It’s Week 3 of Nonfiction November, this week hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home. The task? Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. This is my absolute favourite #NFN exercise.
Swimming and grief – The Tidal Year by Freya Bromley and The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka Continue reading
So I cleverly turned one of the trickier (for me) Nonfiction Reader Challenge categories – gardening – into reading a book about gin! Yay me!
The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart explores, in great detail, the plants that create the ‘world’s greatest drinks’.
The book came about after a visit to a liquor store (in Australia, we call it a bottle shop, or bottle-o) with a fellow botanist –
…we stood in the doorway for a minute and looked around us. There wasn’t a bottle in the store that we couldn’t assign a genus and species … Suddenly we weren’t in a liquor store anymore. We were in a fantastical greenhouse, the world’s most exotic botanical garden…
That’s a fun party trick! Continue reading
Annabel from AnnaBookbel and Emma from Words and Peace are hosting the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge this year. The challenge is straightforward – read the books between June 1st and August 31st. I reckon this is the most relaxed reading challenge you can participate in (swap books out, change your target, do whatever).
Continue reading
Even more exciting (and wildly popular) than my 2014 List of Lists was my post on the Best of the Best. It was the books that appeared most frequently on all of the lists I listed. So before I have to write the words ‘best of the best’ and ‘list of lists’ again, here it is, the 2015 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2015-Book-Lists-in-November top 32 books to add to your To-Be-Read stack. Continue reading