Kate Gardner | Nose in a book

December 2023 reading round-up

December 31, 2023January 9, 2024

Another year is over. It’s been a strange one. This month has been wet and grey, which at least had the side effect of giving me time to read nine books (admittedly four of them were trade paperbacks of comic series).

I also watched a lot of Christmas films – most of them terrible, cheesy fare that I would not recommend at any other time of year. The best by far was The Apartment, which is Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine so really how can any other film compete?

As usual, I got a lovely tall stack of new books for Christmas. Because my loved ones know me well. I did a clearout of my TBR and library before Christmas to create some space so for now I can still fit all my books on shelves. But it is my birthday next week so they may well be spilling over again soon. It’s my favourite problem to have.

I failed to finish any of the three books I’m in the middle of for a nice, neat end to the year. But that does give me a headstart on my 2024 book count! I’ll post next week with my 2023 round-up. In the meantime, happy New Year!

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Book review: Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh

December 22, 2023 1 Comment

Palestinian author, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh has won prizes for his writing and his humanitarian work. Occupation Diaries is one of several non-fiction books he has written about Palestine through the lens of his own life. Born in Ramallah, he attended law school in the UK, then moved back to Ramallah to join his father’s law practice. To the best of my knowledge he still lives in Ramallah now and certainly that’s where he was living in 2012 when he published this book.

As the title suggests, Occupation Diaries is a series of diary entries covering the period December 2009 to December 2011. Shehadeh writes about his daily life but adds in historical and political detail.

In the opening entry, Shehadeh travels with a group of friends to a countryside spot called Wadi Qelt. As they spread out their picnic on a rock next to a picturesque pool, a large family arrives and settles on a rock on the opposite side of the water. Shehadeh’s group are Christians and/or foreigners dressed in Western clothes; the family group is local and Muslim, with the women in hijabs and long black skirts. Mutual suspicion quickly grows and there is a brief shouting match, though it is quickly defused.

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November 2023 reading round-up

December 1, 2023December 2, 2023

November ended and it got COLD. Thank goodness I now have a thoroughly well insulated home office. Definitely the season for curling up with a book.

Every so often my work book club picks a topic rather than a specific book and we all choose our own book on that topic and talk about them as a group. Which is a great way to discuss some big (and often weighty) themes and actually get people to show up for the discussion. For our December meeting we’re discussing LGBTQIA books and I found I couldn’t stop at one book. In the past month I’ve read three queer books and I have another three queued up to read next.

Happy December.

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Book review: Girlcrush by Florence Given

November 26, 2023November 27, 2023 1 Comment

Earlier this year I realised that most of the books on my TBR are serious in tone and/or topic, and I needed more fun reads to intersperse in-between. So when I had a day out with a friend in Bath and popped into Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, this paperback jumped out at me with its bright shiny red lips on the cover.

Girlcrush by Florence Given is a near-future novel about friendship, relationships, identity, social media and celebrity. And it’s very fun and easy to read while still being genuinely good.

It’s 2030 in a fictional British city and Eartha, an artist, has just realised that her long-term boyfriend is a cheating asshole and that she is bisexual. She makes a messy, drunk confessional video and posts it on Wonderland, the social app that everyone is plugged into obsessively, and it goes viral.

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October 2023 reading round-up

November 1, 2023January 9, 2024

We spent most of October in a slightly chaotic state having some building work done on our house. I did not appreciate getting up extra early and doing extra cleaning for three and a half weeks but it is satisfying to have finally fixed some big problems. We still have a long list of redecorating tasks and Christmas is scarily close so there’s that to plan too. Adulting is hard.

Roll on November.

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Book review: Seesaw by Deborah Moggach

October 23, 2023

Seesaw book cover Deborah Moggach is one of those authors I’ve seen recommended in many places over the last 20+ years. A few of her novels have been made into films (including These Foolish Things, which became The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and she has written several screenplays as well. So when a family member was having a book clearout and offered me her novel Seesaw I jumped at it. I will not be jumping at her books in future.

It’s not that it’s a bad book. It’s easy to read, with complex characters and I was entertained. But it’s also fairly predictable, despite a structure that feels intended to surprise or even wrongfoot readers. And its commentary on class and money feels simplistic – very much the perspective of an upper middle class writer.

The story centres on the Price family – suburban middle-class folk with everyday, petty squabbles. They’re members of the rotary club. The younger children go to private school. They bought their oldest child a flat when he went to university and have promised him some very expensive film-editing equipment to kickstart his career. Both parents run their own businesses. They’re ordinary; dull, even.

Then their 17-year-old daughter Hannah goes missing. After a long, increasingly fraught day, the Prices receive a phone call claiming that Hannah has been kidnapped and demanding a very large ransom. They can afford it, but it’s going to clean them out of almost everything they have.

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September 2023 reading round-up

October 1, 2023

September has been full, and exhausting. I finally got the tattoo I had planned for my 40th birthday present to myself. Emily Ingman at 555 Studios in Bradford-on-Avon did a beautiful job, I am so happy with it.

Work got busy, plus we started a big building project on our house, but somehow I managed to get through eight books this month. They were a varied bunch too, and not a dud among them.

On TV we devoured Poker Face (soooooo good). We’re now partway through The Power, based on the Naomi Alderman book, which was one of my top reads of 2021 so I think it’s a good start that I’m not constantly comparing the TV show with the book, I’m just sitting back and enjoying it.

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K-drama review: Anna

September 17, 2023

Our temporary holiday from Netflix means I have access to considerably fewer K-dramas at the moment, but there are still a few scattered between the other big streaming services. Anna (2022) started life as a web series and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. Unusually for a K-drama it’s only 8 episodes long. I didn’t even bother checking online reviews before giving it a try.

This series is most definitely at the more serious, high-quality drama end of the scale compared with a lot of other TV shows from Korea. But it didn’t drag or take itself too seriously, as I found with Misaeng.

Our main character is Lee Yu-mi (Bae Suzy – a huge Hallyu star I know mainly from Uncontrollably Fond), a young woman from a poor background who tells a lie that should have been small and insignificant but instead changes her life entirely. It also changes the tone of the show from straight drama to psychological thriller.

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August 2023 reading round-up

September 1, 2023September 7, 2023

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

August 20, 2023 1 Comment

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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