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!

March 2024 reading round-up

Happy Easter Monday, folks! As is traditional I have spent my weekend mostly reading. I also did some library reorganising for added bookish activity. It’s been a good long weekend.

March has been…wet. I’m starting to miss taking the dog on long, fun expeditions – much as I like the four parks near our house. I really hope we get a few dry days soon. On the plus side our front garden is full of daffodils, tulips and pansies.

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Book review: The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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The first woman book cover

I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age novel. Throw in some feminism and inspiration from folklore, and I am guaranteed to pick it up. Hence my interest in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. With a story set in Uganda from 1934 to 1983 it also covers territory I’ve learned a little about in the last couple of years but from a very different perspective.

Kirabo is raised by her grandparents in a small village in the Bugerere region of Uganda. Her family owns a lot of land and is near a good village school, which means their house is always full of cousins sent to live with them. On the brink of her teens, Kirabo is the youngest of the children and is frequently picked on or excluded by the teenagers, but she knows her grandfather Miiro will protect her from them.

What he can’t protect her from is the flying – Kirabo has begun to have out-of-body experiences when it feels like she is flying through her house or the village. The only person she can trust to help is Nsuuta, their neighbour who is widely considered to be a witch. Nsuuta was a pharmacist until she went blind and has always lived alone, so it isn’t hard to see where the witch reputation came from. Her advice to Kirabo is largely feminist teachings.

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K-drama review: Marry My Husband

Marry My Husband poster

Unusually, I didn’t just stumble across my most recent K-drama, it was recommended by a friend. Marry My Husband (tvN 2024) is brand new to Amazon Prime and it’s a typical K-drama blend of genres. In this case, it’s a mix of saccharine romance, light sci-fi, crime thriller and workplace drama.

As is often the case, it’s impossible to explain the overall premise of this series without completely spoiling the plot of the first episode, so I will do my best and then give a big fat spoiler warning before I get into it.

When we meet Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) she is an ordinary woman in her early 40s with gastric cancer and a mid-level corporate job at U&K Food. After almost 10 years of financially supporting her useless husband Park Min-hwan (Lee Yi-kyung from Descendants of the Sun) Ji-won has just discovered he is having an affair with her best friend Jeong Su-min (Song Ha-yoon). It is peak sad melodrama.

Then there is a major plot flip and it all lightens up. There’s a comically terrible boss, multiple love triangles, a very bitchy high school reunion and a lot of lies are told – some more transparent than others. Marry My Husband goes through a few stages, ramping up gradually from office politics to action thriller.

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Book review: Ithaca by Claire North

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Ithaca book coverI’ve never read The Odyssey, but for my degree I had to study James Joyce’s Ulysses, which involved a couple of lectures detailing how it follows the structure of Homer’s classic. I’ve intended ever since to give The Odyssey a go but 20 years have passed now. I suspect the closest I will come is modern reworks, including those that tell just part of the story. And the best I’ve read so far is Ithaca by Claire North.

Strictly, you could argue this isn’t so much a retelling as filling in the gaps. Penelope is the star of the story, while her absent husband Odysseus is the background character often mentioned but never seen. Penelope runs the island of Ithaca quietly, hiding her wisdom behind her official (male) advisers, turning to her unofficial band of (female) advisers in secret.

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January 2024 reading round-up

Reading spot on the roof

This was a great month for reading, a mixed month in other respects. I mean, it started with my birthday and is ending with a holiday in Paris so it’s certainly not a bad month.

I’ve also watched some excellent films this month, including Poor Things at the cinema. It is honestly so dark and strange, I would only recommend it if you have a high tolerance for weird. But if that’s you, I hope you love it like I did.

We’ve come to Paris for the massive Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which is impressive. But Rothko is really Tim’s thing so in return I made him go to the Catacombs, which I enjoyed a lot. We have eaten a lot of excellent food and the sunsets from our hotel room balcony have been beautiful. Plus the roof terrace is a great spot for reading.

Happy February!

