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Playground, by Richard Powers
Few pairings in literature can match the complex strangeness of the oceans and AI. And yet, in Playground, Powers binds them in a luminous duet – the book is both a love letter to the oceans and the billion lives that pulsate beneath, and a meandering through the history of AI. He evokes the ocean’s…
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Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr sent me on a literary whirlwind in 2016 after I read his previous book, All The Light We Cannot See. Hungry for more of Doerr’s words, I went on a feverish search for books that turned my soul inside out as much as this one had, only to meet with a spate of…
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Iceland
Our final day in Iceland was one of surprises – all of which were far milder in magnitude than the ones that disintegrated the first half of our week into days of waiting for the snowstorm to calm, were happy little ones, nuggets of Icelandic magic that fed our mounting unwillingness to leave this extraordinary…
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Seefeld in Tirol, Austria
“I think I see Venus!” our friend exclaimed as we emerged out of a tunnel into a snowy pasture. “Can we stay here for five more minutes please?” I stared at him in half horror. The skies had darkened, the wind was picking up and my hands were starting to get frosty; we had spent…
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Otherlands: A World in the Making, by Thomas Halliday
I waited a long while to read this. I was excited by the premise, and as much as it overwhelmed me to know I’d have to bear the weight of a book that covers 550 million years of Earth’s geological history in my hand as I laboured through it, I was consumed by a material…
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
This is probably one the best books I’ll read this year, and the year has barely started. It sweeps across decades with all the wistfulness of coming-of-age narratives, but surprises you with its grittiness and profundity as it progresses. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ is one of the most powerful lines spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth,…
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Folk, by Zoe Gilbert
There are some books that read like a fever dream. Wild, impossible, manic – but so very real all the same, you swear by it . Such is Folk, a meandering set of stories that slowly weave together an unforgettable tapestry of an island and its people. Characters we meet early on age fluidly across the…
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Word by Word, by Kory Stamper
Just when you think the dictionary is dying, in saunters Word by Word- at once a delightful romp through the vagaries of the English language, and an exclusive insider’s look into the workings of what is perhaps one of the world’s most taken-for-granted industries. Kory Stamper propels us through the many parts of a word…
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The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey
Disclaimer: The next few reviews are old ones I’d put up on Goodreads which I feel deserve a wider audience. Some of these books were old paperbacks, some were ebooks now relegated to the back of my Kindle, and some are still wilting away on my bookshelf. The Snow Child, in particular, was a lovely…
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The Prologue
Welcome aboard, all ye tired travellers seeking respite from the crippling abundance of internet gunk out there. This first post heralds what is to be an onslaught of views, reviews, travel tales and whimsies on record. It is both at once a disclaimer and an acknowledgement, a warning and an apology for the reads ahead.…
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the mythsmith 