September has been full, and exhausting. I finally got the tattoo I had planned for my 40th birthday present to myself. Emily Ingman at 555 Studios in Bradford-on-Avon did a beautiful job, I am so happy with it.

Work got busy, plus we started a big building project on our house, but somehow I managed to get through eight books this month. They were a varied bunch too, and not a dud among them.

On TV we devoured Poker Face (soooooo good). We’re now partway through The Power, based on the Naomi Alderman book, which was one of my top reads of 2021 so I think it’s a good start that I’m not constantly comparing the TV show with the book, I’m just sitting back and enjoying it.

Happy October!

Books read

I Love You So Mochi by Sarah Kuhn
This is a sweet, funny YA novel about a Japanese-American teen, Kimi, who is floundering in her final year of high school. Kimi can’t bring herself to admit to her mother that she doesn’t want to follow in her footsteps and become an artist, which leads to lies, which leads to a whole heap of trouble. To get some breathing room she accepts an unexpected offer from her grandparents to visit them in Japan, where she gets a taste of romance and begins to figure out her future. The direction of the storyline was blindingly obvious but I still really enjoyed the ride.

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
Pirates and scavengers, sentient spaceships and huge space battles, political wrangling, love romantic and familial, lesbians and slavery. There is a lot going on in this novel. I struggled to care about some of the minutiae of the politics but for the most part this was a very entertaining ride. De Bodard managed to convince me that a ship and a human could fall in love and yearn for each other. And almost every character is female, with no explanation given. Which is completely fair given how much old SF was 95% male with no good reason or explanation.

Tiny Moons: a Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles
This is just what the title says – a memoir of the author’s year spent as a student living in Shanghai, told through the seasons and the food she ate. Powles is a Chinese-Malaysian New Zealander and had previously spent time living in Shanghai as a child, but this solo experience is very different. She brilliantly evokes each foodstuff – the textures, smells and tastes but also its effect on her.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
One of the great classics of gay literature and I can see why. Baldwin’s novella follows David, an American, through one single night in rural France – the night that his Italian ex-boyfriend Giovanni will be executed in Paris. In agonied self-reflection he looks back at the time he spent in Paris, falling for and living with Giovanni in his tiny impoverished room. David acknowledges his internalized homophobia but not how badly he treated Giovanni, though his guilty conscience clearly works away at him. Gorgeous prose and a heartbreaking tale.

The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker
This is a collection of Brooker’s columns written for the Guardian in 2007 and 2008. It’s like a strange time capsule to be reminded of what were those years’ big talking points in the UK and particularly the TV shows. Brooker’s bile and vitriol start out funny but can get a little painful, crossing lines I can’t always defend. At times, he expounds ideas that feel very Black Mirror, dark and strange concepts that are usually not always SF.

The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami
Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
A romance with a very very slow burn. This is the story of Tsukiko, a lonely 38-year-old office worker who bumps into her former high school teacher one night out drinking. They keep bumping into each other at local bars and slowly strike up a friendship. Over the changing seasons they gradually grow closer. A quietly beautiful story.

Friday I’m in Love by Camryn Garrett
Mahalia’s mother couldn’t afford to throw her a Sweet Sixteen party like her friends had. Now she has a part-time job of her own, perhaps she could save up and throw her own party. But this won’t be a Sweet Sixteen, it will be a Coming Out party. The she won’t need to tell everyone individually that she’s bi, and she’ll get to have a great party. It sounds perfect, but life isn’t that simple – nor money that easy to save when there’s too little of it to go round. I very much enjoyed this YA romance.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
I must admit that when I first heard about this memoir and added it to my wishlist I had no idea that Zauner was famous, though I had heard and liked her band Japanese Breakfast. This book doesn’t require previous knowledge of its author, though, as it is a well-written, insightful exploration of grief and almost anyone can relate to that. Zauner was just trying to rebuild her fraught relationship with her mother, when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She describes that year with candour, humour and plenty of descriptions of food.