Emma Goto

After reading Daily Rituals, I figured I’d stay on the same theme and I also picked up My Morning Routine. I feel like it addressed basically all of the criticisms I had with Daily Rituals - namely the lack of diversity, and doing more of an analysis of the things in common with peoples' routines, instead of just showing one routine after another.

It also touches on what it's like to be a parent with a morning routine (for both genders), even some examples of how Ramadan can affect your morning routine, and also how a partner can affect it (since it's not like we tend to do these in isolation) so overall the information in it felt accessible to more people.

As a brief summary of each of the chapters: - How to wake up in the morning - ideally waking up before your alarm, getting in some sunshine, exercise, not using the snooze button and putting your alarm in another room if need be to make sure that you actually get out of bed - Focus and productivity in the morning - don't check your emails the first thing, try and find one important thing to get out of the way first rather than letting notifications from other people dictate your morning for you - Morning workouts - as we all know, exercise is really, really good for you - Morning meditation - that meditation and mindfulness is quite a good thing. For those that are against the idea, even something like focusing on grinding your coffee beans without multitasking on something else is a way to get a bit of mindfulness in - Evening routines - prepare for the next day by laying out your clothes, making a to-do list, cleaning up your home, meditating or journalling to wind-down - Sleep - consistent wake and sleep times - Parents - a chapter dedicated to how children will inevitably impact your morning routine. Waking up before your kids to get in some personal time is good, staying off of your devices so that you are more present, and reminding yourself that this is only temporary - Self-care - giving yourself me-time in the morning, and how having a morning routine can give you a senes of accomplishment to start off the day and is a form of self-care in itself - Different environments - sticking to a morning routine when you are travelling, but really don't beat yourself up if you find that you can't (especially if you are on holiday) - Adaption - you shouldn't feel bad if you can't stick to your morning routine perfectly (and let that negatively impact the rest of your day). At worst, try and focus on completing one or two things, like exercise

The thing I found the most useful was one interviewee mentioned that they have their router settings set to turn the internet off at a certain time. I decided to do the same thing (my internet now turns off at 8pm) which has been a fairly good way to kick us off the TV / laptops at night. Would recommend.

The book is nothing ground-breaking - it’s just giving a bunch of examples of how having a morning routine works for different people. But it can be useful if you need a kick up the butt to improve your own. And it's good if you can find little things that other successful are doing that might jog inspiration for your own morning routine.

After visiting my husband's hometown of Shimane last year, I noticed how much the town seemed to love Lafcadio Hearn, a writer who lived in Shimane only for a short 15 months. I also found it ironic that Hearn wrote about Japan (in English) to share Japanese culture with the western world - and yet today his writings seem to be best-known in Japan itself, rather than abroad. (At the very least, I had never heard of him).

However! I did have a couple of commenters let me know that they did know of Hearn, and I told myself I should give myself a bit of self-education on the topic sometime so that I could know of him too, which prompted me to pick up his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Published in 1894, this was the first of many books he published on Japanese culture.

The book starts off with Hearn describing his first impressions upon arriving in Japan. Funnily, it almost bears similarities to what a first-time traveller might experience today - even in the late 1800s, there were already "don't touch this" signs in English (Japan getting tired of the tourists already). And Hearn was enchanted by the the Japanese aesthetic, which he admits is because the text on shopfronts being in Japanese just looks cool (Super Dry, anyone?)

He then heads off to Kamakura and Enshoshima to check out the temples there (a place still much-beloved by tourists) and even the cave down the bottom of Enoshima Island.

One rather topical section for me was when Hearn explained the Sai-no-kawara - a Buddhist story about how children are doomed to stack stones along a river, unable to continue their journey into the afterlife. I had coincidentally first heard of that story just a month prior when I hiked Mt Ono and came across a small shrine with writing about that story on the trail.

Finally he arrives in Shimane. From the town of Matsue he spots Mt Daisen, "a glorious spectre towering to the sky" - which I didn't realise you could see from the town, plus "a beautiful little islet in the lake" or Yomega-shima, a small island on Matsue's Lake Shinji.

Next it's a visit to the Izumo Shrine and a resort town called Inasa. He mentions the "Chihiki-noiha", which I think is a reference to a rock with a torii gate on it, now known as Benten-jima.

He also takes a visit to Shimane's Kaka-no-Kukedo sea caves - which I had never heard of - where the previously mentioned sai-no-kawara story makes a reappearance. In the cave there are statues of Jizo, and many piles of stone - "Only at night do the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the feet of Jizo". And it is said that in the early morning the little footprints of children can be seen, before they dry up and disappear in the heat of the day.

I actually found this chapter particularly compelling, and it seems like I'm not the only one, as I found a blog post from 11 years ago where a Matsue resident chose to visit those caves, inspired by Hearn. Maybe I'd like to check it out someday too.

Towards the end of the book Hearn goes on a long tangent about the various varieties of supernatural foxes that live in Japan which starts to lose me a little. In Matsue he is known for being a big fan of the Jozan Inari Shrine, which he has a paragraph on earlier in the book - Matsudaira Naomasa of the Matsue Domain established the shrine after a fox spirit came to him and said that he would protect the capital from fire if a house was built for him within the castle grounds.

