Kate Gardner | Nose in a book

Book review: The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 1 Comment

Sometimes a book breaks your heart but you love it anyway. For me, The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai hit that spot. It’s a novel about Vietnam through most of the twentieth century, told through one family.

After a very brief prelude, it opens in Hanoi in 1972. Twelve-year-old Hương and her grandmother Diệu Lan are running to a bomb shelter as the air raid sirens sound yet again. Hương’s parents and uncles have disappeared down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight in the war. Years later, Hương can only hope no news is good news.

Hương and her grandmother decide they must walk up into the mountains with only the food and clothing they can carry, in search of safety from the American bombs. They return months later to a devastated Hanoi and must piece a life back together, including literally rebuilding their home.

This tale is interspersed with the story of Diệu Lan’s childhood further south, in central Vietnam. Like Hương has experienced in her short life, Diệu Lan had a happy, comfortable home until a series of invaders culminating with the Japanese unsettled everything, and then came the blow of the North Vietnamese Communists, who took an extreme, violent approach to redistribution of wealth.

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Book review: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

December 3, 2022December 3, 2022 1 Comment

When a book gets a lot of hype on publication, it can be hit or miss whether I like it. Even a very good book can be spoiled by expectations that are too high. But How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee is one of the cases where I absolutely agree with all the five-star reviews. This novel is excellent.

It’s set in Singapore, with two timelines. In the year 2000 two people are trying to uncover secrets from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Wang Di is an old woman who has her own terrible memories of that time. Kevin is a 12-year-old boy desperate to help his father by following up on his grandmother’s deathbed confession.

While both our lead characters have their struggles, the stakes are rather different. As the novel opens, Wang Di’s husband has just died, leaving her alone. She never learned to read, and scrapes a living by collecting scrap to resell for recycling. In her husband’s last days, Wang Di finally told him the story she had hidden for more than 50 years – though he guessed some of it the day they met. But he died before there was time for him to reciprocate – to tell her his own war story. Now Wang Di is filled with regret. And shame, as her neighbours laugh at her and call her names.

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November 2022 reading round-up

December 1, 2022December 3, 2022

November started out far too warm (when looked at from a climate crisis perspective rather than personal comfort) and ended super cold. In two weeks we flipped from no central heating and light sweaters, to all-day central heating, thick jumpers and blankets everywhere we sit.

Reading-wise it was an excellent month. Every book was great, with my favourite probably being How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee (though it was tough to choose a favourite). I did a book swap with a friend so I’m now alternating borrowed books with TBR titles. It was meant to stop me from buying new books for a while but I slipped up and bought two of the little Faber Stories series in the Barbican gift shop.

Speaking of which: I went to London! For the first time since very early 2020. And it felt like I’d never been away. Not that nothing had changed, but I expect London to be in constant flux. I even went on the shiny new Elizabeth Line on the Tube, which is indeed very shiny still. The main highlight was seeing my friend H for lots of chitchat, hugs, food and boozing. But we also squeezed in trips to the Vagina Museum and the Barbican Arts Centre, because we are very cultural. I highly recommend both. They’re opposite ends of the spectrum, inasmuch as the Vagina Museum is pretty small and I suspect most visitors spend less than an hour there. While the Barbican is enormous and could occupy you and your whole extended family for days.

Top films this month were probably See How They Run (period comedy mystery about a murder in the theatre staging Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) and Thor: Love and Thunder. We’re also very much enjoying the TV show The Peripheral, which is based on a William Gibson book that Tim and I went to a launch event for but neither of us has yet read. That pesky TBR just keeps on growing.

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Book review: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

November 19, 2022 2 Comments

In 2020 when Earthlings by Sayaka Murata came out (in translation from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) everyone was raving about it. Our local bookshop Storysmith promoted it as one of their bookseller favourites (technically they’re no longer our closest bookshop thanks to the sudden boom in indie bookshops in Bristol, but that’s a topic for another blog post). I was intrigued, and I’d really liked Murata’s previous novel Convenience Store Woman, but I was feeling guilt about how little I was reading (for me) so I put buying new books on hold. Then this summer I fed a friend’s cat while they were on holiday and as a thank you they bought me this. Yay for awesome friends who know the way to my heart.

Like her bestselling previous novel, Murata’s hero in Earthlings is a woman who is emotionally disconnected from the world. But in Natsuki’s case, this may not be due to an innate neurodifference, but rather trauma. Or perhaps a combination.

We meet Natsuki as a child. She believes that her cuddly toy hedgehog Piyyut is an alien from the planet Popinpobopia, a country she first heard of from her beloved cousin Yuu, who she only sees during the summer holidays they spend in the mountains at her grandparents’ home. Yuu claims he is also Popinpobopian and is searching for a spaceship to take him home.

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Book review: Austral by Paul McAuley

November 14, 2022November 12, 2022 1 Comment

Paul McAuley is Tim’s favourite author and I completely understand why. I am surprised McAuley isn’t more widely known, as he is in my experience consistently excellent, creating thoughtful, hard science fiction with great characters and exciting stories.

His 2017 novel Austral imagines a world where the climate catastrophe has happened, the worst-case scenarios came to pass, and the surviving humans have learned little to nothing from it, continuing to put the needs of rich people and corporations before other concerns. It’s depressing in its believability.

