August was another mixed month. We had a lovely holiday and two weekends away. Tim and I celebrated 21 years together. I went to the cinema twice, three and a half years after my last trip to the big screen (Spider-Man Across the Multiverse and Oppenheimer – I would have liked to add Barbie to the list but haven’t managed to find the time). We also squeezed in a few long bike rides – both on holiday and back home in Bristol.

On the book front, there were no real standouts this month and I definitely bought more books than I read. Oops.

Happy September!

Books read

Apple and Rain by Sarah Crossan
A young friend recommended this YA novel. It’s a sweet tale of a girl figuring out her relationships with her strict grandmother and estranged mother. A teacher encourages her to write poetry, and though she is reluctant to share them, she finds that writing helps her sort through her feelings.

A History of Burning by Janika Oza
This traces the history of Indians living in East Africa through several generations of one family. From a 13-year-old boy in Gujarat press-ganged onto a ship to build a railway in Kenya in the 1890s through to diaspara scattered across the globe in the 1990s following Idi Amin expelling all Asians from Uganda. After learning a little about this history last year in Kololo Hill by Neema Shah, I really appreciated this fuller history. This novel is epic in every sense and I loved it.

Seesaw by Deborah Moggach
A teenage girl from an ordinary, suburban middle-class family is kidnapped. She returns home safely – and then the real drama begins. Fortunes rise and fall in this melodrama. This is a fairly easy, entertaining but predictable read, with a touch of racism that I couldn’t manage to ignore.

The Effect by Lucy Prebble
I both read and watched this play in the same week. It’s about two young people who sign up for a residential drug trial and fall in love. But can they trust their feelings or is the drug changing how they think and feel? This play starts out funny and becomes powerful to the point of shocking. I was really impressed by it.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
In this satire, a young woman decides the best treatment for her precarious mental health is to spend a year mostly sleeping. She achieves this with large quantities of increasingly dubious medications prescribed by the world’s worst psychiatrist. I struggled a little with just how awful a person the main character is at the start of the book but I did warm to her enough to care about the outcome.

Dimanche and Other Stories by Irène Némirovsky
Translated by Bridget Patterson
This is a very moving collection of portraits of ordinary people at unusual moments in their lives. Originally published in French between 1934 and 1941 and presented in order of publication, through these brief scenes at a small scale we can see huge changes happening at large scale. From old-fashioned high society in Paris to Nazi troops invading France and the great evacuation of Paris, Némirovsky finds the small moments that matter.