This site exists because I lost my joy in reading during Covid. What had once felt instinctive and sustaining slipped away, pages stayed unturned. Writing about books became a way of finding my way back. Not by forcing enthusiasm, but by paying attention again. Thinking carefully about what a book is trying to do, and how it feels to spend time within it’s covers, helped me relocate my love of reading .Less like a habit I’d misplaced, more like a friendship I needed to rebuild.

How I review

The reviews here aren’t ratings or hot takes. I’m interested in what a book is aiming for, what it chooses to prioritise, and what it leaves behind as a result. I try to be clear about effort and payoff, generous about pleasure, and honest about frustration. Sometimes that means admiration with caveats; sometimes it’s a polite shrug. I also totally reserve my right to change my mind. Reading to me can be a question of timing.

Ethical questions matter to me, but without finger-wagging. When books engage with power, harm, history, race, class, or gender, I’m interested in how thoughtfully they do so, and what kind of emotional or imaginative space they leave the reader in. Often, it’s restraint rather than spectacle that lingers.

At heart, this site is an effort to pay more attention. To immerse myself in the experience of reading, and to celebrate finding my way back to something that still matters very much to me.

Why Fernweh?

As a child, books were my way of seeing beyond the edges of my own life. I was drawn to stories that opened outward: big families, boarding schools, children’s classics that slipped me into other times and places. That instinct, to look beyond what was immediately around me, eventually led me to a history degree, but it began much earlier, in reading.

As an adult, that same pull shows up in travel. There’s something quietly transformative about arriving somewhere new: breathing unfamiliar air, eating food you wouldn’t cook, listening more than you speak. It’s a joy, and a privilege.

I remain a contradiction, something of a home body, yet always drawn to the wider world.

Fernweh is a German word for that feeling: a longing for places you haven’t been yet. It resonates because reading still offers more of that experience than time, work, or my wallet will ever allow. Books remain one of the most accessible ways of encountering the unfamiliar, stepping briefly into other lives, landscapes, and histories.

What You Might Find Here

For now, you’ll mostly find book reviews. As the site grows, there will also be space for the thoughts that reading unsettles or uncovers, and for the places that shape how I read. That may be the ones I’ve stood in, and the ones reached only by imagination or armchair travel. The mix may shift over time, but it will always return to reading, attention, and the quiet pleasure of following where a book leads.

Navigating the site

I read widely and often follow challenges for the way they open unexpected paths,  new authors, unfamiliar genres, ideas I might not have reached on my own. Because of that, I don’t tend to file books in a traditional way. I think about how they felt to read, where they took me, and what stayed behind.
You can navigate the site in much the same spirit: by feeling, by place, and eventually, perhaps, by time.

A final word on photographs

Many of the photos you will find here are my own. Photography has been a recently found joy and one I am still avidly learning. For me taking a photograph is trying to capture a sense of feeling, what does it mean to me to stand here right now, right here in this moment. It feels right therefore to have some of my memories here. A rightful triangulation of my love of books that transport and the places, and the moments that matter.