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!

August 2023 reading round-up

Family bike ride

August was another mixed month. We had a lovely holiday and two weekends away. Tim and I celebrated 21 years together. I went to the cinema twice, three and a half years after my last trip to the big screen (Spider-Man Across the Multiverse and Oppenheimer – I would have liked to add Barbie to the list but haven’t managed to find the time). We also squeezed in a few long bike rides – both on holiday and back home in Bristol.

On the book front, there were no real standouts this month and I definitely bought more books than I read. Oops.

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Book review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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The Vanishing Half book cover

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett enjoyed a lot of success and hype when it was first published. I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since, yet I had somehow managed to avoid not only spoilers but any idea of the book’s setting or themes. I quite enjoyed coming to this novel completely fresh, though I doubt it would have marred my pleasure to know more.

In August 1954, identical twin teenage girls Stella and Desiree disappear from the small town of Mallard, Louisiana. In 1968 one sister returns. The story starts from Desiree’s return in 1968, expanding both back and forward from that point to fill in their childhood, the missing years and the future. It is thus a decades-long story but told as a mystery rather than a saga.

Though the core of the story is blood relatives who have split apart to lead very different lives, this novel concentrates more on chosen family. The twins’ mother Adele, widowed young, loves Early – a man who comes and goes from her home and her life, but always come back and is in his own way a loving stepfather to the girls. They never marry and, despite the time and location, this is accepted. Later, her granddaughter chooses a relationship with another man whose only real flaw is that they cannot get married.

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July 2023 reading round-up

July has been a strange month. There was a lot of rain. Some very good things happened in our lives and some really bad stuff too.

Bristol Pride was incredible, I am so happy to have marched in the parade with Tim and a lot of our friends. The bi flag painted on my eyelids might have been a bit subtle for most people to catch but the two metre inclusive Pride flag I wore as a cape was not. Apparently 25,000 people joined the march, plus a few dogs – including Beckett. Who did very well considering she’s not a big fan of crowds or noise. But she’s also not a fan of being left home alone for four hours. I think we made the right choice.

I read quite a lot this month (though three of the books were tiny). Without question my favourite read was Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which is awesome and I shall now recommend to absolutely everyone.

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Book review: Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson

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This is why independent bookshops are awesome. I probably would never have heard of Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson if my local bookshop Bookhaus hadn’t held an author event about this debut novel. Though I was unable to attend because I was unwell at the time (my lupus has flared up a little in the last month), the description in the Bookhaus email about the event sounded so good that a few days later I cycled over and bought myself a signed copy.

The story opens in a small coalmining town in South Wales in 1984. It’s the peak of the miner’s strike and Eluned is working all the hours she can to support her family, as her father’s strike wages have trickled to almost nothing, while also turning up to the picket lines and volunteering at fundraising events at the miners hall. It’s a lot, and her sister Mabli’s no help – swanning off with her Thatcher-supporting policeman boyfriend.

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June 2023 reading round-up

She's a beach dog now

The weather is glorious, every weekend is packed with activity, but somehow I still managed to read 8 books in June. Possibly because the long, light evenings are perfect for sitting in the garden with a book and my dog. I like summer.

This month we went to our first gig in three and a half years (Arrested Development! They were great!). We went to Cornwall with a bunch of friends. I started doing longer bike rides again. And I finally went to the fancy thermae spa in Bath, after only 16 years of living a 12-minute train ride away. It was fancy. And so relaxing.

June is Pride month so I tried to make at least some of my reading Pride-related. I discovered I had a surprisingly small number of LGBTQIA books in my TBR so I bought quite a lot of new books this month too – some from my own wishlist and some bookseller recommendations at indie bookshops. We have a wealth of them now locally. One of my projects for this year is to visit all the new bookshops in Bristol.

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Book review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

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God of Small Things book cover

I have been hearing praise lavished on this novel since it was first published in the 1990s but somehow The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy still exceeded my expectations. It goes to some tough, dark places but manages to use a playfulness with language to prevent it from being a tough, dark read.

