Category Booktalk
Liebster Award (Questions! Answers! Bookish Links!)
I’d never heard of the Liebster Award until Bookpapercut kindly nominated me. It’s an award/meme/Q&A handed around by bloggers to new blogs worth reading (with less than 200 followers). So here goes. Basically, those nominated for the award must: List 11 random facts about themselves Answer the questions that were asked of them (by the […]
The Power of Comfort Reading
So here’s the thing: the world of my reading is generally composed of what I call ‘comfort books’. Comfort books are the books that you reach for on days when life seems to tilt its balance and spill you over to the edge of a dark place that closely resembles fear. On days like these, […]
In Which I Read and Drool and Contemplate My Increasing Age
The first time I went to Black Sesame Kitchen, a small private kitchen here in Beijing, I was extremely apprehensive. Oh, not about the food, which I had heard was scrumptious (people need to bring back this word and retire delicious) but because it was to be a communal dinner. Just me, my boyfriend and […]
Why I Started a Book Blog
In the summer of 2011, I received a Kindle as a birthday present. Now, to understand the impact that the Kindle made on my life, it’s necessary to know one pertinent fact: I live in Beijing. At the time, (conditions have since improved) my book sources were limited to pirated street-peddler copies of Barack Obama’s […]
On the Many Ways in Which Neil Gaiman Comforts the Small, Scared Child in Me
He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing. Last week, after a day of phone calls and text messages that foreboded an uncomfortable and scary disruption to my cosy world, I went online and bought the entire Harry […]
Notes on ‘The Space Between Us’ by Thrity Umrigar
How to start talking about Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us? This whole book blogging thing is so new to me that I feel like I’m floundering about, grabbing haphazardly for whatever words that march across my mind, wrestling them to the page before they have the chance to flee. Which is what writing is, […]
So goodnight, dear void
There’s something bittersweet about reading a new book by a favorite author who has just died. It’s a bit like savoring the last cookie from a recipe no one knows how to make anymore — like Joey Tribbiani gobbling the last half-cookie from Phoebe’s grandmother’s fire-destroyed recipe. Except I’m not going to find a new […]
Buried Beneath All The Lies 