Month: August 2026

James by Percival Everett: a review

For months, people kept telling me to read James. Three different people whose taste I trust, independently of each other. I resisted anyway, because retellings and I have a complicated history. Too often they lean on the original like a crutch and add nothing of their own. Then I finally gave in, and you can probably guess how this ends: James is the best book I have read this year, and it is not close.

What James is about

James tells the story of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but this time we hear it from Jim. Or rather from James, which is the whole point. The enslaved man who drifts through Twain’s novel as a kind-hearted sidekick gets his own voice here, and what a voice it is: educated, dry, precise. And hidden. Around white people, James speaks exactly the way they expect him to speak, and the gap between how he talks and how he thinks creates more tension than most thrillers I know. We read Twain at school in German translation, and I mostly remember the whitewashed fence and nothing at all about Jim. Which is, I think, exactly the point Everett is making.

What surprised me most is how funny this book is. Really funny, in the middle of horror, and Everett never lets one cancel out the other. There is a scene about getting hold of a pencil, just a pencil, that carries more weight than entire chapters of other novels. I had to put the book down a few times to breathe. I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.

Why you should read the book

You do not need to know Huckleberry Finn. James stands completely on its own. If anything, it made me want to go back to the original and argue with it. The book has won more or less every prize there is, including the Pulitzer, and for once I have no objections at all.

The books that stay with me longest are the ones that make me sit with a perspective I do not live in. They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery did that with journalism. James does it with fiction, and it reminded me why I believe that authors can change the world, one reader at a time.

Have you read it? Please tell me in the comments, because I finished it weeks ago and I still need to talk about it.

Digital minimalism, five years on: what actually stuck

Do you remember the 30-day digital declutter I did in 2020, inspired by Cal Newport? I wrote about it in my self-experiment in digital minimalism, and a year later I went one step further and deleted my social media accounts completely. People still ask me about it, and they always ask the same question: did it last? Five years feel like enough distance to answer that honestly.

What survived

The phone still sleeps in the kitchen. In 2021 I bought an actual alarm clock, a hideous yellow one, and it still wakes me every morning. There are still no social media apps on my phone. And the first thing I do after waking up is not scrolling. Most mornings I read. Not every morning, I want to be honest here, but often enough that I read noticeably more books per year than I did before 2020. If the whole experiment had given me nothing but this one habit, it would have been worth it.

I also kept my suspicion of the word “just”. Just checking, just five minutes, just this one video. When I catch myself thinking it, I try to put the phone down. Emphasis on try.

What crept back

YouTube. In the evenings. Disguised as documentaries. I also somehow ended up in eleven group chats that together behave exactly like the feed I thought I had left behind. And at some point I discovered that endless online window shopping scratches the same itch that Instagram used to scratch: new things, always more of them, with a little reward feeling on top. So no, I am not cured.

What I do differently today

The biggest change is that I stopped treating all this as a project with an end date. The declutter had 30 days, real life does not. What remains are a few default settings instead of rules: no feeds on the phone, one screen-free evening a week (we treat it like an appointment and it has survived birthdays, deadlines and a house move), news once a day. And when a new app wants a place on my phone, it first has to answer a simple question: what are you for? If the honest answer is “nothing, really”, it stays off.

I break my own rules about once a month, by the way. I have decided that this is fine.

Would I do the declutter again? Yes, tomorrow. Not because it turned me into a disciplined person, see above, but because it showed me what I want my mornings to look like. If you have been thinking about trying it yourself: a new month starts in a few days. That is all the starting line you need.

5 places for book lovers – Amsterdam

Amsterdam and books, for me that is a love story with a very concrete starting point. A few years ago I was in the city for a day, it started raining (of course it did), I fled into the nearest bookshop and walked out with Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. That one impulse buy later sent me all the way to Scotland to run a bookshop myself for a week. So you could say Amsterdam bookshops have a lot to answer for.

After my lists for The Hague and Haarlem, Amsterdam was overdue anyway. All five places are in the city centre, you can easily walk from one to the next, and together they make a perfect plan for a rainy day. So: for most days.

1. The American Book Center: book shop

Let me start with my favourite. The American Book Center on the Spui sells English books only, three floors of them, and has been run by the same family since 1972. What gets me every time are the handwritten staff recommendations tucked between the shelves. Last time I went in to buy one specific book as a present. I left 45 minutes later with three books for myself and without the present. It is that kind of shop.

2. Athenaeum Boekhandel: book shop and news centre

Directly next door. Which is dangerous. Athenaeum is the more serious, more beautiful sibling: international literature, art books, translated fiction you will not stumble over anywhere else. Attached to it is the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum with newspapers and magazines from all over the world. When I had just moved to the Netherlands and missed reading in my own language, a shop like this felt like a small lifeline. It still does, a bit.

3. Waterstones: book shop

Yes, a British chain, I know. I do not care!! Four floors in a gorgeous old building on Kalverstraat, and nobody looks at you strangely if you sit down in a corner with a pile of books and stay there. The children’s section upstairs is the best I have seen in this country. If you need a present for a small reader, this is where you go.

4. The Book Exchange: second-hand book shop

A canal-side second-hand shop on Kloveniersburgwal, in business since 1978, with tens of thousands of English titles sorted into wonderfully specific categories. It smells exactly the way an old bookshop should smell. I normally have a rule not to buy more books than I can carry home comfortably. This shop is where that rule goes to die.

5. Scheltema: book shop and café

The largest bookshop in the Netherlands, right on the Rokin: five floors, a couple of hundred thousand books, its own café and even a floor with second-hand books. Most of it is Dutch, but the English sections are big enough to keep you busy for a long while. My routine: collect a small tower of candidates, carry it to the café, order a coffee and pretend I will only buy half of them. I never do.

And because I apparently cannot count to five: Evenaar on the Singel sells nothing but travel literature, and Architectura & Natura on Leliegracht is the place for architecture and nature books. Both small, both lovely.

Have I missed your favourite place in Amsterdam? Tell me in the comments. My list of reasons to go back is already long, one more will not hurt.