Annie Kapur
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I am:
🙋🏽♀️ Annie
📚 Avid Reader
📝 Reviewer and Commentator
🎓 Post-Grad Millennial (M.A)
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I have:
📖 280K+ reads on Vocal
🫶🏼 Love for reading & research
🦋/X @AnnieWithBooks
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🏡 UK
Stories (2896)
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A Very English (Literary) Education
There is no doubt that because of people like Shakespeare and Chaucer, writers such as the Bronte Sisters, Austen, Dickens, Shelley and Byron - it is safe to say that England has perhaps one of the greatest literary cultures in the world (but that doesn't take away from any other literary cultures, please don't hate me). But it has become clear that state schools in the UK in the current era are having a crisis of identity and faith around the subject itself.
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Arguably" by Christopher Hitchens
Ah yes, we are back to reading Christopher Hitchens and I can say it is for some profound reason, or I can just be honest. I'm going to choose to be honest: a lot of his essay anthologies are available on Kindle Unlimited. Hitchens was a very prolific philosopher, often writing books atop of books about his theories and what he believes humanity should be doing to progress. I'm going to be honest with you again: I don't agree with everything he says but definitely most things. He is perhaps one of my favourite philosophers ever. His books are often based within logic and reasoning, looking at how and why we think and behave the way we do including obviously, his disdain towards religious institutions.
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Our London Lives" by Christine Dwyer Hickey
Have you ever gone to the library and gone: yeah I'm just going to pick up this giant book because I know exactly when I'm going to read it. Well, that's exactly what I did. Our London Lives is an immersive experience of time and love over the big city. More than often, I think that there are modern writers (especially in the 21st century) that can't really capture the essence of London. However, Christine Dwyer Hickey seems to do it perfectly. There's an atmosphere that is almost unforgettable and a writing style that is constantly tinged with longing. I wasn't surprised I liked this one: it has human connection over the course of forty years intermixed with the changing landscape and lives of the characters. It was beautiful.
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Herzog" by Saul Bellow
I'm not sure how many of you know this but there was one point in my life where I would not read Saul Bellow's novels purely because a few years' ago I got through The Adventures of Augie March with not a lot of the old 'will to live' left in me. I'm sorry if you loved it, but I just thought it went nowhere. The language is pretty good, but he's written objectively better books. I mean Ravelstein is a book I read much too late and yet, it's a masterpiece. I've tried The Adventures of Augie March more than once but, it seems like it's just not a book I'm going to gel with. Henderson the Rain King is also pretty good and here we are on another one: Herzog. Let's take a look...
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "A Very Easy Death" by Simone de Beauvoir
Is anyone obsessed with getting Fitzcarraldo Editions as soon as the price comes down or whenever they're in the library or even on Kindle Unlimited? Yeah I knew it was only me. I have ✨ no money ✨ (I think that is the first time I've ever used those icon things in a post). But anyways, Simone de Beauvoir is not an author I usually like to read often, I find her philosophies on life to be flawed and her feminism to be fair but injected with light Communism. But, I did however have to read this book by her seeing as I was getting an eye-full of it on social media and the price was basically nothing. So here we go...
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "A Girl's Story" by Annie Ernaux
It's the end of April 2025 and I know I always start with the rough dates but I do need to say something about that. Often people ask me how I'm able to release new content every day. This book review probably won't be released until June or something I don't know, I sort of choose them at random by this point. Sometimes I work through chronologically to when I wrote something but other times I release what I think sounds good. The truth is, I've got quite the backlog on here in my drafts. So don't get upset about it, I have been writing like this for a while so there's a lot of stories in my drafts sitting around waiting to be released.
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "HappyHead" by Josh Silver
I love being recommended books in real life, but when I'm recommended a book by a teenager it becomes even better because I can see young people are somewhat still reading. This child explained the book HappyHead to me and I was quite interested. I didn't do anything about that for a long time though and then, an adult recommended the same book to me. It made me think about the teenager who told me about it first and I thought 'well, there's two widely different people telling me about this book, it's got to be good...' - and reader, it was...
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "The Empusium" by Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk is a writer I've read before but admittedly probably not as much as the brodernists of Twitter are pretending they have. I've always found her works difficult to access at first, they are perhaps quite obtuse and a little on the slow start side, but the slow burns at vital moments of the text exude her lyrical confidence more than that. I think it's something special about Olga Tokarczuk's literature and why she won the Nobel Prize in 2018. She definitely has a way with description and how she makes you see the very intellectual side of what are mundane details of life.
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Liquidation" by Imre Kertész
Yes, I've been back to the library and this time (because they haven't actually done my reservations yet so I'm sad) I have tried to go for a theme. The theme this time was black and white book covers. I know it sounds silly but I really had no other idea. I have currently also been shopping for used books. I love looking for books that other people have read and enjoyed (sometimes they have even annotations and drawings inside which makes it all the more interesting). It's April 2025 and I'm sitting around drinking coffee and listening to podcasts. I've finished Liquidation and all I can say is: what the f-?
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "In Memory of Memory" by Maria Stepanova
"The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, never to be felt again between the fingers: "I would never say 'lovely', it sounds so common" Gayla admonished me once. And there were other prohibited words I can't recall, her talk of one's people, gossip about old friends, neighbours, little reports from a lonely and self-consuming life." - In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Hitch-22" by Christopher Hitchens
“Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.” - Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
By Annie Kapur8 months ago in Geeks
