K-drama review: Chocolate

No Comments
Chocolate K-drama poster
The characters Lee Kang (left), Moon Cha-yeong (centre) and Lee Joon (right) all have decent character development in Chocolate.

I love a TV show that centres food, so the K-drama Chocolate (JTBC 2019–2020) sounded ideal. It’s about a doctor and a chef who reconnect as adults after meeting briefly as children. It’s a sweet and surprisingly moving story. With lots of delicious-looking food.

Lee Kang (played as an adult by Yoon Kye-sang) is raised in the small seaside town of Wando. His mother runs a restaurant, his father died when he was a baby. They’re happy, but one day his rich grandmother shows up and announces she wants him to come to live with her in Seoul.

Next time we meet Kang, he’s abandoned his dream to become a chef and is working as a doctor for the hospital his grandmother’s company owns. He’s constantly pitted against his cousin Lee Joon (Jang Seung-jo, from Snowdrop) and picked on by his aunt and uncle. He seems grouchy and difficult with everyone except his room mate and best friend Kwon Min-seong (Teo Yoo).

Continue reading “K-drama review: Chocolate”

November 2025 reading round-up

In some ways it has been an ideal November – mostly very cold and sunny with blue skies, with just the occasional intense storm. I’ve taken the dog for some lovely walks and read some great books.

I also saw Wet Leg live, who were awesome of course. And I went to the Bristol Drama School production of Kae Tempest’s Brand New Ancients, which I found powerful (though the friend I went with was less convinced). Tim also took me to the cinema to see the new Running Man film, which I really enjoyed.

Continue reading “November 2025 reading round-up”

Book review: Resist: Stories of Uprising edited by Ra Page

1 Comment

Resist book cover

Earlier this month I watched a group of masked protestors (or technically counter-protestors) march towards a riot police cordon chanting “Anti-Fascisto”. They were trying to prevent the police from protecting a (thankfully small) protest led by “Bristol Patriots” against a hotel housing asylum seekers. It was a powerful moment to witness. And I realised I knew a lot of the history behind it thanks to the book I was in the middle of reading.

Resist: Stories of Uprising edited by Ra Page is a collection of short stories and essays about moments in British history when people rose up in protest. From Boudicca’s rising in 60/61 to Grenfell Tower in 2017, there’s a whole range of stories. People have revolted for many different reasons in many different ways, and most were countered with violent pushback.

These examples were not always successful protests in the eyes of the people protesting. “The done thing” by Luan Goldie explores the Ford Dagenham Women’s Strike 1968 through a modern-day scene of an old woman who participated in the strike and doesn’t want to talk about it. The strike was a major news story that probably contributed to equal pay legislation, but at the time there was a lot of disillusionment and guilt among the strikers as technically they capitulated and accepted a lesser pay offer. And of course, we know the residents of Grenfell Tower were not listened to in their many complaints and concerns before the horrific fire.

Continue reading “Book review: Resist: Stories of Uprising edited by Ra Page”

Book review: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild coverWhen Tim mentioned our planned France holiday on a night out back in August, a friend recommended a book set (roughly) in the region of France we were heading to. Which seemed like an excellent idea for a holiday read. I duly bought The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne) and started reading it during our idyllic week on l’Ile d’Yeu.

I didn’t completely love this book, but it definitely added a certain something being in the same landscapes I was reading about. The story is (mostly) set in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a small village at the border of the Vendée and Deux-Sevres departements in west France. It’s a rural landscape of farms and villages, getting marshy as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. The Vendée is famous for its salt. Salt pans border the roads, between a grid of narrow channels that help to guide the water, with grazing animals and water birds far outnumbering the signs of human life. It honestly looked a lot like the Somerset levels from the bus we took through the area. Similar weather too!

Continue reading “Book review: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard”

October 2025 reading round-up

Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Lego

October just whizzed along. I squeezed in a lot of things, which I guess contributed to time flying by. I went to two gigs – the Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwals and Panic Shack – as well as a handful of delicious meals out and amazing Lego creations at the Great Western Brick Show. And also two author talks! I saw historian Paula Akpan talk about her book When We Ruled: the Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors. And Tim took me to see Nick Offerman, who is touring for the launch of his new book Little Woodchucks. I’m not sure I’ll get that much out of an introduction to woodworking, but he is a very funny man. And the book does include instructions to build your own little free library, which could be a pretty cool addition to our front garden.

