Sekar Writes
A Collection of (Mostly Nonfiction) Books Review and Personal Notes
Welcome!
Take a look around my blog, where I bring you book reviews filled with knowledges and favorite quotes. Alongside my literary explorations, I share personal stories and some side projects.
Me, More or Less
These lists are pretty much describe me in a nutshell.
Latest Nonfiction Book Reviews
Check out my nonfiction book reviews, featuring thoughts, summaries, and favorite quotes.
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Review: Same Time Next Week?
Same Time Next Week looks at anxiety in a world of curated calm and self-optimisation, and what social media and AI are doing to how we cope.
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Review: Man’s Search for Meaning
What’s left when everything is taken? Viktor Frankl found the answer inside Auschwitz—and it changes how you’ll think about pain.
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Review: I Eat the Stars
I Eat the Stars talks about how the world in collapse and the hopelessness so many of us carry. What remains when our biggest hope runs out?
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Review: Light and Thread
Light and Thread is a tiny book with huge questions about violence, love, and being human, and closed with a beautiful garden diary.
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Review: Things My Son Needs to Know about the World
A father writes to his son about life, love, and everything in between. Backman makes the little things feel enormous.
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Review: Bibliotherapy
Reading does more than entertain us. How does a good book carry us through hard times? Bibliotherapy reveals how stories truly heal.
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Review: My Dreadful Body
My Dreadful Body is Djabbarova’s memoir told through eleven body parts, each one shaped by chronic illness and Azerbaijani tradition.
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Review: Strangers
Strangers by Belle Burden is a raw memoir of marriage, grief, privilege, and the memories we leave behind.
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Review: Inside the Box
Having options feels exciting and constraints are what help us thrive among them. Inside The Box shows how limits shape clearer decisions.
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Review: Black Milk
Black Milk is a memoir about postpartum depression that somehow ends up asking the questions you have been afraid to ask yourself.
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Review: How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is full of practical tips and insights to manage both our head and her heart.
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Review: Free
Part childhood memoir, part political awakening, Free is the book that moves you because it is about more than just Albania.
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Review: Change Your Questions, Change Your Life
The questions running in your head are shaping your life more than you think. Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is worth reading in the age of AI.
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Review: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
The number of stupid people around you is higher than you think and the proof written in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is unsettling.
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Review: Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow is a memoir about losing both her sons, written from the darkest place a parent can stand.
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Review: Nation of Stranger
Feel like you don’t belong as the world falls apart? Nations of Strangers is the essential read on identity in a fractured world.
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Review: Fluent Forever
Fluent Forever teaches you how your brain actually stores memories and uses that science to help you learn any language in an effective way.
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Review: The Beginning Comes After the End
The world has been changing faster than most of us can keep up with, and The Beginning Comes After the End wants you to notice.
From Facts to Fiction
Nonfiction teaches me about the world, but fiction helps me feel it.
Every review comes with the quotes I saved.
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Review: On Earth as it is Beneath
On Earth As It Is Beneath is set in a Brazilian prison built on hidden bones, where inmates are hunted each month in a brutal survival ritual.
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Review: Demon Copperhead
Demon Copperhead, forced to grow up too fast amid poverty, addiction, and a broken foster system. A rich retelling of a Dickens classic.
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Review: And Every Morning the way Home Gets Longer
A grandfather is forgetting his memory. His son and grandson are left holding onto what’s slipping away in this short, aching book by Backman.
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Review: The Answer Is No
Meet Lucas, a man happy in his own world, until a frying pan changes everything in The Answer is No, Fredrik Backman’s witty short book.
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Review: The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories
Some people always want more from life than life will hand them. The Trouble with Happiness is about that ache, and the homes it wrecks.
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Review: The Castle
The Castle is an unfinished novel about a man trapped in an absurd bureaucracy. He fights for answers no one will ever give him.
Browse Nonfiction Books by Specific Genre
Have a specific book topic in mind?
You’ll likely find it in these categories!
- Biographies and Memoirs (33)
- Biology and Life Sciences (12)
- Child Development and Parenting (13)
- Climate Change (2)
- Cooking and Culinary (3)
- Critical Thinking and Research Skills (15)
- Data and Statistics (8)
- Economics (6)
- Education and Learning (10)
- Essays (27)
- Evolutionary Biology (6)
- Fitness and Human Performance (23)
- Health and Medicine (30)
- Leadership and Career (8)
- Life Transitions (11)
- Linguistics (4)
- Literature (2)
- Luck and Chance (3)
- Mathematics (2)
- Mindfulness (3)
- Nature (21)
- Neuroscience (13)
- Poetry (15)
- Politics and Society (41)
- Productivity (25)
- Psychology and Behavioral Science (49)
- Science (44)
- Self-Development (80)
- Technology and AI (10)
- UI/UX (2)
- Women's Studies (6)
- Writing (9)
Life in the Margins
Here’s what else you’ll find on this blog.
Reading Life
- Snapshots of my reading life: the habits, the tracking, and everything around books.
Journaling
- Writing is how I make sense of things. A look at my journaling practice: how I do it, why I do it, and what it’s given me.
Fresh Flower Care
- Looking after fresh flowers asks me to slow down and be present. Here are my personal notes on keeping them beautiful and alive for longer.
Home Gardening
- There’s something grounding about growing things at home. Follow along with my notes as I watch things grow, season by season.
Life in Helsinki, Finland
- Living in Helsinki has shaped how I read, think, and move through the world. A little window into my life in the north.
Hi, I am Sekar!
My passion for reading (at least) one book a week fuels my love for books and drives me to share the insights with others.
Medical science by training, curious about everything else. Here I share my hobbies and the things life teaches me.
Feel free to reach out and join me in celebrating books and all the small joys that make life fuller.
Books let us know we’re not the center of the universe; the universe has many centers.
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie