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.)

The daffodils are out in time for St David’s Day and the sun is finally shining after a mostly wet and grey winter. Happy March everybody.

Books read

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai
Translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood
This is a sweet, gentle book about a Kyoto restaurant run by a father and daughter. But their true business is their detective agency. They promise customers that they can recreate dishes almost lost to memory. Cue a series of emotional stories about loved ones and food. The dishes that customers bring to the detectives are both very specific and maddeningly vague, so that the task seems nigh impossible. But the detectives pick up on subtle details and come through for their clients.

Passing by Nella Larsen
I made a whole pile of books to read for US Black History Month (we celebrate Black history in October in the UK) and only read one of them. A short novel at that, but an educational one. In 1920s Chicago and Harlem, two Black women who can pass for white reconnect years after having been children together. One has married a white man and lives full time hiding her Blackness. The other has married a Black man and fund raises for civil rights. It’s a dangerous path for them to rekindle their friendship and spend significant time together. But the nature of that danger is not quite what it at first seems.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire
A close friend has been recommending this book to me for years. With the film coming out and the Oscar buzz around it, my book club picked this for our February meeting. 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 very much Elphaba’s story, from birth to death. Oz is a land slowly falling to a dictator who is sowing hate and discord to divide and conquer the four previously autonomous regions around Emerald City. It’s a grimly fascinating, scarily familiar story of how fascism is spread by most people’s indifference. And the demonisation of those who try to stand up to corruption. Not a quick or easy read and definitely not suitable for children.

City of the Dead by Paul McAuley
This is a chapbook of a longer short story (novelette?) in McAuley’s Jackaroo universe. In a post-WWIII near future, an alien race called the Jackaroo make first contact with humans on Earth. They offer humans a limited selection of their technology and access to a wormhole network connecting 15 stars – including our solar system. Humans get access to dozens of planets and moons to explore and live on and the Jackaroo get mineral rights to every planet in our solar system except Earth. That backstory is drip-fed in, being largely unimportant in this particular tale. A sheriff in a small frontier town strikes up a friendship with a local scientist who lives off grid studying a species of intelligent and violent rats. The two women must work together to outwit heavily armed criminals who show up following a rumour about valuable alien tech. It’s a great story, with lots of intriguing details and as always in McAuley the future/alien science is believably futuristic/alien.