That same playfulness with language also means that the story initially feels elusive, at a distance, even though most of the facts are given to the reader up front. We start with a 31-year-old woman, Rahel, arriving at her childhood home in Kerala after a long absence. She has come because her twin brother Esthappen has also come back. The only other family member living there now is their aunt Baby Kochamma.

We learn early on that something terrible happened when the twins were 7 and that they haven’t seen each other since. Some of the major details are revealed in the first few pages, while other details are saved to almost the final page. It involved their English cousin Sophie, their mother Ammu, the local Communist leader Comrade Pillai and a local man called Velutha who worked in the family’s pickle factory.

Switching between 1969 and 1993, Roy gradually reveals the facts but she also builds the characters piece by piece. When new details are revealed about a character, that becomes another way to refer to them. For instance, 7-year-old Rahel wears her hair “on top of her head like a fountain” in a “Love-in-Tokyo” hair band, and from then on is sometimes simply referred to as “the fountain” or “Love-in-Tokyo”. This is occasionally confusing but for the most part works well to give something like a child’s point of view to the 1969 sections.

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Book review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini

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The Patriarchs book coverHow did men become dominant in human society? When did patriarchy begin? Was it inevitable or could the world have been different? Angela Saini looks at all the available evidence to answer these questions in her book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule.

Having read (and loved) her previous books Inferior and Superior, I knew I was in safe hands as I embarked on this journey to discover how human inequality began. To begin with two of the few solidly definite answers Saini can provide: no, patriarchy was not inevitable and no, it has not always been the way most human societies are structured. Reaching those answers required sifting through centuries of research, a task at which Saini excels.

Societies that are matrilineal (where family lines are tracked through the mothers) and/or matrilocal (where women stay in their childhood homes to raise their own children – sometimes with husbands going to live with them, sometimes without co-parents ever co-habiting) have existed as far back as prehistory and still exist now in pockets all over the world. Matriliny and matrilocality don’t necessarily equal matriarchy but they do lend themselves to more equal society overall, in which women can hold positions of power, own property and receive education at parity with men.

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K-drama review: Snowdrop

Snowdrop still
Snowdrop alternates between tense action, sweet romance and over-the-top comedy.

When Tim and I agreed to take a break from Netflix to catch up on all the great TV on all the other streaming services we have, my major concern was how would I access K-dramas. Netflix has, I think, a better selection of international TV than any other service, with not just one or two but dozens (if not hundreds) of shows from every country it operates in.

But we really did need to reduce the selection of available TV to a list slightly less overwhelming, and in the four months since we suspended our Netflix account we have barely dented the still very long list of TV shows to catch up on. There were even still a small number of K-dramas available so I thought I really should check one out.

Snowdrop (JTBC 2022) is a political melodrama set in late 1987, when South Korea is finally due to hold a democratic election that will end its dictatorship. It’s largely set in the dormitory of the fictional Hosu Women’s University where the young women live under strict rules. Our heroine is Eun Yeong-ro (played by Jisoo, from the girl group Blackpink), a freshman who is soft-spoken and very private.

When her very popular roommate Ko Hye-ryeong (Jung Shin-hye) is asked out on a group date, Yeong-ro goes along and there she meets Lim Soo-ho (Jung Hae-in, who starred in the film Tune in for Love). There is an immediate spark between them. And then a few days later he turns up in her dorm room covered in blood. He is being chased by the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP) who claim that he is a North Korean spy. Thinking that this is an excuse from the ANSP to arrest and beat up a pro-democracy protestor, Yeong-ro hides Soo-ho in the dorm.

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April 2023 reading round-up

Reading companion

I read a lot in April. I mean, yes, I set aside the long Easter weekend to mostly read, and that accounts for 3.5 books. But that still means in the rest of the month I read 5.5 books, more than March or February.

Partly it’s because this has been a cold, wet spring so far. And I think I’ve been better than usual at creating time to read as I really liked most of the books I read this month. I’ve watched half a dozen films with Tim, but none on my own. Admittedly, though, the K-drama I’m watching has 80–90 minute episodes so you could argue I’ve watched eight more films…

April was quite up and down for us. We seem to have a number of friends going through tough times. It can be hard not being able to prevent bad stuff happening to people you love. But it has made me stop to appreciate the good things in my own life, which it’s important to make time to do.

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