Life is too short for superficial “how are you”s and small talk.
Read More
Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s + A Christmas Memory
Simple, beautiful prose by Truman Capote, presented in four short stories. While I was impressed with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Christmas Memory is my favourite of the lot (even though I found it to be the saddest tale of the lot).
Read More
Deborah Levy: Black Vodka
Review of Black Vodka by Deborah Levy: An intoxicating collection of 10 intense short stories that left me wishing for more.
Read More
Reading and watching Lolita
I read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov for the first time this summer. Shortly after, I watched the 1962 film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick with the screenplay written by Nabokov. Not surprisingly, reading Lolita and watching Stanley Kubrick’s take of the novel left me with different impressions of the convoluted tale. In both versions, the…
Read More
Into Thin Air
“Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.” – Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (1997) More than 10 years ago, I read Jon Krakauer’s memoir “Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster“. The book documents his 1996 expedition to Mount…
Read More
Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar
If you have all the time in the world, what would you do? I’d like to take the train from Brussels to Russia, travel across the latter on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then board the ferry at Vladivostok to Hokkaido where I’ll go hiking in the mountains, eat plenty of sashimi and soak in onsens (hot springs).…
Read More
A. M. Homes: Music for Torching
It was just past midnight. “About time to sleep,” I said to AB as I pulled Music for Torching by A. M. Homes from the shelves to read. It was around five in the morning when I turned the last page on the suburban nightmare that Homes created. Music for Torching is centred around an upper-class couple…
Read More
Mysterious orange blooms and the joys of letter-writing
Dear Reader, Summer’s here. Sort of – it’s being pouring the last few days in Brussels. But at least flowers are abloom and getting all the water they need. Do you like flowers? I recently bought a bunch of flowers at the market. Most of them had yet to blossom, hidden within their green pods. The…
Read More
Graham Greene: The Third Man + The Fallen Idol
Last December, I was in Vienna for the first time and it was for a project related to the historic Hotel Bristol. We had a soirée in the hotel’s Prince of Wales Suite – yup, it’s named after the prince himself and he stayed there with Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom he abdicated the…
Read More
Angelina Hue 