A century after the climate catastrophe, Antarctica is now a country with elected politicians and cities to house all the people who work in the plethora of mines the continent is now home to. The first wave of people to move to Antarctica, decades before our story begins, were the Eco Poets, a collective who planted forests, gardens and small farms. But they were targeted as political “undesirables” and now their legacy is the scattered remains of their plantations, and the children they created through gene editing to be better adapted to the Antarctic climate, known as “huskies”.

Our heroine, Austral, is a husky. She’s large, strong and fat so that she doesn’t feel the cold. Discriminated against wherever she goes, she has limited employment options and few friends. Austral works as a prison guard at a penal colony, a rare job that she is well suited for. She dreams of living in an apartment in Auckland, an ordinary life somewhere safe – a dream that is simple and impossible.

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Book review: Kololo Hill by Neema Shah

November 12, 2022 1 Comment

Back in March, I bought two copies of Kololo Hill in an auction to raise funds for British-Ukrainian Aid. The author, Neema Shah, kindly offered to sign the books with personalized recommendations and I thought here was a great opportunity to do a readalong with my friend H, who I was planning to see soon. Cue months of Covid- and non-Covid-related reasons for us delaying our get-together until in August I finally posted H’s copy of the book to her. In September we agreed to start reading the book. In October I finally read it.

It’s a good book; don’t judge it harshly for my delay.

It’s 1972 and Asha and Pran are newly married. They live in the leafy Kololo Hill suburb of Kampala with Pran’s parents, Jaya and Motichand, and his brother Vijay. Pran is planning to expand his shop; Asha is settling in with her in-laws. But in the background of their life is Uganda’s increasing anti-Asian violence, the curfew imposed on them, and the sounds of gunfire at night. Slowly that background becomes foreground, becomes almost all their lives revolve around. And then Idi Amin issues an edict that all Asians must leave Uganda within 90 days. It’s not much time for them to make the necessary plans.

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K-drama review: My ID is Gangnam Beauty

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

My ID is Gangnam Beauty

I’m aware that South Korea has a high take-up of plastic surgery, particularly of women’s faces, but I hadn’t really questioned how that is regarded and talked about among Korean people. A K-drama might not be the most accurate way to find out, but romcom My ID is Gangnam Beauty (JTBC 2018) certainly gave me an insight.

Kang Mi-rae (Im Soo-hyang) gets plastic surgery between high school and university, after years of being bullied because of her looks. At first, the only person who knows (besides her mother) is her one close friend from school Oh Hyun-jung (Min Do-hee, from Reply 1994) who is bubbly and cheerful and tries to get Mi-rae to join in with the fun of university life. And at first it seems to be going great. Mi-rae immediately has boys chatting her up, girls befriending her and crowds clapping her dancing at Freshers Week.

However, it becomes clear that most people can tell Mi-rae had surgery and some of them judge her harshly for it, calling her a “Gangnam plastic monster”. She’s also being exposed for the first time to stalkery men and women who snipe behind her back. Mi-rae seems super naive at times, but she didn’t experience these things at school – the nastiness there was pretty open, as we see in flashbacks.

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October 2022 reading round-up

November 2, 2022December 1, 2022

Happy spooky season to all those folks who enjoy it! Tim and I are currently playing a computer game called Immortality that is very strange and fun. It has a disjointed narrative that you have to piece together, with hidden surprises of a rather disturbing nature. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys dark horror stories and has a high threshold for spine-chilling…stuff (not wanting to give anything away here).

I am less of a fan of fireworks season, which here in the UK starts in the last week of October and continues to mid-November. This is mostly because Beckett is upset by loud or unexpected noises, as many dogs are. But her reactions have certainly made me sympathise more with people and animals living with PTSD at this time of year. I would fully support a ban on private fireworks sales so that only approved organised displays on specific nights are allowed (say Bonfire Night, New Year and religious holidays that use fireworks as part of their celebrations). Or could we at least make all private fireworks silent/quiet ones? The real fun is the lights and colours anyway.

Anyway, October was…mixed. I had COVID for a second time. My symptoms were mild but I continued to test positive for 12 days, so I stayed indoors and isolated from Tim that whole time, which sucked. Since then I have done a few lovely long walks and bike rides and tried to spend extra time with Tim.

All that time at home means I consumed even more books, TV and films than usual. Top films include Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Prisoners. I read some great books. I think the most enjoyable was If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha, a novel about young women in South Korea. But the best was Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince – non-fiction about how the climate catastrophe is going to cause millions of people to become refugees, and how the world needs to change to manage that crisis. I genuinely think everyone should read Vince’s excellent book

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Book review: One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake

October 24, 2022 1 Comment

It’s a few months since I read One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake, but it had such a large effect on me that I felt I really should write a little more than the brief paragraph in my June reading round-up.

I’ve followed Cloake’s food writing for years. Her “How to cook the perfect…” column for the Guardian hits just the right practical, experimental note and her sense of humour makes for fun reading even when it’s not a recipe I’m likely to ever make. And her Instagram account is an excellent mixture of cookery, food markets, restaurants and her dog Wilf. It’s probably the account I pay most attention to that doesn’t belong to someone I know in actual real life.

This is the first of Cloake’s food-and-travel memoirs, based on her 2018 journey around France by bike and train. Her aim was to sample the best versions of her 21 favourite French foods, while keeping to a fairly tight schedule. She packed her panniers and jumped on the Eurostar with her bike. Over the next two months, she cycled a circle around France (roughly) – sometimes accompanied by friends, sometimes alone. And occasionally jumping on a train. France is a big country, after all.

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