Category: Book Notes

  • Book Notes: Scattered All Over The Earth

    Yōko Tawada’s book Scattered All Over The Earth is set in a future where Japan (the land of sushi) has given way to the ocean and its rising tides. It manages to be both a story of climate refugees raising questions of national identity, as well as a poetic homage to languages. She has lived…

  • Book Notes: Sea of Tranquility

    This is the book you get when a speculative fiction author who wrote a book about a pandemic back in 2015 (which is still on my reading list!) writes another book about a pandemic, but this time during a very non-speculative and very real pandemic in 2020. It took me a good two weeks to…

  • Book Notes: The Nerves and Their Endings

    I have been putting off writing these book notes for quite a few weeks. It’s not that I didn’t like the book, quite the opposite. This collection of essays is mostly about the collapse of our climate, but also about the immigrant experience, especially during Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Personally, I thought I had…

  • Book Notes: Soft City

    The architect David Sim has managed to compile a manifesto on how livable cities ought to be designed. One of his main arguments is to soften the harsh form of built-up density by explicitly designing for as many exposures as possible. Exposing people to their fellow neighbours, be that the immediate neighbours living under the…

  • Book Notes: The Intimate City

    At the beginning of the pandemic Kimmelman, a New York Times architecture critic went on walks with architects, historians, writers, and others. While the conversations with architects were for the most part approachable, very few of them stuck in my memory. On the other hand, I enjoyed the walks with historians and local activists. Especially…