He also recommends a Inari temple in Yoshiwara, Yokohama which I wouldn't mind checking out, although I'm not sure it exists any longer (AI points out that this area could possibly have been destroyed as a result of the either the Kanto Earthquake or WW2 firebombing). I suppose this fixation on foxes is the starting point of his future writings, as from what I've heard much of his writing ends up being focused on introducing Japanese yokai and other such supernatural tales.

Overall, Hearn had a very positive opinion of the Japanese people. He's surprised how even sailors in Japan - who you might expect to be a little more "rough" - were still very gentle and polite. And that in 14 months in Izumo, he never saw any sort of domestic violence, or raised voices during an argument. He seems to be a little naive in taking this at face value though - when I would think that there would have been for sure plenty of that going on behind closed doors. I would assume that this very positive impression is part of the reason why the Japanese people love him today, though.

Nonetheless this was a rather charming book. I would love to see a side-by-side of his writing, together with what that place he's describing looks like today (if it still exists). It seems even Einstein and Charlie Chaplin had the same idea and were inspired to visit Japan based on Hearn's work. Alas I don't think there is such a thing in English yet, but I would bet there is plenty of resources in Japanese available for that.

This book is a long list of different rituals and morning routines that people followed (mostly famous artists and writers). It mostly skews towards older or long-dead people - I think I would have liked a bit more of a range in time periods so we can take a look at how people manage their routines nowadays with the advent of technology like phones and laptops.

There are also some fun facts that pop up, like how Beethoven always counted his coffee beans (60 per cup) and just generally a lot of alcohol and drug consumption going on. But other than 1 - 2 pages per person, there isn't really anything else to the book. I suppose you are left to draw your own conclusions on what makes a good routine, or to try and find some commonalities between them.

There were also two types of routines in terms of discipline - some believed in writing or doing their art every day, no matter what, while others did it whenever they felt like it. Same goes for early birds or night owls. Quite a few would stop work by dinner and then enjoy the rest of the night with their families, some only did a max 3 hours per day, while others would get hooked on their craft and continue all night. Plenty would take long walks to help spark ideas or for the exercise (not so much running or weight lifting - although I suppose that's a more recent invention).

I found Hemingway's routine also interesting - to stop writing at a place where you know what's coming next, rather than just continuing on with that thread. I'd heard that advice before, but for programming (i.e. don't get into the flow and code all night until you get stuck on a bug - instead you should stop at a place where you know how to solve the next step). It's hard to stop, but makings it easier to get started again the next day.

One thing that did stand out for me was that these people generally only focused on one thing. They might spend some of their time replying to mail and doing admin tasks, but otherwise generally focused on the one thing, and had 1 - 2 sessions of it per day (broken up by a meal). Deep work / focus time is important, and I suppose you can't spread your time too thinly across too many interests, or you won't achieve success?

The author also stepped on a bit of a landmine with this book, as less than 20% of the people he featured were women.

Maybe if you consider the patriarchy, there would have been less successful and famous women 100 - 200 years ago to have sources to refer to for this book. So statistically speaking the percentage might be what you'd expect, but I can also get why reviewers of the book might be disappointed with that.

What stood out to me about this though is how it's taken for granted that these great men are propped up by their wives. One wife worked full-time to pay the bills (to give her husband time to create) and yet she still made him breakfast before she went. And there was another story around how a husband and wife decided to take it in turns in who would get to stay home and write, while the other worked to pay the bills. The wife ended up famous - and the author made the off-hand comment that this meant the husband never got his chance to write. Kind of ironic considering that probably happened to plenty of the hidden women in this story.

It seemed the author did take the criticism onboard and wrote a follow-up book specifically centred around women and their routines.

A fantasy book with some great plot twists. The story centres around Neema, a High Scholar for the Empire who belongs to the Raven faction. The setting of the book is that each person dedicates themself to a particular animal god - a fox, bear, raven, ox, monkey, tiger or hound. There's also the magic-using dragon faction that are kind of mysterious and live on their own little island.

In a way this reminds me of the faction system in Divergent, or like joining a house in Harry Potter. Your faction also determines what sort of work you do, and basically seems to determine your entire personality as well. Foxes are always playing tricks on other people, oxes are sturdy and reliable, the ravens are smart, and so on. In that sense the characters become quite the stereotype, which I don't really like.

Every 24 years, each of the factions choose a candidate and they fight it out amongst themselves to choose the next leader of the empire. Again this seems to call back to some other YA books that do similar things (maybe like Red Rising or Hunger Games - although not quite a fight to the death).

Partway through it also becomes a murder mystery. The author Antonia Hodgson previously wrote historical crime novels (this is her debut Fantasy), so I could take a guess that this is something that falls in her area of expertise. I would say the twists are this book's strong point.

I did really find this book quite interesting and I sped through in one day, but the funny thing for me although the characters are a bunch of adults, it almost teeters on feeling like a YA novel. Neema is 34, and all the candidates fighting to become the next emperor are probably also in their late 20s to 30s. Which makes sense - you wouldn't really want a 16 year old to be on the throne.

Yet, it doesn't quite read that way. If you told me Neema was 20, I would totally believe it. Although there's flashbacks to things Neema did when she was in her 20s and interactions she had with other characters in their childhood to help build this idea that she's in her 30s, it's somehow missing that maturity that I might expect out of a 34 year old. And I find it similar with the other characters as well (there's some bullying and a "will they or wont they" romance subplot which wouldn't be out of place with some angsty teens). I think the use of common YA tropes doesn't help.

