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Dear Olde Books, Ho Chi Minh City (2026)

09/09/2026

I think there’s something really cool about recommending a book you love without caring too much whether the other person actually reads it or not. Not in an arrogant way, but more like, “The book exists and it did something real for me. You can take it or leave it, it doesn’t really matter.” The recommendation is an act of sharing, not a performance. And if nobody picks it up, the book is still good. Nothing about the book changes based on how many people read it.

So, read what you like, share what you want, and remember that you really don’t have to care whether other people like the book or not. It doesn’t matter, and that’s not your job anyway.

Your job is simply to enjoy the book, absorb everything from it, and love it with your whole heart, or maybe even hate it if you want. You don’t have to care what other people think, you don’t have to care how they feel about your choices, and you definitely don’t have to follow every single trend, because there’s nothing trendy about reading.

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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

07/09/2026

It just keeps getting heavier 🤣

I already need my “just in case” book, and now I have a “just in case” Kindle too. Like… I never know what mood I’m going to be in or which book I’ll want to read.

Am I the only one who reads 2-3 books at the same time and just switches depending on my mood? Does anyone else have this symptom? 🤣🤣🤣

01/09/2026

The clock is probably the best symbol that connects Matt Haig’s books, because both How to Stop Time and The Midnight Library are about people who keep looking back at their past. Tom Hazard lives for hundreds of years, but he still cannot escape his old memories. Nora Seed wants to die and instead finds herself walking through every life she never lived. Neither book is really about magic, both are asking the same question, whether the life we have is the right one, and whether it is too late to change course.

How to Stop Time follows Tom, a man who was born in the late 1500s and ages so slowly that he still looks about 40 after 400 years. He works as a history teacher today, hiding his secret while searching for his long lost daughter, all while a secretive society insists he must never fall in love again. The Midnight Library takes a different path. After deciding to end her life, Nora Seed wakes up in a library between life and death, where every book lets her try on a different version of herself.

What both novels do well, in my opinion, is take on a heavy subject, whether that is loneliness stretched across centuries or suicidal despair in the present day, and still approach it with warmth. On top of that, what I loved most about these stories is how they treat regret. Many people feel like they have wasted their lives, but these books show us that we do not need to panic about our past mistakes. Instead, they remind us that no matter what choices we make, no one ever has a completely perfect life anyway.

Even with those issues, both books still left me wanting a bit more in different ways. How to Stop Time rushes its ending after building so much emotional weight, and The Midnight Library moves past the heaviest parts of depression a little too quickly, wrapping things up more neatly than real healing usually allows.

Maybe that is the trade-off with Haig's writing. He gives you just enough truth to feel it, and just enough hope to keep reading. I don't think either book fully answers the question it raises. But I closed both books thinking about my own choices a little differently, and maybe that was always the point.
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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

25/08/2026

A Little Life follows four close college friends named Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. After graduating, they move to New York together to build their lives around art, big dreams, and each other. Over the next few decades, their bond grows deeper in a way that feels incredibly special. However, as time goes on, the story begins to focus mostly on Jude. He is a brilliant lawyer who keeps his feelings deeply guarded because his childhood was filled with terrible abuse. The heartbreaking truth about his past only comes out slowly, piece by piece, as his friends try so hard to reach him, but ultimately struggle to help him open up.

In my opinion, what this book does so well is that it does not pretend that love can easily fix deep trauma. Jude is surrounded by people who love and protect him completely . The story never suggests that their love is wasted or not enough. Instead, it shows us a harder truth to accept, which is that love and healing do not always happen at the same time, and sometimes love alone cannot fix everything. Even though this was the hardest part to read, I really appreciated that the book did not offer simple solutions, because that honesty made the story feel so real.

At the same time, reading this book made me feel really uncomfortable, and I do not think that feeling was an accident. Some of the scenes showing Jude hurting himself, along with the violent scenes involving Caleb, were so detailed that it almost felt like too much for the story. That was the moment where the book started to lose me a little.

