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!

January 2025 reading round-up

January projects

Well that was a month. I usually don’t mind January as much as other people do. After all, it starts with my birthday and ends with the first spring flowers. Plus I really don’t mind cold weather for walking the dog in crunchy frost and then warming up at home with a hot drink and a book.

But I have to say this year January was tough. It’s been wet. World news is awful. And it turns out that recovering from shoulder surgery is more slow and painful than I anticipated. Plus, I have yet to see a spring flower that’s, you know, flowering (in fairness, I haven’t left the house all that much).

The list below makes it look like I read a lot of books in January. Which technically is true. But the pain and reduced range of movement I’m experiencing, though both are improving week on week, means it is still difficult for me to hold a book that requires both hands to read. So I’ve mostly restricted myself to my ereader (which I can use one-handed) and the set of tiny 50-page Penguin Modern mini classics that Tim bought me a few years ago. Plus a couple of chapbooks of Korean short stories from the University of East Anglia’s Yeoyu project.

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Book review: This House by Sian Northey

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This House book coverSeeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It’s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home.

We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the remote house called Nant yr Aur, where she lives alone. But she doesn’t have to cope entirely on her own. Soon we meet her friend Emyr, who drops in on her most days. He’s a farmer and her only neighbour within walking distance. They’re both getting old and though Emyr has a wife and two grown sons at home, he clearly values Anna’s friendship.

Between Emyr’s visits, Anna reflects back on her life in the house, prompted by a letter she’s received from someone offering to buy it. This isn’t the first offer she’s had, and she doesn’t plan to accept, but it’s made her reminisce. We learn she had a partner once, Ioan; in fact, the house was his, but she was the one who fell in love with it. When Anna decides to meet Sîon, the young man who’s made the offer, they strike up an unlikely friendship.

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Top reads of 2024 and some fun stats

Line graph showing books read and pages read per month

Happy New Year! I have recovered enough from shoulder surgery to type one-handed for short periods. Which means it’s time for a slightly belated (and shorter than usual) look at my reading stats for 2024.

Last year I read 88 books or 23,928 pages. I get lovely stats and graphs from Storygraph, as their name suggests. For instance, I spent an average 6 days on each book (with lots of overlaps). I read 79% fiction, 21% non-fiction. The average book length was 275 pages. I read the most in May but I liked the books the most in August.

According to my own records, I read 18 books in translation. As for gender split, I read 64 by women, 23 by men and one by multiple authors of various genders. I’ve come a long way since the days when I strived to read as many women as men! It’s perhaps no surprise then that all 5 of my favourite books this year were written by women.

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December 2024 reading round-up

Christmas Day 2024

Happy New Year’s Eve folks!

I actually wrote this post a couple of days ago as I will be incapable of blogging on 31 December. I’m scheduled for minor surgery just before the New Year and expect to be on strong painkillers for a few days. Hopefully after a few weeks of convalescence my shoulder will no longer cause me constant pain. That’ll be nice.

Looking back over December, it was a month of two halves. First half was busy with Christmas parties, get-togethers, shopping and planning. Second half was hospital appointments; keeping myself away from crowds so I don’t get sick before having surgery; and a very quiet chill Christmas at home. My brother joined us for a few days and we ate a lot of very good food.

Staying home more than usual means Tim and I powered through our list of Christmas films. We watched a lot of them, old and new, good and bad. I can recommend A Christmas Affair (1949), Desk Set (1957), The Apartment (1960), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and The Ice Harvest (2005). Plus the new Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is great. It’s not set at Christmas but it was premiered on Christmas Day so it’s basically a Christmas film.

I also read a lot this month. I thoroughly enjoyed Butter and Behind You is the Sea, but I absolutely loved This House. It’ll probably be a week or two before I name my top books of 2024, so here’s a hint: This House will be on the list.

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K-drama review: Hometown Cha Cha Cha

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha posterHometown Cha Cha Cha (tvN 2021) is a sweet, gentle romcom told over 24 hours of television. Like all the better K-dramas it takes its time to establish characters and tell their story without overstaying its welcome. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Yoon Hye-jin (Shin Min-a) is a dentist in Seoul. When she refuses to recommend unnecessary expensive treatments to her patients she is fired. In a thoroughly low place, she decides to spend a few hours in Gongjin, a seaside town her family used to visit when she was young.

A series of mishaps conspire to keep her in this small town for the day and night. And also to repeatedly put her in contact with Hong Du-sik (Kim Seon-ho, who was also in Start-Up). A jack-of-all-trades, he is affectionately called Chief Hong by the town’s residents. When a couple of residents casually mention that Gongjin doesn’t have a dentist, the seed of an idea is planted. It’s about time for Hye-jin to start her own practice, and it need only be for a year or so, until she can move back to Seoul.

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Book review: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You is the Sea coverEvery new book is a gamble. Unless you’ve read it before, you don’t really know what you’re getting. Sure, there are some ways to mitigate risk. Tried and tested author; recommendation from a friend or book blogger who shares your taste; perhaps a bookseller or book club you’ve found you jibe with. But even the best of these can end in disappointment. Not every book can be a gem.

So it’s an extra big risk to pre-order a not-yet-published book by an unknown author based solely on a random Bookstagram post. What can I say? They were persuasive: a way to financially support Palestinian authors and encourage more publishers to work with them is to pre-order their books. Demonstrate there is a demand. So I pre-ordered Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj, mostly forgot about it and then a couple of months later got a lovely surprise in the post.