Nonetheless though, otherwise a really entertaining read! It's made it on to the 2026 nomination lists for both the Hugo Award and Locus Award, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".

On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.

The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.

I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.

And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.

He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.

And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.

(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).

The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.

He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.

After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).

Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.

PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?

For some, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (or officially The International Military Tribunal for the Far East) is considered as a form of “victor’s justice”. History is written by the victors, and so you could argue that the Americans were free to blame Japan for the terrible things that they did in WW2, without any sort of introspection on their own actions. On the other hand, Japan’s treatment of its prisoners of war and enemy civilians during WW2 was despicable, and there needed to be some accountability for their actions.

Judgement at Tokyo provides a run-through of all the major events of the trial, as well as introducing us to its 11 judges (representing 11 of the countries that fought against Japan in the war). Of note is Chinese judge Mei Ju-ao, who was seeking justice after the events of the Nanjing Massacre, as well as Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who was the only judge that argued for all of the defendants on trial to be acquitted of their crimes. I’ll admit I knew very little about the trials and just imagined it was a “America vs Japan” type of situation, so I appreciated the author providing a broader perspective by focusing on the non-white judges.

Overall the trial was quite messy. The biggest elephant in the room was that while the US wanted to see justice for the war crimes that Japan had committed, Emperor Hirohito was deemed off-limits. And the defendants were quite loyal to Hirohito as well - so there was quite a weird dance of them trying to say how much they respected the Emperor and how much they would listen to his opinion if he gave it, while also trying to paint the Emperor as someone that didn’t have any say in how the war progressed and so was not culpable at all.

Australia was quite pissed off by this (with the US and UK trying to tell them to shut up about it), and civilians back home in America were not happy about it either, but the US (particularly General MacArthur, who was in charge of the occupation in Japan) decided they needed the Emperor to stay in power to keep a stable, democratic Japan.

The author points out that Shigenori Togo, Minister of Foreign Affairs during WW2, suffered the most injustice out of all the defendants during the trial, as although he was part of the Prime Minister’s cabinet and in the room when a lot of decisions were made - he was against Japan starting a war with America, and pressed for Japan to surrender earlier as well.

In the end, seven Class A war criminals were sentenced to death and hanged, and sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment (but then paroled within 10 years). Others were imprisoned awaiting another trial, but eventually released. Nobusuke Kishi was one of these men - imprisoned for his involvement at Manchuria, he would go on to become prime minister, and then eventually his grandson becoming Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

Today, Japanese conservatives continue to downplay or deny war crimes like the Nanjing Massacre or the use of comfort women. And in Japan’s case its main conservative political party, the LDP, has near-continuously held power since the 50s, so this is not a minority view.

The main thought I’m left pondering after I finished this book is how could things have been done differently to prevent this outcome?

The trial made clear the war crimes Japan committed and convicted and executed the leaders at the top - arguing that they should bear ultimate responsibility for the actions of the people below them. Maybe that satisfied some people who needed to see at least someone blamed for the atrocities that happened during WW2. But they did not manage to eradicate or change the opinions of those that thought Japan waged war for justifiable reasons. And when alleged war criminals like Kishi would go on to become prime minister, and eventually his grandson Abe too, you can imagine that whatever strongly-held beliefs that Kishi had about the war would have been firmly passed down the generations as well. Not to mention with a bungled or seemingly unfair trial, it’s also given the conservatives of today plenty to be angry about with “victor’s justice”. Would it have even been possible to do the trial truly fairly?

Also I’m not sure I could imagine the US completely rooting out the conservatives of Japan, because it’s not like they would have wanted the left in power either - that’s a touch too close to communism for America, right? (Actually I learned later from Wikipedia that CIA was even covertly helping to keep the LDP in power, to prevent those pesky communists). And of course the risk of destabilising Japan when they have a nearly-communist China looming on their doorstep was probably not a good idea either.

Japanese politicians today also continue to make visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where 2 million war dead (including war criminals) are enshrined. Ostensibly they argue that they are just visiting the 2 million war dead to pay their respects. But the shrine is pretty clear on where it stands, with a memorial dedicated to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal for his dissent against the trial. While he gave some valid points on the legality and fairness of the trial, his dissent was also biased by the fact he seemed to unfairly dismiss eyewitness evidence - the author notes that Pal went on to also deny some evidence of the Holocaust.

The author mentions that in preparation for this book he had his assistants translate tons of historical documents from Chinese and Japanese into English so that he could read through them, even if he didn’t use them directly. It’s clear there was really a lot of effort put into this book. It’s a really definitive overview of the trial, and in my opinion not overly biased towards America, even if the author is American. He takes care to point out the racist attitudes still very prevalent back then in the 40s, as well as the fact that the Chinese government does have things to gain from playing up the Nanjing massacre as well.

From that perspective, it’s hard to give this any less than a 5. However if I rate this book in terms of how much I enjoyed it, it would probably lean closer to a 4. It took me a good 2 weeks to finally get around to finishing this, and it was a bit of a slog at times. So I think I’ll go in the middle and give this one a 4.5/5.

