It was a great decision, if I do say so myself. The …

Review: Woman at Point Zero – Nawal El Saadawi

In “Woman at Point Zero”, Nawal El Saadawi offers a sharp and unflinching critique of patriarchal societies where women cannot win - no matter who they are or the choices they make, they will always be subjugated as long as their lives are forcibly dependent on men ‘taking care’ of them. The problems faced by …

Journey from Sexual Violence to Justice | Black Box – Shiori Ito

In Black Box, Shiori Ito shares her story as the victim of rape and her fight for justice within the legal system of Japan. For those of us who have read Chanel Miller’s popular memoir “Know my name” much of this book will be familiar territory - the shattering effect on the self as a …

Japan as seen from the Margins | Tokyo Ueno Station – Yu Miri

Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station brings attention to a Japan rarely seen in the English-speaking world - the country as seen from the margins. The novel follows a homeless narrator chronicling his life from the early 1930s living in Fukushima, moving to Tokyo for work in the 1960s, moving back to the countryside and later …

The Great Passage over The Sea of Words

It is finally 2021. With that, Invisible Cities has officially commenced. If you haven't seen mine (or my fellow hosts) original announcement for this project, it's basically a reading project where we are going to explore the world through literature (and other forms of culture) three countries at a time. The aim is to promote …

Untold Stories of Disney’s Women Pioneers

Happy start to 2021! I closed off the year of much anxiety, uncertainty, and change with a book that hit close to home. Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt is truly a remarkable book for its very existence. Holt attempts to give voice to the countless female pioneers and artists working in the Disney company …

The Earth is Brimming with Life | Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake

As soon as I started reading Entangled Life I found myself nodding along to the author's clear fascination, awe and passion for fungi. While fungi have long been overlooked in scientific circles, it's increasingly clear that they provide crucial clues to the ways of the natural world from the partnerships with plants to their abilities …

Seaming The Pieces of a Life | Patch Work by Claire Wilcox

The genre of memoir continues to surprise most recently for me with Claire Wilcox's Patch Work. The subtitle for the book is "A Life Amongst Clothes" which in a sense is accurate given how many years Wilcox has worked as a museum curator, handling aging pieces of clothing and dealing with fashion history on a …

The Stopping Places – Damian Le Bas

It's November which means we are finally in the swing of Nonfiction November - if you don't know what that is, it's a Booktube initiative started by Olive (abookolive) and it has now spread out all over the social media platforms. I'm in charge of the instagram challenge we have to go alongside the month's …