This book is insane. It tells about the races held at Shanghai in the 19th and 20th century, even going into details of which specific movies played in which cinema and at which time, and what specific people wore at days of the races. Yet it is not all fluff; the overload of details’ purpose […]
I love books like this. Written with love for stories, and build on stories upon stories. And it makes you reflect on your own life too. While I was reading this, I thought: Wow, Hessler lived in China in such an amazing time, from 1995 to 2006 (when this book was published). There were no […]
The book is a bit full of typical American self-help advice, and some of its exaggerated ‘pump-yourself-up’ self believes don’t land — but despite this, I still rate it five out of five. I read it about 6 years ago and I bought it again in China to read it again now. Key points for […]
The murder and perpetrators are clear, and so this would look like an anticlimactic read. And yet it’s extremely tense and incredibly fast — so fast that it feels more like a short story. This is also helped by the format: experimental storylines are usually reserved for short stories, and this is almost a ‘whodunit’ […]
I picked up this book because it ranks so high on young adult fiction lists, and because so many now-adults from English-speaking countries look back on this book so romantically. I am not from an English-speaking country, and the books that shaped my youth are different. But I really wanted to read this one, even […]
This is why I don’t read non-fiction anymore. Big words like “talent” and “ambition” and “culture” are thrown around — but those words are such strong bullshit indicators because they’re neither an actual goal nor an actual strategy. Yes, there is some concrete advice in here, but in two hundred-plus pages it doesn’t get beyond […]
“A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.” Did you ever feel an author wrote a whole book just to one sentence? Libra […]
Short, concise, funny — and on-point as long as you remind yourself this was written 23 years ago; yet the foundation still stands. Honesty is more important than kindness. A quarrel that has not been solved is not really over. Dutch like direct communication and a student can contradict his or her teacher. And to a […]
I was reading ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ and in praise, Keigo Higashino was compared to Agatha Christie. Then that same week, Christie was referred to in a news article about the Orient Express, and then that same week I found this book in a second-hand bookstore. Three strikes of coincidence, enough for me to […]
I’ve read some Pulizer prize winners, books from Fitzgerald, Capote, Neruda, DeLillo, Burnett, Bradbury, and Calvino and Patchett. 800 pages of Moby Dick. And then there’s this, and yet it’s such a relief reading this after all of that. Skulls and mummies in dungeons and forests. It’s the bratwurst in your hands after eating veal […]