I’m Amy, an explorer of real and fictional worlds. A word huntress. An escape artist. A page traveller. I started this blog in 2015 when I was living as an expat in Hong Kong, as a way to keep in touch with friends and family back home. Later, I wrote about my backpacking adventures in Southeast Asia and Mexico, as well as my other experiences living overseas in Italy and Thailand. Two years ago, I started my next chapter as a digital nomad and travelling cat mom. And of course, I’ve been journeying through books all that time, too…
Inspired by a Football Men’s World Cup underdog story that gripped the globe over the summer, this month we’re reading Cabo Verde / Cape Verde. This list gathers fiction set in Cape Verde, much of it wrestling with drought, emigration and the pull between the islands and the diaspora; alongside non-fiction books about Cape Verde […]
Prague is home to some of the most beautiful libraries in the world. However, I learned my lesson the hard way on my first trip to the Czech capital: you can’t just wander in and browse. Most of these beautiful Prague libraries are protected historic monuments, so visiting means guided or self-guided tours, timed tickets, […]
Inspired by our upcoming Prague Literary Retreat, here are some of the best bookshops in Prague for English books. I had the opportunity to peruse this UNESCO City of Literature‘s many bookstore on my research trip to Czechia, and they didn’t disappoint! Here are my personal Prague bookshop recommendations, as well as tips of how […]
Inspired by the upcoming Nomad Book Club Prague retreat, I’ve compiled this suggested reading list of Czech books, Prague books and Czech writers to know. The collection includes fiction set in Prague and Czechia, with a great deal of it wrestling with occupation, exile, and the absurdities of bureaucracy. Alongside, there are non-fiction Czech books […]
This banned books list looks at graphic novels and memoirs that have been pulled, restricted, or fought over in libraries and schools, with the real story behind each ban, sourced from library associations, publishers and the creators themselves. That visual element has made graphic novels and memoirs disproportionately likely to end up on challenge lists […]
This is a slightly different kind of list. Rather than books that were banned for unrelated reasons, these are books about banned books. A striking number of them have gone on to be challenged or banned themselves, which tends to prove their own point rather better than any critic could. If you’re after books about […]
Book bans tend to make headlines as an American story (school boards, library committees, parents at the podium), but censorship has a much bigger and stranger history. The following list is a world tour of banned books, featuring three of the most famous banned books per continent. Together, they show just how differently, and how […]
Look closely at these banned books by women writers, and a throughline appears fairly quickly: so many of these novels and memoirs were challenged for being honest about things women weren’t supposed to say out loud, about their bodies, anger, histories and independence. For each book, I’ve dug into what actually happened and who objected. […]
Banned books by queer writers have a habit of outlasting the people who tried to suppress them, from a 1928 obscenity trial in a London courtroom to school board meetings happening right now. This banned books list looks at works spanning classic literature to contemporary YA, written by queer authors and repeatedly pulled from shelves, […]
This young adult banned books list explores the most frequently challenged works of YA fiction and nonfiction, and unpacks the real reasons behind each ban, drawing on reporting from the American Library Association (ALA), PEN America and other verified sources. It’s fascinating to look at banned young adult books and discover exactly why they rattled […]