Month: May 2026

The Archive Cafe – a digital detox

Modern digital life is tiring and draining. There are a lot of cranky, socially isolated people staring into their screens or tuning into their airpod-casts.

But there’s also the Archive Cafe in Saint Gilles, Brussels. It’s an independent coffee shop located on Avenue Adolphe Demeur close to the town hall. The specialty coffee is crafted and the baked treats are top-notch, yet Archive is much, much more than a place to caffeinate and refuel.

It seems to possess an almost magical ability to create community and buck the negative trends that surround us. Maybe it’s the vinyl albums you can browse as you wait for your coffee to be made. Maybe it’s the barista, a chill, brown haired woman who seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone and exudes unambiguously positive energy as she DJs her way through the vinyls, chats with customers or just with herself, and serves up delicious brews. Maybe it’s the fact that you can still pay in cash. Maybe it’s simply the location, in one of the more trendy and relaxed neighbourhoods in Belgium’s capital.

Sure there are smartphones even here. But you also see people writing poems in notebooks, reading paperbacks and talking across tables to each other. Dogs are welcome. Babies are welcome. And I always feel welcome too.

It’s a small oasis in the modern dystopia that surrounds us: unpretentious, friendly and positive. A reminder that not everything is online. And not everything is shit.

My review of Jo Nesbo’s “Blood Ties”

Blood Ties by Jo Nesbø

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the ‘uncanny valley’ – where visual effects are neither purely cartoonish, figurative representations of reality; nor are they close enough to pass as photorealistic. Instead, they are in between, and create an uncanny sense of something that is ‘almost’ real.
Jo Nesbo’s Blood Ties occupies the uncanny valley of the written word, in between the genre of Scandi crime fiction, and actual literature. What makes the effect so unpleasant is that the book has some features of real writing to it. Nesbo wants to be a serious writer, and achieves that in places. At the same time, he is cursed with muscle memory from years of cranking out many, many scandi murder stories; he cannot quite escape the ridiculous and cartoonish tropes that made him a wealthy writer of comfortably bad genre fiction.
What results is simply awful. A truly unlikable protagonist named Roy who plods through the uni-dimensional, clumsy plot at a slow and pedestrian pace, yet still finds time to embroil himself in action scenes that are as unrealistic as they are unnecessary.
Worst of all is the warped moral lens through which the reader is forced to view Roy and his uninspiring mission to build a roller coaster in rural Norway. Nesbo tries hard to make the reader sympathise with this guy by backsplaining his childhood abuse into the narrative with a blunt instrument, yet even the heavy spice of child abuse feels so uncannily fake as to leave us emotionally cold. Meanwhile, in the present time, Roy’s brute-boy morality and sordid affair with a young woman are the side plot to his attempts to escape justice for the many murders we know he and his brother Carl committed in the past. Is Roy remorseful? It’s actually hard to say, because the character is so poorly written. Perhaps sensing that the child abuse doesn’t quite make Roy the likeable underdog the author was hoping to craft, Nesbo resorts to making the minor characters even less charismatic than the protagonist, so that Roy can shine by comparison.
It doesn’t work. Nesbo’s warped moral lens does little more than give the reader a headache and make him want to leave that depressing Norwegian town forever. Whatever Roy’s childhood, however corrupt and petty the cops and bankers that inhabit the town of Os, most of me wanted him to get caught and go to jail. But I didn’t want it badly enough to keep reading. I made it about halfway through, before committing my own sort of crime:

Leaving my paperback copy of Blood Ties at an Airbnb, for some other unsuspecting reader to suffer the same fate as me.



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