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…
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 […]
In researching this list of the best books about Cyprus, I kept coming back to one word: divided. Cyprus is a small island with an outsized history; colonised by the British, contested by Greece and Turkey, and split down the middle since 1974, with its capital, Nicosia, still the last divided city in Europe. A […]
In researching this list of the best books about Austria, I kept running into the same question: what actually counts as Austria? Today it’s a small Alpine country, but for centuries it was the heart of a vast empire stretching across much of Europe; the same dynasty that sent Marie Antoinette to France and put […]
If you’re looking for the best books about South Africa, you’ve come to the right place. South Africa is one of the most complex, fascinating, and at times heartbreaking countries on earth. From apartheid books that document the horrors of racial segregation to insightful works of literary fiction, these titles will open your eyes, break […]
Edinburgh was the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and honestly, you can feel it the moment you start wandering its medieval closes and cobbled lanes. The city practically breathes books. It’s the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and Ian Rankin — and, if you know where to look, the city that […]