I actually don’t mind the risk of not loving a book. Makes it easier to decide which ones to keep after reading, which ones to even finish. But in this case I did love the book. And that’s despite some narrative decisions that haven’t always worked for me in the past.

This novel is about three Palestinian families in Baltimore, Maryland. Each chapter concentrates on a different character from these families, following them closely for days, weeks or even months. There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people – a lot of whom will have appeared in previous chapters or go on to appear again later.

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TV review: Back to 15

I have to give credit to Charlie Jane Anders for pointing me towards this TV gem. Her newsletter Happy Dancing always ends with recommendations for books, films, TV and/or music and the recs I’ve followed up I’ve always enjoyed. De Volta Aos 15 (Netflix 2022–2024) is a Brazilian comedy-drama coming-of-age series with LGBTQ characters and is a lot of fun. There’s also time travel!

Anita (played by Camila Queiroz) is 30 and her life is in a rut. When she goes back to her hometown Imperatriz for her sister Luiza’s wedding, she sees that it’s true of most people she knows: they’re all stuck in lives that don’t really make them happy. So when she sits down in her childhood bedroom and finds herself reliving her first day of high school when she was 15, it seems clear what she has to do. Anita (now played by Maisa) is going to fix everyone else’s life and then she’ll magically jump back to her real life, right?

This not only goes predictably badly wrong in the past, but when Anita suddenly returns to her 30-year-old life it has changed significantly. She needs to get back to 2006 and do something differently. Which she does – over and over again for two seasons.

This show is gloriously fun. There’s the 2006 fashion and music. There’s high school drama, with love triangles ahoy. There’s hapless 30-year-old drama, in which Anita thinks she knows best and is repeatedly distracted by her love life. And there’s friendship – so much friendship.

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Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

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I don’t read all the books that get a tonne of hype, but I try not to be prejudiced against them either. If a blogger or bookseller I know shares my taste – or even better, a friend – recommends a book to me, I’ll give it a chance. And let’s face it, Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) has been everywhere this year. But thanks to a friend recommending it, I get it. Because it’s really good. And even better, it contains a lot to talk about.

The narrative (mostly) follows Rika, a journalist at a prestigious weekly news magazine in Tokyo. Unmarried in her mid-30s, she is at once judged and admired for being a careerwoman – not an easy thing to be in Japan, we’re told. She’s the only woman in her department and works long hours, often seven days a week. She lives on junk food and sees her sort-of boyfriend Makoto only occasionally – usually when he is out drinking late and needs a nearby bed to sleep in.

Her best friend is Reiko, in some ways Rika’s opposite. Reiko is married, cooks every night and has quit her job in PR while she tries to get pregnant. She’s also full of curiosity and (genuinely) helpful advice for her friend.

With the prospect of a promotion on the horizon, Rika needs a big story and she might now have it. Convicted serial murderer Manako Kajii is awaiting retrial at Tokyo Detention House. She would date rich men, cook gourmet food for them, lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to them, and then one by one they died in mysterious circumstances. It was a huge sensational case, in part because Kajii was already Internet famous, with a popular blog about food and cooking.

Kajii has never given an interview to the press, but Rika thinks she can be persuaded by someone open to the possibility of her innocence. Rika is certain that all the press around Kajii’s original trial was steeped in misogyny and fat-shaming, which may have influenced the jury.

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November 2024 reading round-up

Beckett meets Ted

Well that was November. We had snow! I met my Dad’s puppy! Also there were fireworks for weeks, which is not great with a nervous dog. And my shoulder pain is back with a vengeance. Chronic illness is fun.

I didn’t speed through books this month. Pain makes concentration harder, so I watched a lot more TV instead. We’re most of the way through season one of Three Body Problem – based on the book by Cixin Liu – and I’m also most of the way through the K-drama Hometown Cha-cha-cha. One of those is considerably lighter on the ol’ brain.

I went with friends to see the stage production of Never Let Me Go – based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro – at Bristol Old Vic. It was excellent. Tissues definitely required. I also went with the same friends to an evening of traditional Egyptian and Lebanese music. We sat on cushions on the floor, drinking tea – a very chill night out.

The Christmas activities have already begun. I took my Mum to see Luxmuralis: In the Beginning at Bristol Cathedral – a light art installation that tells the story of the Nativity through laser projections. It’s a bit cheesy but also quite impressive. And again, quite chill.

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Book review: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

I would never have picked up a book about boxing but Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel was sent to me as part of the Good Book Club subscription. And then I saw it was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, so I figured it was time to give it a try. I didn’t love it but I do think the writing is great, Bullwinkel is talented and the only negative for me is the boxing. Which arguably isn’t the point of the novel at all.

Headshot follows the finals of the Women’s 18 And Under Daughters of America Cup. Over two days, eight young women compete to be the US national youth champion. Each chapter follows one match, describing both the bout itself and the thoughts of the two fighters. We get brief flashes back to their lives so far and flashes forward to the futures ahead of them, so that in 240 pages eight stories are told, stories that intersect at this one point.

These are not rich girls; their backgrounds vary from dirt poor to lower middle class. They are all aware this might be the one time in their life they have a shot at winning something notable. Some have family expectations resting on them but most are here under personal ambition alone. Which makes the wins and losses personal too.

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