Reviews

  Spoiler Warning: This review discusses major plot points and the ending of The Art of Sarah . When I first started watching The Art of Sarah , I honestly thought it was going to be a story about a woman obsessed with becoming rich, sophisticated and surrounded by expensive things. Luxury handbags. Beautiful clothes. Exclusive circles. A carefully constructed lifestyle.                                          At first, Sarah Kim seemed like someone who desperately wanted to reach a particular level of society and live a very specific kind of life. I thought the drama would simply show us her obsession with wealth and luxury. But episode by episode, that understanding started changing. The more we learn about Sarah, the more the story moves away from handbags and money and towards personality, identity, ambition and the lengths a person can go to create the life they want . An...

 Some books are written to tell you what happened. Some are written to explain a life. And then there are books like The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath —books that allow you to sit quietly beside a person's thoughts as they happen.                                    You don't simply meet Sylvia Plath through these pages. You encounter her ambitions, contradictions, observations, relationships, creative struggles and restless desire to experience life completely. That is what makes this book so different from an ordinary novel, biography or collection of essays. What Makes This Book Different From Regular Reading? A conventional book usually has structure. There is a beginning, a progression and some kind of resolution. A journal does not promise any of that. Plath's journals move between everyday observations, writing ambitions, relationships, books, travel, identity, love, loneliness, cr...

 Some K-dramas grab you from the very first episode. Castaway Diva wasn't one of them for me. In fact, when I started watching it, I wasn't particularly impressed by the opening. There were two schoolgirls asking people about their phone battery and then using one of the boys in their class to make a call. The whole fangirl-like situation and some of the opinions surrounding the girls didn't really work for me. I remember thinking that I wasn't sure I would enjoy this drama.                                              But I kept watching. And somewhere between one episode and the next, Castaway Diva slowly pulled me in. Not with a dramatic hook, but with its characters, their stories, their wounds, and most importantly, their determination to keep living despite everything life had taken away from them. My first reason for watching: Park Eun-bin I already had a soft ...

 There are books that entertain you for a few hours. And then there are books that make you stop somewhere in the middle of reading and think about your own life. Jenny Mustard's What A Time To Be Alive felt like the second kind for me. The book follows Sickan, a 21-year-old young woman who leaves her small town in southern Sweden to attend Stockholm University. She arrives with very little money, very little experience and, most importantly, very little experience of belonging.                                                        After a lonely childhood, Stockholm is supposed to be her fresh start. A chance to make friends. A chance to experience love. A chance to become the person she thinks she should have already been. And that is what makes this book so interesting. It isn't simply a story about romance or university life. It is about ...

 There was something about the title It’s Okay to Not Be Okay that made me fall in love with this drama even before I knew where the story was going. Maybe because the sentence itself feels like something we rarely allow ourselves to believe. At the beginning, though, I honestly thought this drama was going to make me depressed.                                                        I am already someone who gets emotional easily. I tend to absorb feelings, situations, and sometimes even fictional characters more deeply than I probably should. So while watching the first few episodes, I kept thinking, What have I started watching? Everything felt dark. The characters carried so much pain. Everyone seemed broken in their own way. But somewhere between the beginning and the final episodes, my perception completely changed. I stopped looking for t...

 There are books you read, close, and move on from. And then there are books that leave little pieces of themselves sitting inside your head. You finish a chapter, put the book down, and somehow you are still thinking about a sentence hours later. You notice yourself using a word differently. You start looking at your own habits from a slightly different angle.                                                That was my experience while reading Sophie Staring at Me by Meg Mason . I went into the book expecting a story. Instead, I found myself collecting little ideas from it—especially one new word, warping , and a thought that has been difficult to shake: “I’m fine” might be one of the most load-bearing lies in the English language. And somewhere along the way, the book also made me think about something I had never quite put into words before: Reading is the orig...