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.
Latest Nonfiction Book Reviews
Check out my nonfiction book reviews, featuring thoughts, summaries, and favorite quotes.
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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.
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Review and Summary: In Search of Now
What does science say about the present moment? In Search of Now looks at time, perception, and how our brains build the feeling of “now.”
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Review: Flourish
Our fast culture pulls attention away from what truly matters. Flourish reflects on a meaningful life that we should create together.
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Review and Summary: The Score
What happens when numbers decide what matters in life? The Score reflects on value capture where meaning and learning turn into metrics.
Browse Nonfiction Books by Specific Genre
Have a specific book topic in mind?
You’ll likely find it in these categories!
- Biographies and Memoirs (32)
- 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 (26)
- 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 (78)
- Technology and AI (10)
- UI/UX (2)
- Women's Studies (6)
- Writing (9)
From Facts to Fiction
Nonfiction teaches me about the world, but fiction helps me feel it.
Every review comes with the quotes I saved — maybe you’ll want to save them too.
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Review: Playground
Four strangers, a remote island, and an ocean full of secrets. Playground is a stunning story of nature, friendship, and life’s big questions.
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Review: The Trees
Brutal murders shake the town where Emmett Till died, and the truth cuts deeper than anyone feared. The Trees is haunting and funny.
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Review: The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories
A regretful father and a dying little girl meet in one hospital room. One choice could change everything, what is a single life really worth?
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Review: Arborescence
Imagines a world where humans turn into trees as the planet grows greener and emptier. A story of nature, tech, and the cost of letting go.
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Review: Heart the Lover
Heart the Lover explores how the choices we make in youth ripple through our entire lives, for better and worse.
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Review: The Details
Through malaria and fever, a woman remembers the four people who made her. The Details shows how we’re built from the ones we love.
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 the 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
- There’s something grounding about tending to fresh flowers. My personal notes on keeping them beautiful and alive for longer.
Home Gardening
- Growing things at home with a lot of curiosity. A record of my small gardening experiments, wins and failures included.
Life in Helsinki, Finland
- Living in Helsinki has shaped how I read, think, and move through the world. A little window into daily 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