Category: Book of the Week

This week, I want to feature something different by touching on what is probably my favourite collection of poetry from everybody’s most marmite of poets, Philip Larkin. I am also breaking new ground for Book of the Week by covering something I have read, but have yet to review. The Whitsun Weddings is one of…

I must confess that this book lured me in with this particularly pretty cover, but the content of Night Train to the Stars is rather fantastical. Although the compilation bears the name of Miyazawa’s best-known Night Train to the Stars, this whole book is full of the author’s Japanese fairy tales. In particular, these fairy…

Modern novels with slightly meta titles can be rather hit or miss (especially debut works), but I think Really Good, Actually is a solid hit from what information I can source online about it. This humorous novel follows twenty-nine-year-old Maggie, a woman whose marriage ended after 608 days, or roughly 1.6 years. Now facing an…

Anonymous authors are always alluring because it often makes you wonder why someone refused to put their name to whatever they had written. I think it’s doubly surprising in the case of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, because it appears to be rather well-known. A Dutch novel at around 140-pages, it is not a long…

Big Sur is one of those books that I judged by the cover, mainly because I like this particular version’s fat and rounded wide font in tandem with the calming blue and abstract artwork. However, that was a very surface-level interest, because my interest in it grew more upon learning that it is really memories…

Everyone, especially Brits, like a good bit of dry humour and cynicism. Nothing seems to universally inspire a sense of cynicism quite like thinking about the state of the climate and how damned as a species we are. This makes McEwan’s satiric Solar—a novel about a jaded Nobel Prize physicist who pursues a solar-based solution…

Self-help books aren’t always my cup of tea, but that does not mean they’re worthless or unhelpful. It really depends on the content inside a self-help book, and what its overall objective and guidance pertains to. Kŭn-hu Yi’s If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy stands out because it appears to…

Debut works can say a lot about an author, and I think naming her first public work Nightbitch says a lot about Rachel Yoder as a modern, subversive, and perhaps even chaotic, author. This novel centres in on a struggling woman. Unable to make it as an artist, and positioned as a mother of a…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an immensely talented author who has received plenty of praise here on The Steady Read. She has a knack for slow and compelling narratives, and I assume Americanah will be full of the same slow-paced quality that appears in all her other works. The story follows Ifemelu and Obinze, two teenage…

Stephen King is an author who has basically passed me by for all my life. Every interaction with his works has come in the form of film adaptations for The Shining and IT—meaning I have next to no understanding about his writing style, the quality of his works, and all that. All I know is…