Category: Review

I was walking along Sydney Road with a bit of time to kill. I had a pie, walked through Princess Park and browsed through a Socialist Bookstore. The store is pretty new, and initially I was curious why it had been set up at all. Inside everything was political, the staff appeared to be young…

After reading Zorba – twice, because for some reason I thought I would process more from doing so – I decided to read another Nikos Kazantzakis book. For one, the author fascinates me. He story of excommunication, Nobel nominations, travels and literary standing is fodder enough, but the fact that he is also Cretan really…

Now this was a good book. This almost autobiographical tale follows a young Michael Lewis as he winds up on the office floor of Saloman Brothers, just as their hugely successful bond trading business begins to collapse. Michael Lewis is an engaging writer and the characters here ranging from a loyal Italian wall street visionary…

Following on from Hari’s other book, stolen focus, I picked up his earlier work Lost Connections. I was expecting to read about changing society, what I didn’t realise though was this book was actually focused on Depression. Like Hari’s other work, this book does a great job pulling readers into the emotional story hook line…

I picked up this book in Chania. I was happy with this pick because it was in Greek and English and I was just getting into poetry so this married up a new passion with an old passion of wanting to improve my Greek. I took ages to read this book, reading almost a poem…

Stolen Focus explores the modern factors that impact our attention spans. With a very human touch, Johann Hari presents a book that weaves in his own experiences, interviews with experts, and the most seductive modern research on the topic. Stolen Focus is anchored by Hari’s own battles with improving his attention by tracking the author’s…

Burnout to Brilliant is a light and fluffy pop-science book I enjoyed reading. Here, Dr Marny Lishman attacks the topic of Burnout in two parts, firstly describing what burnout is and secondly explaining what to do about it. It’s punchy, digestible and likely what people experiencing burnout actually need. There are a lot of short…

A Cook’s Tour chronicles Anthony Bourdain’s global adventures during the filming of his first television show. Each chapter focuses on a different leg of the journey taking us from Portugal to Vietnam and describing the food and people Bourdain encounters along the way. It’s the style of writing that shines, as usual, with Bourdain’s work.…

Lucky Jim tracks the professional and romantic struggles of Jim Dixon, an academic, as he navigates the stuffy English social scene in the mid-1900s. Jim is stuck in a world of subtle social queues and of a social anxiety that afflicts everyone just below the surface. All this of course is present even before Jim’s…

The Buddha of Suburbia tells the coming of age story of Karim, a second generation Indian migrant in 1970s England. However, oddly, the main character Karim never seems to need growing up but rather he presents as a fully formed observer making sense of the world rather than himself. Like many second generation migrants, Karim…

I’ve always enjoyed David Mitchell’s work and comedic tone. I’ve watched him on Peep Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look and of course on Would I Lie to You. Over the course of about 15 years and across these very different works, one thing has struck me about him which I can’t say about too…

Heritage Aesthetics is a collection of poetry from British-Cypriot writer Anthony Anaxogorou. It was one of the more modern poetry collections that I have read, and I enjoyed the contemporary feeling of the themes and writing. As I read this book, I feel that I placed less pressure on myself to absorb or analyse pieces,…

Meditations turned out to be a wonderful read, full of insightful philosophical thoughts, most of which were still as relevant today as when they were originally written almost 2000 years ago. The book is a translation of the writings of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor. Originally written in Greek, the writings were preserved and handed…

Sapiens endeavored to tell the story of us, from a starting point much further back than we may be used to. This anthropological deep dive into the development of human culture and society was a fascinating and enjoyable read. For a story so large I was delighted by the clear writing style and simple structure…

You can probably last about a day in Lisbon without hearing about Pessoa, fortunately for me I was in the city for longer than that and has the opportunity to learn more about the great man. Statues, tour guides, street signs and souvenir shops preach his greatness so when I was given the opportunity to…

This book represented my introduction to Noam Chomsky and after hearing his name thrown around for years, I was keen to read some of his original work. I came into this book expecting a dissenting voice and I got one, although not the one that I was expecting. The first thing I noticed, and was…

Well this was a weird one to say the least. I hadn’t really had any exposure to classical literature and picked this book up with that in mind. I found it at a bookstore, noticed it was short and included a second piece on the Allegory of the Cave, which I had at least heard…

The book was fine. I’ll be honest, I had higher hopes for Slow Horses and in the end I reckon that the genre just isn’t quite for me. I bought the book on a lunch break. I was specifically looking for something light that would become a good bedtime companion, and ironically wanted to avoid…