The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul by Dave Bruno My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dave Bruno decides one day that he is going to downsize his collection of personal things. Like a woodwork table he bought to do, well, woodwork but never…
Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Alexander Aciman My rating: 2 of 5 stars Twitterature is a relatively short book on retelling classics (e.g. Macbeth, Beowulf, Emma) through Twitter-ese, or language used on Twitter. Limited to 140 characters per tweet, each of these classics are retold in about 20 tweets, capturing their…
The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell My rating: 3 of 5 stars This novel chronicles Carrie’s senior year in high school. As expected of any novel depicting teenagers, it is filled with stereotypical characters, high school drama, booze and sex. The book does not shed much light on why Carrie is Carrie and how Carrie…
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See My rating: 4 of 5 stars This novel tells the story of a pair of sisters bred in Shanghai and later forced to escape the Japanese invasion of the late 1930s and lands in Los Angeles, USA. Through the book we see the fall from grace; from English-speaking polyglot rich…
Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this book, the narrator protagonist Robbie and his weed-smoking girlfriend Christie woke up one fateful morning to find the town of Walden Virginia, home to some 11,000 residents, enveloped in darkness. All forms of modern technology including radio, electricity…
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a short book on how much reading matters to Anna Quindlen. She talks about growing up a bookworm and how she loves af physical book way more than an ebook. She also provides some interesting book lists, such as…
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is nothing short of an inspiration to me; at twenty-four I’m entitled, still, to identity crises and being emo. In my quest to improve my life, so to speak, I picked up this book and found what Rubin has said to…
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Spoiler Alert! This book is worded in a highly accessible manner without compromising description accuracy and research fallacy. An overall well-researched and supported book introducing readers to the state of the art of child development including topics related and not limited…
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain My rating: 2 of 5 stars If this is Bourdain’s medium raw, I don’t want to begin to fathom what Bourdain tartare is like. While his couldn’t-care-less attitude contributed to his fame on TV, being somewhat a…
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai My rating: 4 of 5 stars The narrator very eloquently tell the tale of his struggling childhood. The power struggle of the adults in Sri Lanka is mirrored by his struggle amongst his large extended family of cousins and by his segregated classes in school. As a schoolboy the narrator…
