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A wise and beautiful book from Deary—his voice and prose was lovely, and the book’s thoughtful and kind exploration of our natural fragility to be deeply necessary. 

A thrilling mix of food, gender and identity politics, Japanese culture, and self growth. A longer read, but golly, one I enjoyed every page of. 

One of the best essay collections I’ve read. Rothfeld’s writing is incredible and compelling. The central thesis of the book is one that I found provocative and compelling and has be considering my relationship with minimalism. I will say, though, the essay on mindfulness and meditation felt substantial worse than the others, and Rothfeld herself commits many of the things she later criticises of other authors in her essay on consent. Still, highly recommended.

A lot of fun. Bless Munroe for this delightful book. 

A beautiful and meaningful collection of essays. There is a magic to Morton’s writing. 

Blaine sets out the curious case of Peter Dutton; a person seemingly motivated by hate and fear more than anything else. A politician who has frightening implications for the state of Australia’s political system.

Montell is a great writer, but I found the book heavy on anecdote, memoir and pop culture and light on things I have not read or heard before. It would have been interesting to tease out some of the complications and nuances of these cognitive biases.

These are, objectively, mostly awfully over the top and not terribly useful ways of presenting information. They are presentations of ideas with the design setting turned up to 11. Which is to say I loved every moment with this book. 

A clarion call about the incompatibility if not out right impossibility of fighting climate change within existing capitalist frameworks. The bits of the books that were concerned with establishing whether or not Marx was an advocate for green degrowth were pretty dull and I thought unnecessary to the broader point that Saito makes. 

As a big fan of the recent films I wasn’t sure what to expected by going back to the original source. In short, my eyes have turned deepest, darkest blue and I yearn to ride a Maker. I loved the book.

Heck, this was a grim, grim, grim compelling read. A necessary reminder about the irredeemable evil of nuclear weapons and how quickly life as we know it could be over because of these evil weapons. 

This was definitely better than their work-focussed book and so I wish I had just read this. I think the value of design thinking is powerful and I hope some form of it is being taught to kids today. For those of us coming to the concept later in life, books like these are helpful. 

Another great cookbook from Anna Jones – I’ve made two recipes from this and they’ve both worked really well. It’s a perfect book for those wanting to eat more plants. 

Gay writes with beauty and such humanity. The thesis of this book, even ignoring its excellent execution, is such a valuable and important idea: we all of us should practice the art of being receptive to joy and delight. 

A stunning, haunting portrait of a country that seems lost and set on self-destruction. The harshness, oppression, and corruption experienced by its people is heartbreaking. Kostyuchenko’s writing is incredible, necessary and deeply affecting. 

A surreal nightmare of a book which is fitting giving modern work is its subject. The calm, measured prose does a wonderful job of creating a bizarre, confusing feel, aided by (at first disturbing then I eventually figured out what was happening) abrupt and unmarked transitions between different character PoVs.  

A fantastic book; one that tackles a topic that has been on my mind for the past few years—I even wrote an essay on the topic. Numbers have invaded our life and our thinking to such a degree that they distort debate, discussion and decisions. Being conscious of the power of numbers is the first step to a healthier relationship with digits small and large. Special acknowledgements to the fun little personal anecdote from the authors – set apart from the text itself – as well as the end of chapter summaries. 

An important essay – both so far as form goes (the afterward in my edition comments on the rather Japanese structure, itself a demonstration of the themes Tanizaki-san writes about) and content. I’ll never quite look at the interplay of light and darkness and shadow in the same ways every again. 

The ability to set a novel from the viewpoint of a non-human has always fascinated me; it can be quite hard to do well, but I think Hoke manages to pull off a convincing sense of otherness. We can both relate to and be curious about our mountain cat narrator.n And I think the book largely avoids falling into an overly anthropomorphic view point. A brilliant and contained story. 

A book of such profound and genuine wisdom; the life of a monk (and the periods both before and after) are written with such grace, kindness and humour. Beautiful and moving. 

A dark (and darkly fun) novel about loss and the ways in which we cope. I was impressed with the clarity and strength of Sámano Córdova’s prose and character work and am very keen to read more of their work.