April 2025 reading round-up

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It feels like midsummer here in Bristol. Which is kinda lovely but also kinda terrifying on a climate-catastrophe level.

April was busy, mostly with fun things. We made our own spiced rum, went fossil hunting in Lyme Regis and saw the very excellent poet-musician Joshua Idehen perform.

April has also been a shitshow politically, especially for trans people in the UK. I am ashamed of my country right now. I’m trying to help by writing to my MP, donating to the Good Law Project and generally being vocal in my solidarity. Trans rights are human rights. No women are made safer by legitimizing the exclusion and ill treatment of a subset of women. I truly hope this is a short-term setback on an overall upward trajectory and that things will get better.

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It’s Easter, it’s readathon time

Long weekend plans

Pretty much every Easter I get 3 or 4 days entirely to myself – no work, no Tim or other family, no commitments. Just me and whatever I want to do. Well, okay, for the past couple of years I’ve had the dog for company too. So I go for walks, cook myself nice food, buy and eat Easter eggs. But most of all – I read.

I don’t set myself any targets or rules. I try to choose from my existing TBR because let’s face it, there are over 100 books sat in my bedroom waiting for my attention. But if a dog walk should happen to take us to a bookshop, then who am I to ignore the call of fate?

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Book review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

Parable of the Sower book cover

Thank you again to the organisers of the Banned Book Club on BlueSky for prompting me to read this modern classic of dystopian fiction, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler. I listened to the audio book read by Lynne Thigpen, which meant I couldn’t highlight quotes but it did really bring it alive.

In diary entries starting from 2024, teenager Lauren details what it takes to survive in an alternate California. The US is increasingly unstable between severe climate change; escalating privatisation of resources and services; and a scary drug that gives users a high from watching fire burn. Lauren lives in a gated community with her Black preacher father, Hispanic stepmother and gaggle of stepbrothers.

A gated community sounds fancy, but this is just an ordinary neighbourhood on the outskirts of LA of people who are at best lower middle class. They have had to put up walls, rigged alarms, set up 24-hour watches. They seem at first to be managing well. Several families grow some food in their gardens; one family breeds rabbits for food; most families have one person with a paying job. They trade between themselves, the teenagers date each other, the parents take turns teaching essential life skills to the children.

But they are under constant threat of robbery, violence, fire. When they leave the neighbourhood for weekly shooting practice they must keep constant watch for attacks from humans and feral dogs.

Added to this, Lauren has hyper empathy, literally feeling the pain and ecstasy of any people near her. Which is not helpful when surrounded by violence. She knows that worse times are coming and tries to encourage friends to prepare but they reject her warnings. All she can do is prepare herself.

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March 2025 reading round-up

Three-cornered leek

The sun has started to show its face; the clocks have changed; our cherry tree is in full blossom. The herb seeds I planted a month ago are varying from just peeking through the surface to recognisable plants on various windowsills around the house. I do like spring.

Health-wise, I’ve been getting out on my bike at least once a week and even started running again. My shoulder isn’t 100% recovered but I’m inching closer.

I joined BlueSky last year and so far my favourite part is the Banned Book Club, which names a different book each month to discuss. This month’s selection was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and I’m so glad I was pushed to finally read this terrifying modern masterpiece. It’s definite a good candidate for discussion. In fact, I think the discussion prompts really helped me to process this challenging read.

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Book review: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

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Wicked book coverAs if to prove his point in his author’s introduction, the first few chapters of Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire include: slut shaming; puppet porn; mob violence and a pretty detailed childbirth. This book is very much not for children. It is so much better, darker and more politically complex than I had expected from having seen the musical years ago on the West End.

This is not a sweet and light tale of female friendship regretfully torn apart by loving the same man. It’s a politically complex novel about the spread of right-wing ideology and one woman who finds that not playing along with the majority opinion comes at a high cost. Put another way, it’s Elphaba’s story, from birth to death.

Oz is a land slowly falling to a dictator – the Wizard – who is sowing hate and discord to divide and conquer the four previously autonomous regions around Emerald City. Elphaba is the daughter of a preacher and a woman who is already unhappy before her first child is born with green skin. Everyone fears her, child and adult.

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Book review: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

The Skin and its Girl cover

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is one of the stories of Palestinian diaspora that I have been particularly excited to get hold of. Reviews made it sound right up my street – and it absolutely is. It celebrates language and storytelling; questions ideas of truth and honesty; features queerness; and is beautifully written.

Betty Rumanni tells the story of her life so far, starting with the day of her birth. At first she wasn’t breathing, doctors thought she was dead, then she took her first breath and her skin turned cobalt blue. Betty’s skin has been bright blue ever since.

