Author: Kate Gardner

I live in Bristol and I like to read books and share what I thought about them here. I read mostly general or literary fiction, with pretty much every genre making an appearance from time to time. I love to receive comments, whether you've read the same books or not!

The real physics of fantasy

Fire Ice and PhysicsThis is just a quick note to say that my review of Fire, Ice and Physics: the Science of Game of Thrones by Rebecca C Thompson has been published over at Physics World.

The book is just what it sounds like: a popular-science study of the book and TV series Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, from the materials science of an ice wall to whether an animal the size of the Game of Thrones dragons could actually fly. It’s really well written, and a fun way to approach topics from hypothermia to nonlinear dynamics.

The book also includes a foreword by physicist and science writer Sean Carroll that reminded me that I really should check out some of his books, as he’s very eloquent.

Intrigued? You can read more over at Physics World.

October 2019 reading round-up

reading at the pubNot my greatest month on the reading front. I blame lupus. I’m partway through two large books, but even so I only finished one full-sized book, plus three comic trade paperbacks. It’s a poor record and means my EU Reading Challenge hasn’t progressed at all. Probably not the best reason to be glad of another Article 50 extension, but yay! We’re still in the EU (for now).

Happy November.

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K-drama review: Descendants of the Sun

From left: Captain Yoo Si-jin, Dr Kang Mo-yeong, Sergeant Seo Dae-young and Lt Yoon Myung-ju.

I know, it’s barely two weeks since my last K-drama review and this show is 16 hours long. No wonder I haven’t read much. My excuses are twofold: I was a bit brain foggy and I found this series addictive. From the first episode of Descendants of the Sun (KBS 2016), I knew I was in trouble.

After the low stakes of Coffee Prince, this drama was much more serious, but still sweet. It opens with an impressive set piece in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After soldiers from both sides of the border fight with knives in a stand-off that the public can never be told about, the triumphant leader of the South Korean commandos removes the scarf covering his face to reveal our hero: Captain Yoo Si-jin (Song Joong-ki).

Our heroine has a slightly less violent introduction but is still instantly impressive. Dr Kang Mo-yeong (Song Hye-kyo) is a surgeon at a big hospital in Seoul. She’s great at her job but keeps getting overlooked for promotions because she doesn’t have connections. She doesn’t take any shit from patients but does get on well with her colleagues and is willing to suck up to her superiors so long as it doesn’t break her moral code.

Si-jin and his best bud Sergeant Seo Dae-young (Jin Goo) are on leave and enjoying a funfair when they foil a robbery. The thief, Kim Gi-bum (Kim Min-seok, who I know from Doctors and Hello, My Twenties) is taken to hospital, with Si-jin and Dae-young in pursuit when they realise he still has one of their phones. Dr Kang initially thinks they are hoodlums harassing her patient and refuses to let them near Gi-bum (who, for reasons that I could never figure out, has as his next-of-kin Dae-young’s on-off girlfriend Lt Yoon Myung-ju – a military doctor who trained with Dr Kang). But when Gi-bum tries to run away from the hospital, he runs into a real gang and ends up being saved by Si-jin and Dae-young in the pilot’s second excellent set piece.

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October is #LupusAwarenessMonth

Lupus UK 2019 posterRoughly once a year I write a post about having lupus (SLE), partly to raise awareness of the disease, but also because it helps me to talk about it in a space where I’m not worried about boring the same poor people who hear about it all the time! Here in the UK, October is Lupus Awareness Month so this seems like a good time.

The symptoms of lupus that I struggle with most are fatigue and brain fog. I had a really dispiriting experience with my rheumatologist earlier this year when I asked him if there is anything I can do medically to help with this and he responded “Everyone gets tired.” That’s so incredibly unhelpful and frankly offensive, though I didn’t have the words to explain that to him at the time.

For one thing, chronic fatigue is not just “feeling tired”, it is extreme and long-term and has a lot of side-effects that can make daily life really hard. Think about the most tired you have ever been. You may have experienced headache, sore eyes, double vision, dizziness, nausea or confusion. You might find yourself unable to think clearly or concentrate. You might find lights too bright, or noises hard to distinguish. Now imagine some or all of that happening every day, no matter how much sleep you get or how careful you are to eat healthily and do regular exercise.

A medical professional should know that’s what chronic fatigue means. So did he not believe me, or was he just being glib without realising how rude and dismissive it sounded? I’m annoyed at myself for not speaking up but then one of the things that I find especially hard is conversation with strangers. I often can’t manage to say what I want to because either I can’t find the right words, or I’m too tired to judge the right moment to jump in and speak.

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K-drama review: Coffee Prince

Coffee Prince advert

I haven’t written about the last few TV shows I’ve watched, but this one had some interesting quirks that I thought were worth a blog post. Coffee Prince (MBC 2007) was a successful enough show that it’s been remade in at least four other countries and the old cafe used for the main set was turned into a real coffee shop that’s a popular tourist attraction in Seoul.

