Stephen King may be known as the Master of the Macabre, but many people forget that he can be equally skilled when it comes to drama and crime fiction: I’m talking The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption (from his Four Seasons series). There have been a couple of hits and misses, like the lacklustre…
Recently I reorganised my bookshelf (it took five hours wtf) and set aside some stuff I knew I wouldn’t be reading to be donated. These are mostly books I got from events, like How to Plan A Wedding, Tropical Spa Scrubs, etc. But when it came down to really giving away my fiction/non-fiction collection, I…
It’s okay if you haven’t heard of Q&A by Vikas Swarup. I certainly hadn’t before. But I’m sure you’ll know the movie adaptation of this book: it won 8 out of the 10 Academy Awards it was nominated for, and was a critically acclaimed success, raking in over 300mil against a budget of 15mil. I’m…
My first Philippa Gregory book was The Other Boleyn Girl. The acclaimed novel, which revolved around the life of one of England’s most infamous queen consorts – Anne Boleyn – was jam-packed with tales of intrigue; of power hungry men (and women) who’d stop at nothing for influence and the throne, and of dangerous political…
I think I have compulsive book buying disorder. … there’s no such thing, I just made that up. xD They should have a term for it though – that high feeling when you buy new books and smell the pages. Euphoric. Yes, yes, I know I’ve said I’m not going to buy new ones until…
What are the odds that you’d find an American-Jew, working as a crime reporter on the police beat, in one of the biggest newspapers in Japan? Second to none, maybe, but this is what Jake Adelstein did for 12 years. And boy, does he have a story to tell in his memoir, Tokyo Vice. Many…
Ah, film adaptations from novels. Sometimes I’m guilty of watching them before buying the books. Case in point: Lord of the Rings (which turned out to be my favourite book series of all time), the Shawshank Redemption and The Hunger Games. World War Z is another such example. After seeing Brad Pitt in action –…
As a woman, it’s hard not to be affected after reading Burned Alive. Told as a memoir, it chronicles the life of Souad, a victim of an attempted honor killing. As a young girl growing up in 1950s Palestine, where the rule of men was law and the women were sometimes treated worse then animals,…
Now that I’m freelancing, I finally have time to read books – and I’ve read a couple of them over the last few weeks. The ironic thing is, I don’t have time to write about them, since I’ve been busy with housework and freelancing projects. So before I lose the plot, so to speak, let’s…
…to a bibliophile like me, at least! What better place to spend eternity than to be surrounded by books? :P Even so, I’ve avoided coming to the annual Big Bad Wolf sale for the last two years, simply because I have so many unread books in my library. The temptation proved too much to resist…
I’ve always been a horror/fantasy novel fan, but since hitting my 20s, I’ve taken to reading historical fiction. I like history, but the way it’s presented is often bland, boring, blah. This is where novels like Equal of the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani, come in. Set in 16th century Iran under the rule of Tahmasb Shah,…
Many women rulers have often been unfairly represented or demonised in history. In a patriarchal society, it is always easy to blame the woman, but hey: we’ve had two World Wars, genocides, countless atrocities, and I’m sure we all know who the leaders behind those were lol. In fact, my friends and I used to…