Heated Rivalry, if you haven't already heard of it, is about a pair of closeted hockey players who spend 10 years having an on-off relationship with each other. It was released as a TV series at the end of 2025 and really blew up online. It's gotten really good reviews so I was keen on watching it, but it doesn't seem to be streaming in Japan at the moment, sadly. So I decided to give the book a read instead!

I usually tend to hate-read romance novels - they're great for turning your brain off, but I don't always find the quality of them to be that high. Heated Rivalry is actually quite good though. I think this comes down to the stakes being a lot higher than your regular romance novel. One of the main characters is from Russia, a pretty anti-LGBT country, and the pair play in the NHL - which in the real world has never had a single person come out as LGBT. Which is a pretty insane statistic when you think about it. The author has mentioned that players have reached out to her privately after the release of the book, so it's not like there are actually no LGBT players - it's just the culture doesn't really make anyone feel comfortable in coming out.

In saying all that, Heated Rivalry is quite heated, so there's plenty of R18+ scenes. Maybe I'm getting old but I skimmed over them a bit - but either way I wouldn't really recommend you read this if you aren't into that sort of stuff.

This was author Yume Kitasei's debut novel - I actually read one of her other books (Saltcrop) and liked it enough to go back and read this one. The plot revolves around Asuka, a half-Japanese, half-American girl who is part of the crew on a spaceship that is setting out to colonise the distant planet X, leaving behind an Earth that is doomed due to the effects of climate change.

I always like it when sci-fi books do something different, so the unique twist in this book is that the space ship's crew (of about 80) consists entirely of people who are equipped to be able to get pregnant and give birth (i.e. mostly women, but also at least one trans man and another with they/them pronouns). And they are all required to try and get pregnant at least once (via sperm they have stored on the ship), with the aim of eventually getting to their destination planet and being able to raise a new generation there. In a sense mandatory pregnancy is a little dystopian... but at least all the crew knew that fact when they signed up for it.

The plot starts on the ship, but has several flashbacks to when Asuka was a student attending the astronaut candidate school. Some of the friendships she made there with her fellow students continued onto the ship, so it's nice to get a bit of backstory. The main plot on the ship itself is actually a rather interesting whodunnit where Asuka goes around trying to figure out who was responsible for a murder. There's also an all-knowing AI onboard who conveniently is unable to give away confidential information (so the AI knows who committed the murder but is unable to tell anyone) which is a bit too convenient if you ask me - should have a clause baked in for crimes or something 😂

Asuka as a character has some big complexes. For one, she has a lower status on board the ship, having been assigned as an "alternate" astronaut who does odd-jobs instead of having a fixed role. For two, some issues around feeling betrayed by her mother. And for three, while she is being sent as the representative astronaut from Japan, she doesn't feel like a "real Japanese" - having been born and raised in the US, and not being able to fluently speak the language. The author is similarly Japanese/American so I assume this is drawn from her own lived experiences.

Writing it out like that makes it seem like Asuka might be a bit of a whiney character, but I think it sort of borders on the edge of just making her seem more relatable - if anything she grows throughout the course of the book, so I'd really like a sequel just to see her becoming a more self-confident character.

The pregnancy detail is kind of interesting. When you think about it, attempting to have babies ready to go in tubes when you get to the destination planet (Interstellar-style) is a pretty tall order so maybe it would make sense that you do one step removed from that and have as many "wombs" (for want of a better word) available to go on the ship. With how male-dominated STEM and the space industry is, it is a little hard to imagine that concept ever actually taking off (pun intended), but hey, that's the fun part about sci-fi.

The book follows Bertie, a trans man employed by Germany’s Institute for Sexual Science, before and after the events of WW2.

In my mind I had naively assumed that LGBT rights improved with a mostly upward trend (albeit maybe with some flat bits) as society got more progressive over time. But actually there was work being done in pre-WW2 Germany to try and improve the lives of trans people, which was all reversed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s.

The founder of the Institute, Magnus Hirschfield, coined the terms transsexual and transvestite (although these terms are now outdated they are used in the book for historical accuracy), and is featured as a minor character in the book. He also implemented a “transvestite pass” to allow trans people to present as their gender identity (as cross-dressing was illegal at the time). The main character, Bertie, works at Hirschfield's Institute, and helps gives tours to people interested in learning more about LGBT topics.

Now it’s not like things were perfect - there was still discrimination and harassment - but there’s quite a hopeful tone at the beginning of the book. But unfortunately this is also a book about WW2, which always gets quite depressing. With the Nazis coming into power, they quickly overturn any sort of progress, burn all the books and research in the Institute and even use the previously issued passes to root out trans people.

And then what’s really a kick in the teeth - when WW2 ends and America liberates Germany, they really have no interest in helping LGBT people (if anything, they share a lot of views with the Nazis). So while Jewish people and other minorities are freed from the concentration camps, those guilty of LGBT related “crimes” instead continue to serve out a prison sentence instead of being freed as well.

The author has put a lot of care and research into painting a picture of what living as a trans person might have been like around this time in Germany, so I think it is a really valuable book. So in that sense, I feel a bit bad to give this one a 4 star rating. I thought it was an interesting and informative read, albeit a little depressing, but not one I would necessarily whole-heartedly recommend everyone to read (which is what classifies a book as a 5 star for me).

