This month, I’ve been thinking about what makes a memorable book. As I’ve become more discerning in my literary tastes, I’ve found that the books I’m drawn to, and the recommendations I seek out, are the ones that people can’t stop thinking about. Some books I’ve been recommended in this…

1. The Memory Police | Yoko Ogawa | 1994

A Summary (No Spoilers)… We follow the young lives of Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig, who come of age in the chaos of World War 2. One. Daniel LeBlanc is the locksmith of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Fearing the worst, Daniel creates miniature models of the streets of Paris and Saint-Malo…

Do you ever finish a book and think “This is a very fitting title”? I had that feeling with A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and again with Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. Taken from Walt Whitman’s poem, A Clear Midnight, I felt like the title perfectly captured the unfolding…

Read the full blast here. — I read voraciously this month, my choices swayed by Bookstagram’s recent favourites — in particular, Convenience Store Woman, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Klara and the Sun. I was especially enthused by short books, and in that spirit, my current read is a collection of short horror stories written at the…

A Summary (No Spoilers)… Hotel Du Lac is the quaint and quiet estabishment to which we follow our disgraced heroine. A writer of romance novels, Edith is at a crossroads, and the musty, veal-coloured halls of the hotel aren’t having the restorative effect she needs. She meets a cast of peculiar women, all trapped…

“Who doesn’t come with enough baggage to bring down an airplane?” — A Summary (No Spoilers) Lori is a therapist who’s seen it all — denial, narcissism, self-destructive behaviour… There’s a lot her clients have to work through, but Lori is an expert, cultivating hope in hopeless situations, and getting the most shallow of her clients to look deep within themselves. When Lori finds herself struggling…

The Classics Edition — Read the full issue here. This Classics Edition is inspired by all the time I spent this month loitering around second hand book stores. At the beginning of the month, I bought myself some dusty copies of Catch 22 and Barchester Towers. I love buying old editions of classics — the ones with yellow and…

☆☆☆☆☆ — I am one of the many many kids who grew up with David Attenborough documentaries and got wild ideas about saving rare habitats and becoming friends with orangutans. …