Continue reading “October 2025 reading round-up”

K-drama review: Twenty-five, Twenty-one

Twenty-Five, Twenty-One poster

I occasionally like a more grounded K-drama – less glitz and designer clothes, more money troubles and friendship drama. Twenty-five, Twenty-one (TvN 2022) really hit the spot for me. It’s a coming-of-age drama that reminded me a lot of Reply 1988 – which is no bad thing.

Like the Reply series, we have two timelines. In 2021 a teenage girl, Kim Min-chae (played by Choi Myung-bin), is reluctantly attending a ballet exam. She does badly and in a pique runs off to her grandmother’s house where she find a diary of her mother’s from 1998.

Cue the story of Na Hee-do (teenager played by Kim Tae-ri, who co-starred in the excellent film The Handmaiden; adult played by Kim So-hyun, who is a major musical theatre star). Hee-do was a child prodigy in fencing but, now in her penultimate year of high school, has failed to live up to the early promise. She has developed an obsession with Korea’s top fencer Ko Yu-rim (played by Bona) – a girl her own age, also living in Seoul. When Hee-do’s school axes its fencing team due to the IMF crisis, Hee-do manoeuvres her way into Yu-rim’s school and its fencing team. But Yu-rim’s friendship is not easily won.

Continue reading “K-drama review: Twenty-five, Twenty-one”

September 2025 reading round-up

Picnic spot

We spent the last 10 days of September on holiday in France. It was glorious. We had a great time, ate great food and are mostly sad to be home. We had a chill week on a small, quiet island bookended by weekends in cities. I have approximately a bajillion photos to sort through but for now please enjoy this picture of my reading spot last week.

I spent most of the holiday reading a book set near where we stayed, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne). I didn’t quite make it to the end before we got home (it’s a pretty long book) so I’ll save my final assessment, but I do know it won’t usurp The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver as my favourite read this month, as that was truly excellent.

Continue reading “September 2025 reading round-up”

Book review: Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook

please look after mother book cover

Last year I looked up recommendations of Korean literature available in translation. Not so long ago, the options were fairly few but that’s changing fast. I have multiple novels by Kyung-sook Chin on my want-to-read list and I’m happy to find I really enjoyed the first one I tried, Please Look After Mother (translated from Korean by Kim Chi-young).

The premise is simple. But the psychology and emotions are far from simple. An elderly woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the busy crowds at a central Seoul subway station. The novel follows her family’s search for her and their gradual discoveries about this woman they thought they knew.

Chapters are told from the perspective of different members of the family in turn. Some sections are written in second person, which I don’t always get on with. And it did put me off a little to begin with, but Chin won me over.

Continue reading “Book review: Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook”

Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

1 Comment

sex and lies book cover

I like essay collections but I tend to buy them at a faster rate than I read them. I fear they’re going to be less gripping than a novel or deal with serious subjects with less levity than fiction usually adds. Neither of which was a problem with Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani (translated from French by Sophie Lewis).

I first heard about Slimani when her her novel Lullaby was published in English in 2018 and everyone was recommending it. I took one look at the synopsis and decided it was far too dark for me. That novel won Slimani the Prix Goncourt, making her the first Moroccan woman to do so. But it was actually her previous novel Adèle that triggered the conversations that led to Sex and Lies.

Adèle is about a woman living with sex addiction. When it came out in France, there was publicly expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could have written on that topic, or indeed anything related to sex. Slimani didn’t set out to be shocking or controversial. She was after all following a centuries-old tradition of Arabic-authored literature that is frank about sex. But she acknowledges that in recent decades, things have changed on that front in her native country.

On her two-week Moroccan book tour for Adèle Slimani found that women and young people were keen to discuss sexual topics. But the conversations kept turning to the lack of freedom in modern Morocco. So she kept the conversations going, meeting people – mostly women – who were willing to be interviewed, albeit anonymously for the most part.

Continue reading “Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani”