Emily Ratajkowski’s ‘My Body’ ★★★¾
Emily Ratajkowski, for those unacquainted, is an actress and model – with the kind of face and body that has defined her whole life. She rose to mainstream fame in Robin Thicke’s infamous Blurred Lines video, and has since starred in Gone Girl and graced the…
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A galvanizing account of the power of female rage: Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister ★★★★½
Women aren’t supposed to display rage. While men’s ire is ‘comprehensible’ and ‘rational’, angry women are chaotic, unhinged, unnatural. Of course, we’ve got a lot to be angry about. This double standard is just one more addition to a growing list of rage-inducing injustices. In…
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Nobody Told Me by Hollie McNish – a raw, funny and fascinating account of motherhood ★★★★
When Hollie McNish became a parent, she soon realised that there was a lot – an awful lot – that nobody talks about. So she sets about to change that in this compassionate, raw, truthful collection of poetry and prose about motherhood. The early days of…
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Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, an illuminating, brutal memoir of loss in the Deep South ★★★★½
At the beginning of her harrowing, lyrical memoir, Jesmyn Ward tells us: ‘telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.’ Through this slim book, Jesmyn humanizes these ghosts – the five dead young…
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Book Tag | Goodreads Was Wrong
This has been floating around the book blogosphere for a few years, but I believe the tag originated with Gabs About Books on YouTube. I have a love-hate relationship with Goodreads, and have used it inconsistently over the past 11 years (!!) and I’m intrigued…
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Pairings of fiction and non-fiction books
So, I initially wanted to participate in this as part of non-fiction November, but life happened – five months later, here I am! I really enjoyed reading other readers’ pairings last year, and I love the concept. Meng Jing, ‘Little Gods’ and Mei Fong, ‘One…
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Book Review | Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Three Women is a book that I waited for nine months on the library wait list. No kidding, I requested it back in May (when I was still hopeful that by the time my name was up the pandemic would be distant memory.) But here…
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Book Review | Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
This is not an easy book to read, but boy is it an important, timely book. Mikki Kendall meticulously dissects the tenets of women of colour (WOC) womanhood – with a large focus on African American womanhood, as this corresponds to her lived experience. With razor-sharp…
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Book Review | The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West
In an essay collection that has the dexterity to be both funny and devastating, Lindy West lays bare the current American cultural climate as one that is built on centuries-old misogyny and toxic masculinity. The book covers a lot more ground than I was expecting,…
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Book Review | Know My Name by Chanel Miller
This is a stunning, harrowing and incredibly powerful real-life account of Chanel Miller, once known only as ‘Emily Doe,’ who goes to a party on the Stanford University campus and wakes up hours later in a hospital bed.
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Book Review | Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
I think we can all agree that we’re living in extremely strange and unsettling times. But even before the onset of this global pandemic, our modern lives are lived in a shifting and precarious landscape that throws into question of conceptions of selfhood, truth, and…
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Book Review | Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell puts forward that we aren’t half as good at knowing people as we think we are. Most of the judgements we have learnt to make about strangers – in Gladwell’s case, anyone we don’t know well – are misguided. Most people, argues Gladwell,…
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Book Review | Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
In order to lead meaningful, fulfilling lives, we have to be comfortable with being vulnerable. That’s at the heart of Brené Brown’s thesis. Far from vulnerability being weakness, or practicing invulnerability as a shield to protect us from hurt, she explores how leaning into vulnerability…
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Book Review | The War on Women by Sue Lloyd-Roberts
Women. We make up half the human race, and yet for so many of us, our very existence is an abhorrence. Women’s lives are simply worth less than their male counterparts. Sue Lloyd-Roberts, a masterful journalist, doesn’t shy away from showing us the full spectrum…
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Book Review | Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
It might seem silly to be writing a memoir when you’re not yet 30. There’s a snobbery attached to memoirs, an idea that one needs to have lived a long and full life before even thinking about putting pen to paper to eternally memorialise the…
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Book Review | The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White
I’ve loved Deborah Frances-White’s podcast, The Guilty Feminist, since it was first released in 2015, and I was reading books about feminism for at least five years before that – so it’s fair to say that I’m the ideal audience for this book. And it…
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Book Review | Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman
Piper Kerman is out of college, restless, and haplessly in love with an older woman. The object of her affections is also involved in an international drug smuggling operation, and Piper – longing for a sense of adventure – willingly flies halfway around the world to…
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Book Review | Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I can’t remember the last time I finished a book in one sitting, one that had me bookmarking every other page and frantically scribbling down quotes. That is a true testament to this book – an in equal parts compelling and horrifying and searingly honest…
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Book Review | Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz
‘The Street of Eternal Happiness is two miles long. In the winter when its tangled trees are naked of foliage, you can see past their branches and catch a view of the city’s signature skyline in the distance…’
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NOVELS AND TEACUPS 