It is a very well-known fact that Shakespeare wrote a play named Hamlet. Less well-known is the fact that he had a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11. People theorise that Hamnet's death in some way inspired Shakespeare's writing of Hamlet. (As for the difference in spelling - apparently Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeably used as names).

The author takes this, and a few other key facts that are known about Shakespeare - that he grew up in Stratford with a glove-maker for a father, married a local farmer's daughter named Agnes, and split his time between Stratford and London where he wrote his plays - and fills in the gaps. She imagines what sort of woman, wife and mother Agnes must have been, the opposition they had from their family considering the 8-year age gap (Shakespeare was 18 and Agnes 26) and their grief when they lost their son Hamnet.

Agnes is written as a very strong character - she has to be, considering Shakespeare is away for long stretches of a time as he writes his plays in London. And also as a bit of a free spirit as she goes traipsing about the countryside looking for medicinal herbs. There are some slight fantasy elements as she can also at times see glimpses of the future. This is all completely fictionalised but it's such beautiful writing and a worthy successor (loosely, of sorts) to Shakespeare's legacy.

The book was originally published in 2020, but I only heard about it more recently. I assume it picked up a lot of buzz after it was adapted into a movie last year, and then nominated at the Oscars. I haven't had the chance to see the movie, but the actress who played Agnes did win Best Actress so I'm glad it seems she did the book justice.

It felt quite topical to pick this up at this point in our world's history.

The book follows the story of Ellie and Homa, two girls who grow up in 1950s Iran under the reign of the Shah, and their enduring friendship despite their class and political differences.

It has several jumps forward in time as Ellie eventually moves to New York, and the Shah is overthrown in the Islamic Revolution. The Shah was not great - he arrested anyone against his regime, had secret police and would torture people for information - but ironically was better than what was to come after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 where the rights of women in Iran took a nosedive.

Ellie and Homa are really fleshed out as characters, and their friendship is heartwarming yet bittersweet as the pair lose touch over the years. A great book if you want to understand better the strength of the women of Iran.

This is a sequel to the Darkness Outside Us, which on the tin looks like a sort of trashy romance book, but actually has some pretty serious turns and a good amount of sci-fi (I enjoyed it!)

In short, it was about two astronauts from opposing nations who came together to do a rescue mission (think like America and Russia).

It’s hard to talk too much about the second book without giving away spoilers for the first one, but the second book jumps back in time to before the two astronauts boarded the spaceship, as well as jumping forward in time to when the final two clones have arrived on their new planet, and follows their lives with their two children.

I liked how their backstories were a bit more fleshed out, plus the timeskip had some interesting details as well. A solid sequel - would love to possibly see even more of a timeskip if they did another book in the series, although I’m not sure how you’d continue the story on after the final two clones die - maybe there are more clones of them left as embryos?

This was the first book I read by Guy Kay. Apparently his trademark is to write fantasy novels, but modelled off of real historical periods and places. In this story we jump between Seressa (Venice), Dubrava (Dubrovnik) and Asharias (Constantinople) sometime during the Renaissance. There is a war going on between the Jaddites (Christians) and the Asharites/Osmanlis (Muslims/Ottomans).

There's a couple of different storylines going on here - Seressa wants to install a spy in Dubrava, and plans to send a doctor and a young woman pretending to be married to make it more believable. A young girl from the pirate town of Senjan tries to prove herself so that she can join her town's raiding crew. A boy who was abducted as a child from the Jaddite side is now being raised as a soldier in the Osmanli army, lead by the Grand Khalif. Seressa also wants to send a second spy, a young artist, to go and paint the Khalif while also spying on him.

With all this talk of Seressanis, Senjanis, spying and different belief systems - honestly I found the first part of the book really hard to follow. I also didn't even realise that there were parallels to the real-world until I got to the Acknowledgements of the book so I think that really didn't help with me connecting the dots in my head either.

Once we start to get deeper into following the individual stories and you don't have to care so much about the country-level politics, I found the book more enjoyable. Pirate-archer-girl Danica makes for quite a badass character, as does the doctor's young wife, Leonora, who starts to come into her own as the book progresses. I also quite liked the interactions between the painter and the Khalif - quite a brutal guy, yet I like how he was humanised by his interest in the painting style. The female POVs helps to offset the amount of sex that the characters seem to be having - it's not explicit or anything, and maybe it's realistic to the time period (and realistic with people in general). But if this was only a book about a bunch of dudes, and it kept mentioning their sexual escapades with the locals I probably would have docked a star or two (lol).

Speaking of sex, there is also a touch of romance, but I feel like it was not quite enough. The characters actually seemed quite indifferent to each other and would go about their lives before things would suddenly wrap up neatly with a "Oh, actually I think I love this person", which was sort of nice, but not too satisfying to read.

Even with all of my nitpicks, this was a decent read! This is my first time hearing of Kay, but as a fun piece of trivia before beginning his writing career, he helped edit Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which was published posthumously in 1977.

40,000 years in the future, five imperial queens take turns ruling the galaxy to ensure stability. As their bodies age, they transfer their mind into a new host body, allowing them to reign eternally. The host bodies are sourced from the queen's genetic children - and they battle to get the coveted spot of next host, so it's not as dystopian as it seems (well, it still is).

