I loved this. I haven't read much art history, but this was a beautiful way to learn to appreciate art in the context in which it was made. Also contained some nice detours into architecture and urban planning that influenced the art/development of Venice. Will definitely try and read more like this in the future!

I learned a lot from this book. I quite enjoyed how it covered a variety of experiences of people from the Sherpa community, and it seems to me that it did a pretty fair job. It's certainly interesting to see how the Sherpa's view climbing. Worth a read for the stories and if you're interested in climbing culture and how and why the Sherpa's participate.

Loved this. Akala is a extremely knowledgable about history and politics, so this is an important and interesting read. Not being someone who has that much perspective on the UK, I also really valued learning more about how colonialism and racism have had an impact.

Being a bit closer to Ireland these days I've been quite interested in learning about their history. I didn't quite expect what I got from this book, which is the viewpoint of (fictional?) people who were part of the IRA at the time. A quite interesting read, really, and a perspective that I haven't seen before. Worth a glance!

This is an nice introduction to the topic of abolition of borders. Maybe you're already familiar with the idea of defunding the police, or similar, but this work extends that to the idea of borders themselves. It's quite interesting to see this idea brought there; and moreover it's quite nice to see a challenging discussion about the damaging impact of deporting or otherwise removing citizenship of people on visas; i.e. how can we care about people even when they do something bad. Lots of good ideas in this book!

I loved this. Don't be put off by the number of pages; almost all of them only contain a few lines per page. It's a collection of stories told be the residents of a small town in Sweden. It's a real slice of life and culture; mostly quite relatable. For me I found it very interesting to "listen" to these stories that I would find hard to listen to in real life. It made me reflect a bit on why I would find listening to these conversations in real life a bit hard. In any case, I really enjoyed reading this; it's a real gem.

A very fun and informative book. I really enjoyed learning about the different kinds of indexes, and have since been more motivated to read the indexes of other books (and, to be honest, been quite disappointed, knowing now what I could expect to find). Highly recommend this as a fun/quirky read about books and history.

Written by Thich Nhat Hanh, of "How To Walk, How To Love, How To Eat, ..." fame, this is quite a large book but nevertheless, very engaging. Consisting of several stories related to the life of the "historical" Buddha. I think this book is a particularly good entrypoint to this particular variant of Buddhist writing: namely stories that have a bit of magical character, but also attempt to be somewhat historical accuracy. One thing I found particularly interesting was to learn that early Buddhism, in this telling, was quite sexist. I really appreciated this detail being included; it helped me see that Buddhism, much like any approach, isn't perfect and needs a process of self-correction; which in my interpretation it does have. Overall, I loved this book. It's simple, easy, reading, has some nice messages and stories. But it's certainly not full of practical advice for mindfulness, but if you're keen on that you can you can check out the authors many other offerings!

I absolutely loved this book. I love semicolons and I use them all the time. But the important things I learned from this book was how malleable grammar used to be; and that people used to think of grammar as a form of self-expression, instead of a strict set of rules, as we consider it now. It's also written in a very fun and engaging way with plenty of jokes. The best book you're ever likely to read on grammar!

I loved Beowulf, by the same author; and this book promised to be a "modern" version of Beowulf. I have to say, I quite enjoyed it. I think I'm glad I read Beowulf by her *first*, as it gave me context for understanding this story. That said, I don't think that context is necessary; and this is a great read on it's own. If you could pick only one, I'd say read her version of Beowulf; but for a nice modern feminist retelling, you can't go wrong with this book!

This was a bit of a long read that took me a while to get into, but I did get their eventually. I certainly found it had some nice thoughts, but I found parts of the book to be oddly unnecessary. As a murder-mystery I can't say I enjoyed it (maybe because I didn't guess who the killer would be...) because I found all the voices to be a bit same-y; but maybe that was poor reading on my part. I think I'd probably recommend this book, and do agree with the essence of the assessments on the front. Worth reading just for the quirky telling.

An amazing story and great reading. I picked up this particular second-hand copy in Hay-on-Wye, a self-proclaimed "Book Town", and in it we found a photo of someone, probably the loved-one of a previous reader! The book itself is highly readable; in fact I could barely put it down and read it in just two days!

Exciting read! This is the first book I read on The Troubles, and while it doesn't cover the much of the background or the start, it does cover one the period of time by following a few quite interesting characters. I particularly enjoyed learning about the process some academics covered in the story used in order to try and record the history and details of the troubles, and the associated difficulty of doing that. Very interesting!