This is not some alternative universe where some people are blue-skinned. Betty is one-of-a-kind. And while it’s a clear metaphor for standing out as an Arab American “soon after 9/11”, it also makes for a kind of modern myth.

It becomes clear that Betty is telling her story to a specific person, her great aunt Nuha. Or more accurately, Nuha’s grave. Betty is trying to figure out whether to stay in America to take care of her mother, or to follow her girlfriend overseas to build a new life together. But more than that, she is trying to piece together her aunt’s story and that of the Rumanni family.

Betty’s knowledge of the Rumanni family largely comes from Nuha’s bedtime stories. There’s a family feud relating to a soap factory in Nablus; a girl who follows a silver gazelle to Haifa; even a tattooed ogre. And mixed in with these stories of Palestine are Bible stories, retold by someone who believes in God but does not feel God has ever been there for her. How do these tales relate to the friction between her grandmother Saeeda and great aunt Nuha in America? Are these the roots of Betty’s mother Tashi’s fragile mental health?

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February 2025 reading round-up

Elektra

Not such an eventful month as January or nearly as prolific reading-wise. It’s honestly been a bit of a tough one as recovery from surgery is proving much slower than I had expected. But I’m now cycling again, which feels like a big step.

We ended the month with a trip to London to see Brie Larson on stage in Elektra. She was absolutely brilliant in this bare bones, angry, punk staging that uses Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles. It’s the most experimental play I’ve ever seen in the West End or indeed in any traditional old theatre. If it weren’t for the huge Hollywood and Broadway names (Clytemnestra is played by Stockard Channing) this play would have felt right at home at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatre or South Street Arts Centre in Reading. I loved it, even if I didn’t quite understand a couple of the set details (why is there a zeppelin?).

I’m still not sure I’m quite ready to read the Ancient Greeks, even in modern translation. But this has reignited my interest in these stories enough to queue up the second part of Claire North’s Songs of Penelope series to read soon. The blurb suggests this novel heavily features Elektra and her brother Orestes. (They were minor characters in the first book, Ithaca.)

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Book review: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Woman on the Edge of Time book cover

I forget where I heard about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, but as its cover proclaims it is “the classic feminist novel” and it’s speculative fiction written a woman, it’s not hard to see why I added it to my wishlist at some point.

This is quite a dark, grim, even shocking, book. And it’s also a vision of a hopeful, more equal future. Or is it?

In 1970s New York City, middle-aged Connie tries to stand up to her niece’s abusive pimp and he has her committed to a mental institution. Conditions there are pretty bleak and no-one listens to her, or any other patient – particularly people of colour. Connie is Hispanic, which means she isn’t treated quite as badly as Black patients but she is still “othered” by the doctors, spoken of as more animal than human. What it comes down to is these patients are all poor, and therefore expendable. And she is also a woman, while the pimp is a man. Connie’s one relief from her awful situation is her ability to contact a community in the far future.

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January 2025 reading round-up

January projects

Well that was a month. I usually don’t mind January as much as other people do. After all, it starts with my birthday and ends with the first spring flowers. Plus I really don’t mind cold weather for walking the dog in crunchy frost and then warming up at home with a hot drink and a book.

But I have to say this year January was tough. It’s been wet. World news is awful. And it turns out that recovering from shoulder surgery is more slow and painful than I anticipated. Plus, I have yet to see a spring flower that’s, you know, flowering (in fairness, I haven’t left the house all that much).

The list below makes it look like I read a lot of books in January. Which technically is true. But the pain and reduced range of movement I’m experiencing, though both are improving week on week, means it is still difficult for me to hold a book that requires both hands to read. So I’ve mostly restricted myself to my ereader (which I can use one-handed) and the set of tiny 50-page Penguin Modern mini classics that Tim bought me a few years ago. Plus a couple of chapbooks of Korean short stories from the University of East Anglia’s Yeoyu project.

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Book review: This House by Sian Northey

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This House book coverSeeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It’s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home.

We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the remote house called Nant yr Aur, where she lives alone. But she doesn’t have to cope entirely on her own. Soon we meet her friend Emyr, who drops in on her most days. He’s a farmer and her only neighbour within walking distance. They’re both getting old and though Emyr has a wife and two grown sons at home, he clearly values Anna’s friendship.

Between Emyr’s visits, Anna reflects back on her life in the house, prompted by a letter she’s received from someone offering to buy it. This isn’t the first offer she’s had, and she doesn’t plan to accept, but it’s made her reminisce. We learn she had a partner once, Ioan; in fact, the house was his, but she was the one who fell in love with it. When Anna decides to meet Sîon, the young man who’s made the offer, they strike up an unlikely friendship.

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