An arkship sets out from Earth in 2200, and ends up here 40,000 years in the future (something something space travel). They meet Finn, a high-ranking member of the noble class. As you'd expect he's a bit of a spoilt brat, but sick of the luxurious life he leads and instead wants to explore the galaxy.

The main problem with the story is the amount of info-dumping - the first 10% was quite a struggle to get my head around. Finn meeting the arkship also gives the author plenty of opportunity to infodump, as the arkship people have about 40,000 years worth of history to catch up on.

The last Peter Hamilton book I read (Pandora's Star) I gave 3 stars, which was also for the fact that it felt very long and quite confusing with all that was going on - so maybe this is just Hamilton's writing style.

Along with the queens and Finn and the arkship, there's also another subplot around a police officer dealing with spies and politics. To be honest I had the hardest time following this and couldn't explain to you what was going on, although all three storylines come to be tied together by the end.

If I let my eyes glaze over and speed through the long explanations, otherwise the book had an interesting plot and I was keen to see it through to the end!

A semi-biography of Eileen, the first wife of George Orwell. The author Anna Funder places quite a personal touch on the story, making it all the more interesting.

The book is a mix of letters from Eileen to her friend, facts about her life from other biographies, and the author then filling in the remaining gaps with a sort of fiction, imagining what Eileen’s life would have been like together with George.

As the title suggests, the author imagined the marriage as not necessarily a happy one. Although we can’t know for sure how Eileen felt about it (and she did stay married to Orwell). Eileen was quite an educated, accomplished woman in her own right - proofreading and suggesting corrections to Orwell’s Animal Farm, yet was also reduced to doing all of the household chores and waiting on George hand-and-foot. And when times were tough, she was the breadwinner while George kept on writing.

And George repays this by cheating on her (!) multiple times. The author takes care to point out that many men have written biographies about Orwell, and softened his image by suggesting that Eileen was also engaging in her own affairs - but Funder decidedly takes Eileen’s side, and assumes how she must have felt a sense of betrayal about it all (which would only be natural).

Orwell probably did love his wife in his own way, but you can’t help but feel the injustice of it all. But I wouldn’t place the blame solely on George either. Eileen could have walked away at any point, right? And maybe she was ultimately happy (or satisfied) serving George, who knows.

Funder admits that in her own relationship with her husband she too has felt herself slip into these more traditional gender roles without realising. So I think women have to be careful too, to not let men write their story for them.

Overall a bit depressing at times. It really does tear down the image of Orwell, and I’m sure for any Orwell fans you could see this book as overly biased in Eileen’s favour. But a rather interesting book nonetheless, and I love how Funder weaved all the various sources and her own imaginings all together.

A couple set out on a voyage across the ocean, but then their ship sinks, and they miraculously survive in a liferaft for 118 days. It’s a true story from the 1970s, and so the book is technically a sort of non-fiction but also reads like a fiction.

The husband, Maurice, wrote a book after the experience while the wife Maralyn kept a journal while they were adrift, so the book is also mixed in with occasional quotes from the pair themselves. The overall tone is a mix between fictional retelling and factual explanation (which makes more sense when you also realise the author is a journalist).

Also what I found interesting was it seems there was more recently a revived interest in the couple - Maurice was interviewed only a couple years before he passed away in 2019 by Alvaro Cerezo, and he had the foresight to also take photos of Maralyn’s journal.

Alvaro was also given a letter by Maurice which explained how he met his wife (https://paradise.docastaway.com/how-maurice-bailey-met-maralyn/) which upon reading was almost exactly how the encounter was described in the novel.

Maurice is quite a good storyteller in his own right so this sort of gives me mixed feelings - is A Marriage At Sea a good book because of its author, or because of how good the original story was to begin with? It’s a pity Maurice and Maralyn have both passed away and are unable to see the renewed interest in their story.

About three sisters, set in a fairly dystopian future where crops are lost to blight, and people grow sick from the excessive use of blight-killers on the remaining crops. The youngest sister is also a keen sailor, so the story takes you on a journey via land and sea.

It’s a little depressing to read at times, but quite interesting! There is a focus on the relationships between the sisters which provides some more uplifting moments.

I read The Will of the Many last year after being recommended it by a co-worker - and I think at least 5 of us on my team at work ended up reading it and all really enjoyed it. It's a book that at first glance comes with a lot of YA tropes, but has a lot of great world-building, storyline and characters that more than makes up for it. I did a re-read of this book just recently in preparation for its sequel, The Strength of the Few since I knew I had completely forgotten the plot points. It holds up well.

Now unfortunately, I didn't find book #2 to be as much of a banger as the first one. It's a decent book, don't get me wrong - but it doesn't quite blow me away.

The first book takes place in a school setting, but book 2 has the protagonist Vis graduate and head out in the real world. The author tries to shake things up and we now jump between 3 POVs. The first book had a Rome-esque setting and we are now introduced to a Celtic and Egyptian setting as well, and both comes with a bunch of new characters. And this turned out to be the main weakness! I felt the Celtic setting growing on me over time, but the Egypt one was kind of boring and I just was reading through it waiting to get back to the good bits.

