Book review: Rouvrir le roman

Posted on February 18, 2023 by WordsAndPeace

📚 Rouvrir le roman,
by Sophie Divry
French nonfiction/ Book about books /
Literary criticism
February 8, 2017
Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc
208 pages
Read with French student F.

I hadn’t opened a literary criticism book for a while, and I had seen good things about Rouvrir le roman (not sure where), so I decided to read it with one of my French students who has read vastly and even attends some classes on literature.
The following is mostly thoughts that struck me in the book, and that I’m recording here for memory (mine!) sake.
Sorry if you cannot read French. The book has not been translated into English, I doubt it will ever be, and I don’t have time to translate the excerpts I’m pasting here.
The text in English is mine, all the text in French are quotations from the book.

Click to continue reading

Book review: Japanese Kanji Made Easy

Posted on December 16, 2022 by WordsAndPeace

Japanese Kanji Made Easy:
An Easy Step-by-Step Workbook
to Learn the Basic Japanese Kanji
To be published some time in 2023
by Lingo Mastery
155 pages
Nonfiction/ Language book/ Japanese

Ecopy received for review

You may have read that I recently decided to learn Japanese, and this has become a bit of an obsession. Actually, can you even manage to learn Japanese if you are NOT obsessed, lol?
So today, I’m presenting a very special kind of nonfiction, an ebook I just received from Lingo Mastery for review: Japanese Kanji Made Easy: An Easy Step-by-Step Workbook to Learn the Basic Japanese Kanji.

I already have two books published by Lingo Mastery, on Hiragana and Katakana (two of the 3 Japanese alphabets). I like the way they work, so I was thrilled with this one on Kanji.
And obviously, you first need to master hiragana and katakana to be able to fully enjoy kanji learning.
Click to continue reading

Nonfiction November 2022: New on my TBR

Posted on November 29, 2022 by WordsAndPeace

#NonficNov
#nonfictionbookparty: Instagram Daily Challenge
Click on the logo to see the detailed schedule

Here is the topic for Week 5:
New to my TBR
hosted by Jaymi @ The OC Book Girl

New to My TBR : It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books!
Which ones have made it onto your TBR?
Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book!

November ended up being more busy than expected, so I didn’t visit as many bloggers as intended. But looking back at the nonfiction books I added on my TBR in Nonfiction November 2021, I realized I only read 3 out of 17.
So I guess it’s not a bad thing I’m not adding as many this year!
Here they are, with the blog where I found them:

AnnaBookBel

1. Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree: Getting to know trees through the language of scent, by David George Haskell

A Web of Stories

2. The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak

Book’d Out

3. The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep, by Guy Leschziner

Let’s read

4. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan

Readerbuzz

5. Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide, by Cecily Wong
6. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong

What’s Nonfiction?

7. The Return of the Russian Leviathan, by Sergei Medvedev

This November, I actually added 6 more titles, but the source was not participants in Nonfiction November:

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Web3 Simplified – A Beginners Guide to Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, NFT’s, the Metaverse and more, by Steve Sarner
The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates
Englishwoman in America, by Isabella Lucy Bird
The Life of Isabella Bird, by Anna M. Stoddart
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, by Umberto Eco

WHAT GREAT NONFICTION BOOK
HAVE YOU RECENTLY ADDED TO YOUR TBR?
PLEASE SHARE YOUR LINK IF YOU POSTED