Even with all of those hard moments, A Little Life is one of the most emotionally heavy books I have ever read, but it is also one of the most unforgettable. I would not suggest reading this book if you are currently going through a hard time in your own life, because it does not offer much hope at the end. However, if you are feeling strong and in a good place mentally, and you want a story that will really stick with you for a long time, then it is truly worth your time. It looks at trauma, deep friendship, and grief in a very honest way, even though you should be prepared for how heavy the story gets before you finish it.

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19/08/2026

There was a time when I completely shut myself off from the world. I didn't want to go outside, mostly because I couldn't afford to, but also because my own mind was so overwhelming that being around people felt like too much to handle. I was constantly comparing myself to everyone else, and carrying around so many toxic thoughts. I had very little back then, but one of the few safe things I could still hold onto was books.

So I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on, romance, mysteries, q***r stories, literary fiction, or manga. I would just lock myself in my room and read for hours. And then, something inside me started to change. It was actually the book She and Her Cat that made me finally get up and do something. For the first time in a long time, I truly wanted something for myself. So, I went to a shelter and adopted my very first cat, a little gray and sad-looking one. He has been with me for four years now, and even though he is a bit fat, he is so lovely and knows every single one of my secrets. That is the special thing nobody really tells you about reading, the connection and the moments you want are still possible, and that little reminder is often enough to help you move toward them.

I am not saying that books can replace therapy, but when I was stuck in a place where I had very little else, they were always there for me. Reading really helped me get through a hard time, and so I want to share the specific stories that helped me, just in case one of them might help you too.

If there is a book that helped save you a little bit during a hard time, please share it in the comments below because I would love to know about it.
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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

12/08/2026

I have a theory that the books you love most and the songs you love most are working on the same frequency. Both of them are trying to do something that ordinary language can't do. They reach for the feeling underneath the feeling, the thing that's too specific to explain and too universal to keep to yourself.

Which of these songs is already on your playlist, and which book are you adding to your TBR list next? Tell me in the comments! 👇

Frances, 21 and sharp-tongued, performs spoken word poetry with her ex-girlfriend/ best friend Bobbi. They befriend a married couple, Nick and Melissa, and Frances begins an affair with nick while convincing herself she has everything under control. Rooney’s prose style, which mirrors Frances’s detachment perfectly, flat and precise and somehow devastating.

This is the book that sounds like music playing in a room where everyone is pretending they don’t care

Four friends from college, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm, navigate adult life in New York. The story centres on jude st. Francis, a lawyer whose childhood left marks he will spend his entire life carrying, and the people who try to love him through it.

Jude spends 700 pages trying not to break the people who love him by pretending he is more okay than he is. The people around him love him deeply and still cannot reach the part of him that most needs reaching. That gap between love and the limits of what love can actually do is what the book is about.

Seven short stories, each centred on a cat and the human life it moves through. From a kitten rescued from a recycling bin who teaches a new father how to parent, to an elderly cat who plans to become a supernatural spirit so that death won’t separate him from his family, each story explores love, loss, and the small things cats witness in a household.

The fourth book in the before the coffee gets cold series. Café funiculi funicula in Tokyo offers customers the ability to travel to the past, but with strict rules: you can only sit in one specific seat, you cannot change what happened, and you must return before your coffee goes cold. Four new visitors arrive, each with something they didn’t get to say.

Salama Kas

05/08/2026

I have a habit of bringing up books in almost every conversation I have with the people I'm close to. It is just my favorite thing to yap about.

My best friend has a kid and barely has time to read, but I still end up talking her ear off about whatever story I am currently obsessed with. I do the exact same thing to my brother. And even though neither of them are really bookworms, they still listen every single time (I promise has nothing to do with any kind of mind control on my part)

Sharing what I am reading has basically become my main love language. When you really love someone, you naturally want to share what is going on inside your head, your inner thoughts, your feelings, and the random realizations that keep you up at night. Sometimes a book just happens to say those things better than you ever could. Recommending a story is not always about the plot. Sometimes it is just a way of saying "this is how I think and feel, and I wanted you to know it."