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Book review: The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker

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The Golem and the Djinni book coverOver Christmas and New Year I had almost two weeks off work, so I thought I’d power through four or five books. I’d wrap up cosily from the world in chunky knits and soft blankets; move from bed to sofa to rocking chair; interrupted only by dog walks and meal times. Ha! I think I forgot that Christmas is also a time for trying to see all the family and friends for quality time. And that’s lovely, but does mean despite the truly terrible weather keeping the dog walks short, reading time was also short.

But I did finish one book, a 644-page saga with magical fantasy elements woven into an otherwise realist historical setting. And it was a great read that thoroughly absorbed me.

The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker is, as the title suggests, about a golem and a djinni. Though mostly set in New York City in 1899, it also has scenes in what was then Prussia and locations in the Middle East that again straddle modern country borders. Manhattan is the perfect place for characters living in a Jewish neighbourhood with strong European roots and in Little Syria, with its Arabic roots, to encounter each other and discover that they have much in common.

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Book review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

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The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is beautiful, thoughtful, original, packed with ideas that generate discussion. And yet I found it a bit too ponderous to love it.

Miri’s wife Leah has “come back different” after a deep sea research mission that overran by months. Leah seems weakened and barely eats, sleeps or speaks. She sips on salt water and soaks for long hours in the bath. Her skin takes on a strange hue, almost translucent.

Miri spends her days worrying and trying to get hold of the research centre behind the mission to find out what happened but they are proving maddeningly elusive. She reflects on earlier days of her and Leah’s relationship and who Leah truly is, or was.

Chapters alternate between Miri’s present and Leah’s journal of the mission itself. They are a tiny crew of just three and disaster strikes early, but in an odd way that is left open to the reader’s interpretation. The craft’s communications, lights and engines fail so that it sinks to the ocean floor and cannot be manoeuvred or any message sent. But somehow it still has a working shower, oxygen and water recycling plus a store of long-life food that could last them months, despite the original mission only being a couple of weeks long.

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Book review: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

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Forty rules of love book coverI am not a big fan of the novel-within-a-novel device. Invariably I find the secondary narrative either too dull or too abstract to keep my attention, and my interest is only held by the primary story. I found it a little odd, then, that the opposite happened with The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.

Ella Rubinstein is a very average, middle-class white American housewife. Now that her three children are almost fully grown she’s got her first job in two decades, reading manuscripts for a literary agency. Her first manuscript is Sweet Blasphemy by A Z Zahara, a historical novel about the real-life 13th century poet and scholar Rumi and the time he spent with Sufi dervish Shams of Tabriz.

The story’s setting and characters are completely alien to Ella but she finds herself getting completely sucked in. To the extent that her relationships to her children and husband change entirely and she begins a secret e-mail correspondence with Zahara that quickly becomes flirty and romantic.

I can relate (to a point) as I also found myself fully absorbed by novel-within-a-novel Sweet Blasphemy. I’ve read a little of Rumi’s poetry and I’m very interested in new historical settings. I didn’t really know anything about 13th century Iran or Sufism. But most of all I was fascinated by Shams.

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My top books of 2023 and reading goals

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Reading in bed

As I mentioned in my December reading round-up last week, 2023 was an odd year for me. I feel more in need of the arbitrary fresh start of a new year than I can remember for a very long time.

However, “odd” doesn’t mean all bad, and among my highlights were some truly great books. According to Storygraph I read 81 books and gave 5 of them the maximum rating of 5 (though the ratings are a gut reaction when I finish the book and don’t always match which books I’m still enthusing about months later). My most-read genres were literary, contemporary, LGBTQIA+ and classics – so no surprises there. My average book size was 240 pages and the mood of the books got darker over the course of the year (the mood is based on aggregate “light” or “dark” ratings from readers so isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of what I thought of a book’s mood).

But I know what you’re here for is my favourite reads of 2023. So with the usual caveat that these are chosen from books I read in 2023, not necessarily published last year, here goes…

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