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Review: Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang

A picture of a hardcover copy of Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang sitting on a brown wooden table with the front cover facing the camera.
I really love the front cover design for Taipei Story though I’ll say the typeface used is a bit plain. The jacket design is by Ploy Siripant. Jacket and digital edge illustrations by Whooli Chen/Central Illustration Agency.

But their Chinese was no better and no worse than mine. I had also used the Integrated Chinese textbook. I, too, knew Wang Peng. We were on the same itinerary so that we could fill in the same gaping lack, and the only thing that would resolve this was the passage of time—ten weeks in Taipei, immersed in our mother tongue—until we returned with perfect tones spilling out of our mouths, and we were no longer so bad at being Chinese.

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Review: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

A paperback copy of The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout on a blue cloth surface with the front cover facing the camera.
The cover design for The Things We Never Say has similar colours to the blue cloth background I tend to use nowadays.

So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have, as Artie did with Rhonda Lazarre that day. But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.

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