The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav
In her preface to The Seat of the Soul, Oprah Winfrey writes: “The Seat of the Soul changed the way I see myself. It changed the way I view the world. It caused a profound shift in the way I…
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse: German Literature Month 2020
There’s a lot more to the novel than a protest against society’s stifling conventions. In fact, the way that Hesse wrote the book actually undercuts a lot of the angst Harry Haller is experiencing, suggesting that his suffering, although understandable,…
The History of Serbia by Cedomir Antic: Review
This is a useful overview of the history of Serbia, starting in neolithic times and going right through to the present (it was published in 2018). The book starts by describing the early inhabitants of the territory now known as…
Spell the Month in Books
Why trawl the web for updates on just how little has changed in the US election process or how many more people have caught COVID-19, when you could spell the month in books? This idea has apparently been bouncing around…
The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain
The Heart of the Race is a classic of Black British women’s history. First published in 1985, the book filled in large gaps in British history, which had traditionally neglected the Black experience altogether before belatedly including the perspective of…
August 2020 Reading Roundup
After my quick trip to the UK last month, I’m back in Belgrade again. We made a few stops on our drive back across Europe, but it’s really not a good time to be travelling. It was, nevertheless, a great…
The Unsaintly Side of Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi is one of those people whose position as a hero of history is assured. He overcame the most powerful empire on earth with the power of nonviolence. He is immortalised through his quotable epigrams like “Be the change…
July 2020 Reading Roundup
I’m writing this in the middle of a two-week quarantine in the UK. Don’t worry, I don’t have any Covid-19 symptoms—it’s just a precaution for people arriving from certain “high-risk” countries. Why the UK (with 46,000 deaths) is quarantining people…
Children of the Cave: A Fascinating Finnish Novel of Ideas
In Children of the Cave, Finnish writer Virve Sammalkorpi imagines an encounter between a group of explorers and some strange creatures living in a cave in the remote forests of northern Russia that look like animals but also have some…