a book club ✳︎ a literary magazine

A book club and a magazine for those who read in English.

Name: Taipei Story
Author: R.F. Kuang

Every month we read a new book. “Not yet translated” is our favourite genre.

Become a member how it works ↓

Taipei Story — book of the month join any day of the month

We talk about books,

not “study English.”

We make materials that turn reading deeper and easier — especially if English isn't your first language.

— how we read

The book is split into parts — and then:

One

Flip through the interactive word sets and the margin notes.

word set · Taipei Story134 words

circumnavigate Tap to flip

To travel all the way around something, especially the world. They had ___d half the globe only to end up eating the same food as everyone el…

cram Tap to flip

To study very hard for a short time just before an exam. I tried to ___ the night before, but you can't learn a language overnight.

cobble together Tap to flip

To make something quickly and roughly out of whatever pieces are available. She ___ed an answer together out of the four words she still remembered.

FlashcardsMultiple choice

Two

Reading gets easier — the key words and realia are familiar before you meet them.

reading notes✳︎

Chiang Kai-shek

Nationalist leader (1887–1975) who ruled China and then Taiwan after losing the civil war to the Communists; his huge white-and-b…

Lu Xun

Writer (1881–1936) regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature, best known for "The True Story of Ah Q" and "Diary of a M…

Three

The book is finished within a month at a comfortable pace.

Reading Pace Guidenovember

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

9–14 parts2–3 days eachquiz ✳︎

— margin notes by bookflix

For every part of the book we collect the details and cultural realia that widen the reading horizon. We sketch and dig through libraries.

< have a look >

Patchouli

A strongly scented Asian mint plant whose dark, earthy oil is used in perfume and incense; it was so associated with 1960s counterculture that the smell is still shorthand for hippie. Traders once packed cashmere shawls with its leaves to keep moths away.

Mews

A small street or courtyard of former stables and coach houses, now converted into desirable homes, especially in London; the word comes from the royal hawk "mews" at Charing Cross, where the king's falcons were kept while moulting.

Taupe

Taupe is a grayish-brown color somewhere between brown and gray.

Topiary

The art of clipping shrubs and trees into ornamental shapes; the practice dates back to ancient Rome, where gardeners carved hedges into ships and animals.

San Sebastián

An elegant seaside city in the Spanish Basque Country, known locally as Donostia, whose old town has one of the highest concentrations of Michelin stars per square metre on earth.

Nativity scene

Nativity scene — is a Christmas display showing the birth of Jesus, usually including Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, animals, shepherds, and the Wise Men.

Melodeon

A small reed instrument — either a button accordion or, in 19th-century America, a pump-action reed organ worked by foot pedals. New England workshops turned out these parlour organs by the thousand before pianos and radios pushed them out of fashion.

"Razor" by Vladimir Nabokov

A 1926 short story by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov about an émigré barber in Berlin who recognises a former tormentor in his chair, playing on the menace of a blade at a stranger's throat.

Man hands on misery to man

A line from Philip Larkin's poem "This Be The Verse", about how parents damage their children; the poem's blunt opening line makes it one of the most quoted — and most censored — in modern English verse.

Pinkie swear

A children's promise sealed by hooking little fingers together; the gesture is thought to have travelled to the West from Japan, where the equivalent yubikiri implies a grim penalty for breaking one's word.