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
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Book Review: "You Weren't Meant to Be Human" by Andrew Joseph White
Somebody needs to check on this author because honestly, what the hell did I just read? This book starts pretty uncomfortable and just gets more and more uncomfortable from then on. The storyline has its ups and downs, the characters are somewhat stocky and yet, the book itself is still compelling. Is it the writing that does it? Well, there's an apparent lack of atmosphere throughout the novel, so I don't believe so. Is it the characterisation of these people who serve as clear tropes for quite obvious things? Possibly not. Well, I can tell you what it is. Here's the thing, if I have said it once, I've said it a million times: a successful horror novel needs to have simplicity at its core. Too many random tangents and you get the reader mixed up and the horror quite literally drains from the book. The author's biggest advantage was his simplicity.
By Annie Kapur24 days ago in Geeks
Book Review: "The Good Samaritan" by John Marrs
You’re going to hate me because you’re going to think I’m back on my thriller train and I can assure you I am trying to push against it. Once I start reading thrillers, I start reading them all and I don’t slow down. If you want to know what happened last time then just search up my ‘British Library Crime Classics’ reviews in the search tab. It got so bad that it was all I was reading for ages. Well, we are here with a book called ‘The Good Samaritan’ by John Marrs which I found because I follow some out of touch page on Facebook and it was mentioned briefly in the comments section. Yes, it was that out there. Let’s take a look at it shall we?
By Annie Kapur25 days ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Nudge" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
This book is mentioned in another book I was reading as something you should probably read in order to have a greater understanding of certain concepts. I'm not telling you what the other book is because it's kind of a surprise for 2026. Nudge is a great book and tells the story of choice architecture and the way in which we make decisions. It is a pretty good book considering the fact that I picked it up for the cheapest possible price (I'm not saying cheap books are bad, if you read this blog then you will know how great cheap books are). Let's take a look that the book Nudge and what I thought of the ideas being presented within...
By Annie Kapur26 days ago in Geeks
Book Review: "A Sense of Belonging" by Dr Holan Liang
As you can tell, I'm still riding the train of social media, loneliness and how the world went to hell. If you remember from a few years back, I was doing the same thing with consumerist culture and did a deep-dive into books like Naomi Klein's No Logo among others. This shouldn't surprise you by now but if you're looking to get on this train with me then you are perfectly welcome. You can trace the trace the train tracks through the previous articles I have done over the last week. Before you ask, no I'm not reading and finishing one a day, these reviews are normally written as I'm reading them and I have different books for different things I'm doing. Good ol' neurodivergence. It's hard to explain. Let's investigate the book...
By Annie Kapur27 days ago in Geeks
So I've Tried Candle-Making...
You have probably witnessed my baking on Facebook and in the 'Feast' tab. You have probably seen my book reviews and from time to time, my movie reviews. You have witnessed my poor attempts at poetry and my weirdly fragmented fictions. Now, witness my strangest side-quest: candle-making. I'm not sure why I took this up but it's warming and there's nice smells going on - like when I bake. So you can probably tell why I like doing these things. I've still got some stuff planned for 2026 and this is probably going to be one of them. Just short articles here and there, no real schedule, talking about how I made a particular candle. I want to desperately continue with this and hopefully, somewhere down the line I want to start selling them. I don't know how I'm going to go about that yet but you've heard it here first.
By Annie Kapur28 days ago in Journal
Book Review: "The Cure for Loneliness" by Dr Bill Howatt
Another cheap find. I'm still reading about how our world went to hell and though I don't agree with it all (I'm a fairly unsociable person in real life, I prefer to spend time alone), I can understand why some people may feel the need for more realistic and physical communities. I've read a number of books about how social media has basically broken humanity. Books such as Selfie by Will Storr, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly by Neil Postman, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnman among a number of others. This book is called The Cure for Loneliness and focuses on the way in which we can have workable solutions in our lives. I'm quite interested in this as it is normally the case that only the conclusions of other books deal with solutions and still, they seem a bit far from an achievable reality. Let's see if this book has any better ideas that focus more on sociology than regulation and misguided optimism.
By Annie Kapur28 days ago in Geeks
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise isn't regarded as one of Fitzgerald's best books but it was published bang on 1920, marking the beginning of his fascination with the on-coming Jazz Age. It's semi-autobiographical and details his experiences of elite social circles at Princeton University. It made him famous overnight.
By Annie Kapur28 days ago in Geeks
Book Review: "The Chaos Machine" by Max Fisher
As you can see, I'm still reading books about the way in which society has basically been destroyed. So far I've read books like Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, Selfie by Will Storr and a couple of others in the past such as Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Now, it's time for The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher which deals with the social media age. I mean the subtitle of the book is quite literally: "The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World" and so, I'm holding out quite a bit of hope to learn something new and connect ideas to things I have already read.
By Annie Kapur29 days ago in Geeks
Lemon and Coconut Shortbread
I've been in the kitchen almost all day today making lots of shortbread and I also made some casserole (but that wasn't for me). I don't particularly like shortbread because of the texture, it's a bit too buttery and crumbly for my liking but, it's a fun and easy thing to make if you want a relaxing bake. There's no egg in this and again, all of the dairy ingredients are able to be swapped out for dairy free alternatives.
By Annie Kapur29 days ago in Feast
Book Review: "Bowling Alone" by Robert D. Putnam
As you can probably see, I am riding another deep-dive train and this time I'm looking at how our own age is basically destroying us. One thing I can honestly say by now is that the kind of books I've been reading were written back in the 90s and 2000s and so, seem to project the idea that this has been around for far longer than the simple social media/AI age. Bowling Alone is a cornerstone of this kind of literature. As I was making the rounds about Reddit - not posting, just looking - I was trying to find a book which looks at this from an individual perspective rather than a technology perspective or one that deals with the group of us as a population of users and consumers. So, Bowling Alone was the highest recommendation. Let's take a look at what the book was about and what I thought about the major points it made.
By Annie Kapur30 days ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman
Neil Postman is an interesting author whom I'm reading quite a bit of lately mainly because I've been hearing about his books online. I first read his book Technopoly which deals with the fact that these massive companies have absolutely no regard for how their technology and market monopolisation will impact the average person. But Amusing Ourselves to Death is something far more sinister than this. I have been itching to read this book (yes, that is a thing that happens to me) and I spent some time compiling my thoughts into workable paragraphs so that you can understand as much of what is going on as possible. I would urge you to read this book for yourselves though, it is so important.
By Annie Kapurabout a month ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Unbound" by Richard L. Currier
You know how I love a good deal and so, I got this one on my phone again, on the cheap. Well, in reality I got it for free but that story is for another time. I'm not hugely into books that go so deep into anthropology that I can't really understand them philosophically speaking but I took my time with this one and it was pretty enjoyable. The book is actually well written, although at the beginning it was fairly hard to get into. However, even though I did feel like I was ploughing through it from time to time, I came out of it alive and pretty well-informed too. So, this book is getting some good marks.
By Annie Kapurabout a month ago in Geeks
