About – Urban Tofu

Me and my cat, Professor

Welcome. I’m just a girl that likes to read, likes data, and wanted a place to capture both of those things.

Why “Urban Tofu”? I taught English at a university in Hunan, China years ago and “urban tofu” was one of my favorite local dishes. It’s nostalgic, plus I love a good cognate, false or otherwise (false cognate in this case).

I use a 1-10 rating system vs the more common 5 star system. It makes more sense to me, probably because I get so frustrated being confined to 5 stars with no half or quarter points on sites like Goodreads. 10 points gives me a lot more flexibility. See my personal rating rubrics for Fiction and Non-Fiction here. Anything above a 7.5 means I liked it, anything above a 9 means I loved it!

I’m a Mental Health Counselor/Psychotherapist by trade, which is why you’ll find a lot of my non-fiction books landing in the Psychology category.

Here’s a link to my personal home library that is open for perusal (again, data + books = something I will be interested in): Library Cat.

Cheers,
Aly

ICON KEY:

I listened to the audio version of the book

I read the physical version of the book (paperback, hardcover, or Kindle)

A book club read, which means either I chose it to read with my book club or it’s a selection from one of the nine members.

A choice to fulfill a category for my library book challenge. 50 books that fit under these selected categories.

Psychology pick, to either better my craft or find good options to recommend to my clients. I try to personally read anything that I recommend beforehand.

A book I read just for fun!

Shout out to OpenLibrary.org where my book covers and data are pulling from; to NPR Books We Love’s website, you’ll notice this site borrowed heavily from their design; and lastly, to my husband, who created and coded this website for me purely out of love (or in response to incessant nagging, one of the two).