I think a lot of us do this with the people we are close to, whether it is a movie, a song, or a story that completely wrecked us. These eight are the ones I have already talked everyone's ear off about in real life, so now I am sharing them with you.

Also, if you haven't seen the Lonely Castle in the Mirror anime on Netflix yet, you should watch it before it leaves. It is not quite the same experience as the book, but there is something really cool about seeing how someone else imagined the world inside the story and turned it into animation. You get to compare their version with whatever you pictured while reading, and honestly that comparison is its own kind of fun. It is a really healing watch either way.

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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

05/08/2026

I have a habit of bringing up books in almost every conversation I have with the people I'm close to. It is just my favorite thing to yap about.

My best friend has a kid and barely has time to read, but I still end up talking her ear off about whatever story I am currently obsessed with. I do the exact same thing to my brother. And even though neither of them are really bookworms, they still listen every single time (I promise has nothing to do with any kind of mind control on my part)

Sharing what I am reading has basically become my main love language. When you really love someone, you naturally want to share what is going on inside your head, your inner thoughts, your feelings, and the random realizations that keep you up at night. Sometimes a book just happens to say those things better than you ever could. Recommending a story is not always about the plot. Sometimes it is just a way of saying "this is how I think and feel, and I wanted you to know it."

I think a lot of us do this with the people we are close to, whether it is a movie, a song, or a story that completely wrecked us. These eight are the ones I have already talked everyone's ear off about in real life, so now I am sharing them with you.

Also, if you haven't seen the Lonely Castle in the Mirror anime on Netflix yet, you should watch it before it leaves. It is not quite the same experience as the book, but there is something really cool about seeing how someone else imagined the world inside the story and turned it into animation. You get to compare their version with whatever you pictured while reading, and honestly that comparison is its own kind of fun. It is a really healing watch either way.

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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

which one are you picking first?

28/07/2026

Swap the 5-hour doomscroll for a quick 200-page book that will actually give you a dopamine hit. (Or emotional trauma, depending on which one you pick). Let’s cure the brain rot together 💪

25/07/2026

I have never really thought of myself as a poetry person, and honestly, part of that is because English is not my first language. Poetry already asks a lot from any reader. It relies so much on rhythm, the hidden meanings of single words, and pictures that are supposed to just pop into your head. When you read poetry in a second language, that magical, dreamy feeling doesn't always come through. Sometimes I get it perfectly, but other times, a line just slides right past me. I might understand the literal words, but I completely miss the emotional feeling behind them. Because of that, when I picked up Lullabies and later The Universe of Us by Lang Leav, I expected to struggle a bit. But to my surprise, I didn't struggle at all.

That was the very first surprise about Lang Leav's writing. It never once made me feel like I was missing out on the secret meaning. Her poems are simple, and I think she does that on purpose. She uses short lines and everyday words, instead of that heavy, complicated language you have to read three times just to understand. For someone like me, that simplicity meant everything. I could read a poem just once and actually feel something right away. Because of that, both books became a warm, easy welcome into the world of poetry.They made me feel like this genre was not something closed off just because English is not the language I grew up thinking in.

What I really loved about both books is how they look at love from every angle, not just one. Lullabies follows a relationship almost like a piece of music, starting soft and hopeful in Duet, drifting into uncertainty in Interlude, and finally settling into heartbreak in Finale. The Universe of Us takes a different path to the same feeling, using stars and space to describe how massive love can feel, and how tiny you can feel once it's gone.

In the end, both books gave me something I never expected from poetry. They made me feel included, not left out. As someone stepping into poetry from a different language background, I am just really happy these were the books that welcomed me in.
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DEAR OLDE BOOKS

Dear Olde Books

09/09/2026

07/09/2026

01/09/2026

25/08/2026

19/08/2026

12/08/2026

05/08/2026

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28/07/2026

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