While the book did introduce a lot of cool concepts, I felt like it was just doing a bit too much in one go. To be honest if they had just spent the whole of book two in Celtic-land and then gone to Egypt for book 3 I feel like that would have let you get to know the characters a bit more and hence it enjoy it more as well.

... now I normally wouldn't write this long of a review for a fiction book, but I think since I enjoyed book #1 so much, even though book #2 is still pretty decent on its own, in comparison to the amazing-ness that was #1 it felt like a tiny bit of a letdown in comparison and so I just wanted to vent my feelings about it.

The book does a good job at describing gender equality issues as it relates to the home. eg how men can be overly praised, even if they don't contribute with chores to the same extent as women, since it's at least better than what the stereotypical man is expected to do at home (very little).

And that women do a load of hidden work by carrying the mental load, so while the man might feel like it's a 50/50 partnership, it might not be actually. And how we need to hold them to a higher bar.

Obviously not just to bash on men, but women can contribute to this inequality by taking on too much of the childcare, and not giving men enough responsibility or the chance to be a proper parent, which exacerbates things since it doesn't give the man a chance to learn (which ultimately with childcare it's a thing that is learned by both genders, not something that is innate).

It also tries to provide real-life examples of men who are practicing gender equality in the home, and some actions you can take to get towards gender equality in your own home.

Note the book also has quite an emphasis on childcare since having children is probably the tipping point for when things start to become unequal in the home.

I don't feel like I walked away from reading this with any strong action items in my own life, so in that sense it wasn't that useful for me. But could be a good reminder if you happened to be in an unequal partnership that you should expect more out of your partner (or yourself).

The book is an interesting concept to demonstrate AI predictions via short stories. However it was structured where before each story you would have an explanation of the AI concept that would follow in the short story, and it just felt like it was over-explaining things both in this intro and in the stories themselves. I would have preferred more straight fiction or more non-fiction writing (and less fiction) rather than this in between. Even so, it felt a bit hard to reconcile what they were predicting in the book as something that could actually happen by 2041, so I didn't walk away feeling convinced.

So after reading Rose in Chains which is rewrite of what was a Draco/Hermione Harry Potter fanfiction, I had to give the recently released Alchemised a go, which is another book that also comes from a HP fanfic. I was a bit hesitant to read it, since I heard there was a lot of torture (and I like my books to be a bit lighter than that..). Basically the plot is what would happen if Voldemort won the war, and Hermione is forced to live with Draco - very classic tropey fanfiction stuff.

I did find myself to be pleasantly surprised though! The world building is really good and is pretty different from the HP universe. You can tell that the main characters are Hermione and Draco, but the other characters have been sufficiently changed so that they feel like real characters rather than drop-in replacements for Harry Potter characters. The first third definitely has some dark themes and I felt a bit daunted by what I was getting into, but the second third is a bit lighter as you get to go back to the time before Helena (i.e. Hermione) was imprisoned. And there is a bit of hope in the final third as everything comes towards a "happy" (ish) ending.

I'm not sure I would recommend the book for someone who is not interested in fanfiction to begin with, since there are still some tropes that the author kept in that I side-eye (uhh a breeding program to deal with the lack of wizards, which luckily doesn't go too in-depth). But if you're a fanfiction kind of person, then this is definitely a step above that, and a really good read.

Wow this book is so crazy in a good way. You settle in for a comfy (and possibly slightly trashy) spaceship romance book where you can just switch your brain off and enjoy... and then it totally does a 180 and goes deep into this almost horror-like scenario which I can't really explain any further without giving it away. But damn was it a good plot twist. The definition of not judging a book by its cover.

This is such an unexpected horror book. CLONES!! The ending felt a little bit weak, but I guess it's hard to wrap up such a plot twist in a way that leaves you satisfied with the ending (to be honest if they had all just died that would be the most realistic).

In a way I can understand why the book starts off so light-hearted and YA romance-like as the main character moons over the other guy on the spaceship - that helps make the twist mid-way through the book and the tonal shift all the more impactful. But also I wonder if the way the book was marketed and starts off would put people off from reading the book? Which is a shame, to me the plot was good and they could have done it as a more serious sci-fi book and gotten more readership.

So this book was originally a Hermione/Draco fanfiction that got adapted into a proper story, which probably already reveals a lot about what the book is going to be like. It's not one of those more wholesome "Hermione meets a reformed Draco" type ones though, and instead is one where Harry dies, Voldemort wins the war, and then Hermione is auctioned off to the highest bidder (Draco). The way they explain the need for the auctioning thing is that there is some form of magical power that can be sourced from a marriage bond.

I'm not sure I'm convinced a story that involves an auction is something that should have made it out of the fanfiction world, but it does feel a bit tamer than what I assume the original fanfiction might have been like and the author does a pretty good of setting it up for book 2 in the series. It's a bit cringe (maybe in the vein of ACOTAR?) but like a guilty pleasure you can't help but read to the end. Obviously all the characters have been renamed (and some even gender-swapped) and so it's not quite a 1-1 duplicate of Harry Potter, but it is very easy to see a lot of the parallels, and that does distract from the story a bit as you try and figure out who each character is based off of.

As a side note, I found out about this book because I heard about the recent release of Alchemised (another Hermione/Draco fanfiction adaptation). Apparently the original fanfic for Rose and Chains was inspired by the original fanfic for Alchemised, so I suppose I might be tempted into checking that out too.