The set-up is that our heroine, Go Eun-chan (played by Yoon Eun-hye), is a 24-year-old androgynous-looking woman who is often mistaken for a man and rarely bothers to correct people. She is the sole wage-earner in her family since her father died, and is determined to earn enough to send her younger sister Eun-sae to college, which means that she works several low-paying jobs. In the first episode, she meets the two men who will be rivals for her love, and of course they are cousins and close friends.

Choi Han-gyul (Gong Yoo) is the heir to a major food corporation and after spending a few years in America “dabbling” with being a toy designer, his grandmother is keen to get him suitably settled down. Her first aim is to find him a wife, so Han-gyul hires Eun-chan – who he thinks is a man – to play his boyfriend who breaks up every blind date. Eun-chan doesn’t like Han-gyul but she has just lost one of her jobs and needs the money.

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What exactly about the bag is Jewish?

Chasing the King of HeartsChasing the King of Hearts
by Hanna Krall
translated from Polish by Philip Boehm

This is my Poland choice for the EU Reading Challenge, one of several I bought from Peirene Press. It’s a true story from World War Two, retold by a journalist who herself survived the war by hiding in a cupboard. Which sounds like quite a story itself, but possibly not one as eventful as that of Izolda.

Izolda Regensberg is a Jewish woman whose history took her from the ghetto in Warsaw, to working for the Underground, to various workcamps and even Auschwitz. But we know early on this book that she survived, thanks to interspersed chapters about her attempts to communicate with her Israeli grandchildren.

Language is key to this amazing story. Language and love. Izolda speaks Polish, Yiddish, Russian and French, and during the war learns German, which helps her to fake her identity, make friends and make money. But in her old age she can’t speak even a sentence of Hebrew and can only communicate with her granddaughters through her own children. It’s an interesting comment on the reduced capacity for new language as we get older, even in people who are polyglots.

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September 2019 reading round-up

Edouard Manet - The Railway
Edouard Manet – The Railway, 1873

Like most years, September started with sunshine and ended with rain. Lots of it. We had another weekend in London and a week off work doing DIY, but the most book-related non-reading activity I did was going to see Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort of) at Bristol Old Vic. It’s an excellent production, using a small all-female cast to great effect. It made me laugh and it made me think, which isn’t bad going for a play based on a book I don’t especially like.

Happy autumn!

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All of us who survived on the street could not renounce the charm of the stories we told

Dry SeasonDry Season
by Gabriela Babnik
translated from Slovene by Rawley Grau

This is a strange book, difficult to follow at times, but always lyrical and occasionally outstanding. It’s my Slovenia book for the EU Reading Challenge, written by a Slovene author and starring a Slovene main character, but actually set in Burkina Faso. It seems extra appropriate for this project as its publication was co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

The book opens with two people in bed together in a hotel room in Ouagadougou. They are Ana – a 62-year-old artist here on holiday – and Ismael, a 27-year-old local who spent much of his life living on the street. It’s an unlikely pairing and one that doesn’t seem destined to last, but as the narrative alternates between their points of view, we discover things they have in common. In a way they are both running away from their daily lives, and as they gradually open up to each other, we learn that neither of them is quite what you expect.

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Our father refused to compromise, and live a life of silence in the face of oppression

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burying the typewriter coverBurying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police
by Carmen Bugan

This is my Romania selection for the EU Reading Challenge, and it’s so far my only book in this challenge that was originally written in English. I remember adding this to my wishlist when it was first published. Past me was smart.

It’s a memoir of the author’s first 18 years, when she lived in Romania. She and her family left Romania in late 1989 under threat of death and this is Bugan’s story of how they reached that point. It’s very much told from her own point of view, as the oldest child of Ion Bugan, who was twice imprisoned for protesting Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime.

The book opens with Carmen’s early childhood, which was idyllically happy. Though her father was an activist long before his marriage and her birth, and never stopped secretly protesting, she was oblivious for many years. As the 1970s turn into the 1980s, the warning signs appear (with of course decades of hindsight). When Carmen turns 11 she begins to pay attention to the radio programmes her parents listen to; to the food shortages and fights over rationing on the streets; to the arguments her parents have about moving near to the border and becoming self-sufficient.

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August 2019 reading round-up

bookshop on a barge
Word on the Water is a bookshop on a barge moored on Regent’s Canal near Kings Cross.

Oh dear, I bought far more books than I read this month. Too many great bookshops and publishers, too much of my time filled with stuff other than reading. Such as celebrating mine and Tim’s 17th anniversary with an awesome weekend in London, a few minutes’ walk from the British Library and Word on the Water. Or a trip to the giant secondhand bookshop Bookbarn. Or a night at the theatre to see the Malory Towers musical, which faithfully reproduces the tone and feel of the books (by which I mean it was a bit twee but still enjoyable).

I did also lose some time this month to being unwell, of the head too foggy to read variety. It always happens during summer. I try to take plenty of precautions but lupus will find a way.

I am currently halfway through two books, so hopefully my September list will look a little healthier. How was your August?

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