February/March 2021 Reading Roundup

I missed my monthly reading roundup in February, so here are two months together. As you’ll see, they were dominated by one huge book: Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, 3,000-page masterpiece. But I managed to squeeze in a few more good books…

Best Books I Read in 2020

There’s a quote by Alice Walker that I love: “When I was a child, I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.” 2020 was a year when I reached for the lifeboats more often…
November month in books

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…

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…

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…

May 2020 Reading Roundup

The COVID-19 lockdown here in Belgrade was very strict in March and April, but this month it ended, and things are more or less back to normal now. The cafes, shops and restaurants are all open again, and there’s rarely…

April 2020 Reading Roundup

In a short time, I've gone from travelling full-time to being under strict lockdown in a Belgrade apartment. Perhaps that's why I've spent the month travelling through the world of books, from the Russian wilderness to a still-divided Germany and…

February 2020 Reading Roundup

From Japanese literature to the history of Serbia via the aftermath of war in Sierra Leone, this has been a good month’s reading for me. Here’s a roundup of the books I’ve read in February. The Sound of the Mountain…