About 2 journalists vying to take the coveted spot of writing a biography for Margaret Ives, a super rich lady who was married to a famous singer but then disappeared for 20 years.

The book starts off slow, as Margaret wastes time diving into the backstory of her parents and grandparents to delay having to talk about herself. Once she gets to her own life story it gets really good, and sort of reminds me of the sort of family drama you'd see in a Taylor Jenkins Reed novel, though not quite as good since it's being narrated by Margaret rather than being directly in it.

And of course, it's an Emily Henry novel so throw in a serving of romance. It's decently ok, nothing mind-blowing, to be honest I felt like I'd rather hear the story of Margaret Ives more than anything!

If you've never read Why We Sleep it's a book that basically scares you into getting more sleep by explaining how important it is for your health. (I recommend you read it if you haven't already). Outlive is sort of like the diet and exercise version of that book, where the author really drills into the importance of getting and staying healthy at a younger age so you can reap those benefits as you get older.

The author kicks off the book by emphasising the idea of focusing on your healthspan, not just your lifespan. There's no point making it to 90 if you spend the last 20 years with a fairly poor quality of life, and so it's more about figuring out how you can live to an old age and be fairly mobile and healthy to right near the end.

The other concept he introduces is a term he has coined himself - Medicine 3.0. Today's medicine, or "Medicine 2.0", is about finding a cure for a disease after you get diagnosed, while Medicine 3.0 is about preventing you from needing to be diagnosed in the first place. The author runs some sort of a health clinic, so he sidetracks a bit into the sorts of niche tests he runs on his patients as part of this Medicine 3.0 approach. It's interesting, and I think it's great he's trying to push for something like this, but at the same time, the average reader is not going to have access to those tests for themselves so it's not super helpful. (Also the cynical part of me sees this as marketing for his health clinic).

The middle part of the book goes into his "four horsemen" of diseases that we should be trying to prevent much earlier, which are heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases (i.e. Alzheimer's) and type 2 diabetes. Sometimes you can just get unlucky with cancer, and there's no known way to stop or cure Alzheimer's, but the general advice here is that exercise and diet are important.

You might mistakenly assume that if you are not obese, you will be fine, but some people (including Asians) are genetically predisposed to not be able to handle even small amounts of extra fat so they could still be experiencing poorer health even if their BMI might not suggest it. I've never been at an overweight BMI but even so have had issues with high cholesterol in the past, so I felt like I could kind of relate to this point.

One of the problems with Medicine 2.0 is that if you don't have an over 5% risk of a heart attack in the next 10 years, then you're not considered at risk. But really we should be aiming to live healthily, for a long time, so you should start caring about these risks earlier, before you reach that 5% risk level. So as an example, although medicine today recommends that people should be aiming for below 70mg/dL for LDL cholesterol, you should actually be aiming for as low as 10-20mg/dL to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Finally the most useful part of the book is near the end, where he gives some actionable tips. The first big one is exercise and your VO2 max level (basically how out of breath you get when you run / how well you can run). There's a table with what is considered an average or above-average VO2 max level per age range, and the author recommends you should be aiming for the elite level in your age range. If you hit that, you should aim for the elite level of 2 decades below your age range.

Your VO2 max declines 10% per decade, so as an example, even if you have the sufficient VO2 max to comfortably hike today, you need a score that is way above that now, to be able to hike into your later years. Your body is going to decline, it's inevitable, but it's about shoring up your health and fitness as much as possible while you are younger so that you can still enjoy life while you are old. As for how to improve your VO2 max? You should do most of your runs as zone 2 (you can still hold a conversation) but do 1 sprint workout a week which involves sprinting for 4 minutes, then dropping back down to a jog until your heart rate drops, and repeating that 4 - 6 times.

The second component of exercise is strength training. Muscle mass is impossible to put on in your 70s and will continue to decline each decade, so you need to put on as much as you can now to make up for it. He doesn't advocate going as heavy as you can, as an injury can put you out for months (which I did to my back this year so I can relate). Instead you should be focusing on stability. He goes into detail about a bunch of exercises you could do for that but it gets a bit harder visualise what he means.

And finally, nutrition! Reducing calorie intake can lead to a longer life, but comes with increased risk of injury, plus it's kind of depressing to diet all of the time, so the author doesn't really recommend it. What's more important is just eating well. He doesn't recommend a specific diet since different things work for different people (Keto, Mediterranean) but the key point is something that's sustainable. Factoring in your weight training, protein becomes really important as well, and he recommends a daily intake of 1.6x your weight in kg.

Surprisingly, although he acknowledges that alcohol has no upsides, his recommendation is to restrict your servings to 7 in a week. I found this point really interesting in that he's recommending people aim for such a high VO2 max level (elite level is no joke, right?) yet is still so lax on the drinking aspect - I would have expected he would just recommend you cut out drinking altogether. So I do feel like there's a bit of the author's bias coming into play here as well.

Finally he caps off the book with a chapter on his own mental health struggles (which were quite severe) - longevity is meaningless if your life sucks - which is fair enough.

Overall, I think that Outlive does inject a bit more of the author's personal bias into it compared to Why We Sleep, hence the 4 star rating, but I definitely recommended reading if you need a bit of a kick up the backside when it comes to your own health.