Art & Books Gallery is a website dedicated to reviewing the best art books in the world, with a particular emphasis on books covering Chinese art.

We believe that books cover the heart of the art world and drive understanding through one of the most interesting – in our opinions! – fields in the world.

All our book reviews contain links to books on Amazon and each of those has an affiliate link. If you would like to help support us we would very much appreciate it!

Our aim is to provide impartial insight and an experiential viewpoint on the biggest books in the art world. That’s been my viewpoint ever since I read this article on writing book reviews nearly 10 years ago.That means we won’t be providing simplistic ‘out of 5’ scores, or any starring systems. That means we will read the books and tell you what they meant to us in the hope that they will also mean something to you.

We aim to write this way because that’s how we ourselves like to experience reviews. When we read reviews we want to know ‘how will I be changed if I read this book?’

It should go without saying that if we read a book and it doesn’t change us, it simply won’t feature on the site. There’s a question there about what we’ll do with books that we have read but don’t recommend 🤔. To be determined!

In the short-term we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy reading our reviews, and that you’ll take them seriously.


A little bit about us, though, which you might also be interested to hear. We are a partnership – currently 2 of us – working dilligently to produce the reviews. Our names are Sally Grundgen and Louise Simone. We’re both based out of Louisiana.

We’ve been friends for a long time and we are both passionate about art. For many years we had a book club – we’d meet once a week to discuss a book – and that gradually led into this Art & Books Gallery site which you’re reading now.

If you’d like to come and hang out with us, we’re often around at Mick’s Irish Pub sinking beers! We’d absolutely love to see you.

We have been so inspired by famous book clubs over the years that we felt we needed to start our own!

We are mostly interested in contemporary art, and Sally is particularly interested in Chinese contemporary art because she spent a lot of time living in China and is a fluent Mandarin speaker with good connections in the Chinese art world.

As time goes on we really want our legacy to be about sharing our passion for art, and we both felt that this book review site would be a great way to share that with you – the rest of the world!

If you have any questions for us, please do get in touch via our contact page!