Category: Blog

October 2018 reading round-up

Bulrush tasting menu

I ended last month swimming in the Med, reading in beautiful gardens, eating Neapolitan pizza and drinking Ischian wine. I ended this month eating delicious Michelin-starred food right here in Bristol (if you click on the pic above and go to my Flickr page, you can read what all the courses were at the very excellent Bulrush). And the wine might not have been made two miles from where I drank it, but it was pretty damn good. So being back home isn’t so bad (but I still miss holiday).

I have started three or four books since coming back from holiday, but finished none of them. Maybe I need to set aside a day for nothing but reading sometime soon – a good old-fashioned read-a-thon. That would be nice.

Lack of reading aside, this month I watched a couple more K-dramas – Love in the Moonlight and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon – and I also went to the cinema for the first time in ages, to watch the excellent biopic First Man.

Here’s to a happy November.

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Long time, no blog

Paris
Tim and I at the start of the holiday.

I know, I have been horribly absent. Tim and have been on holiday, and I know I usually blog when we go away, but this time I needed to fully switch off from the world – which I did. We went to Reading (university reunion), Paris, Milan (briefly), Naples, Ischia and Pompeii. Which sounds packed for two weeks, but eight days of that were spent on a resort on Ischia doing very little indeed and it was pretty nearly perfect.

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September 2018 reading round-up

Shakespeare-and-Co

Ah, September was definitely a better month. Work continued to be hectic but my health has greatly improved and we ended the month by going on an awesome holiday. See above for highlight number one – I finally made it to Shakespeare & Co! I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by walking through its upstairs rooms, seeing the old photos of previous residents and the camp beds made up for current occupants.

While we were in Italy the transition from summer to autumn happened in earnest. I love autumn. Happy October, folks!

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August 2018 reading round-up

Root

It’s going to be a short list this month. Mostly because I have been too tired to read, partly because I have been wolfing down soapy high-school TV dramas on Netflix instead of reading. But that does use far less brain. I’m also most of the way through the final part of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, so maybe the September book list will be longer than two. Maybe.

Most notable this month was mine and Tim’s 16-year anniversary. We went for a delicious meal at Root in Bristol, which I highly recommend (see pic above). It started life as a chicken shack but they couldn’t get a supply of free-range chicken that they were happy with so they switched to a mostly vegetarian menu. It’s a brave move and I think it’s paid off. I hope they manage to stick around.

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On music and photography

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Untitled

The lupus flare continues. Reading is a struggle. Even harder is conversation. It’s taken me a week to write this post. Being coherent is tough.

When I’m in a flare the things I enjoy doing are heavily restricted. I can watch TV and films if they’re plot-heavy and/or on the silly side, but I can’t concentrate enough for slow, serious or complicated (Brooklyn Nine Nine for the win!). I find social media overwhelming and really only check into Twitter regularly for the cute animal photos and videos. I can listen to podcasts for short periods but I lose concentration easily.

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July 2018 reading round-up

Reading woman (portrait of artist's wife) by Ivan_Kramskoy
Reading woman (portrait of artist’s wife) by Ivan Kramskoy, 1863.

This has not been my most prolific reading month, and it might be my worst month yet for reviewing the books I read. But on the plus side I really enjoyed them all.

My lupus has been flaring, so I have watched a lot of junk TV. But I have squeezed in some “high culture” too. We went to see An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal in Bath, which was a lot of fun. It was a transfer of one of those West End productions with an all-star cast and generally I don’t find them to be as good as the star-free plays I see more often, but there is a certain pleasure in seeing famous faces up close.

I also watched the Netflix special everyone’s been talking about: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. It is genuinely brilliant. It’s funny and upsetting, smart and different.

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Musical interlude: Janelle Monáe

I have been a little unwell lately, so I haven’t caught up on book reviews. I have mostly been watching trashy TV, but I also find that music cheers me up. Specifically, Janelle Monáe continues to make me smile with every song and every video. This is one of her older songs that I love, from 2013. Enjoy!

2018 – the halfway point

Emily, Countess of Kildare

It’s a few weeks late, but the end of June seems like a good point to review my reading so far this year. I read 39 books in the first half of 2018, but the overall number isn’t really what matters to me. How am I doing on my reading goals?

Of those 39, I’ve read 13 books by men, 24 by women and two by multiple authors. 12 have been works in translation – two per month, my best rate yet! Six of those were translated from Japanese, so the holiday clearly had a good influence. Our next holiday will be in Italy, so you may see some Italian translations added to that list before long.

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Reading round-up June 2018

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The heron and the Mastaba

My stack of books that I have read and not reviewed is threatening to topple over and crush me, I am so behind. But we have been getting out and about. I love how summery it’s been for so long already now. Even if the sun is really not good for me, I can’t help but enjoy the blue skies, the long light evenings, the urge to get out and do things.

Speaking of which, this month we have been to London (again) to see Hamilton – which we loved enough that I now have a new album to play on rotation with Janelle Monáe (with whom I have been obsessed all this year). We also went to the Forest of Dean to visit my Dad and Grandad on Father’s Day. We visited Tim’s family on their farm – which is bountiful with food at this time of year. We saw art and we hung out in parks.

My favourite read this month – by some way – was The Radium Girls, a disturbing true story recounted expertly by Kate Moore. But I did read a lot this month and a lot of it was great. Roll on July!

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Wasting time vs quality time

Lately I’ve read quite a few books but I haven’t found time to review them, partly because I’ve been prioritising other things in my evenings and weekends. (Partly because I have been exhausted from working a lot of hours.) And reflecting on that has got me thinking about the choices I make.

I know that the ways that I spend most of my leisure time – watching TV, hanging out in pubs, doing crosswords, playing computer games, reading books – might be considered time-wasting, particularly the TV. But another way to look at is it that most of that time is spent with Tim and he’s my partner, my family, so surely that’s quality time. Yes, even watching TV together. Perhaps especially that – we laugh together, discuss plot points, get annoyed or scared or sad together.

This weekend we had intended to go to on a couple of day trips but I was tired, so instead we have mostly been playing games, or rather one specific game: Civilization VI. Civ has been part of our relationship since the start, in its various iterations. When I was a student we would lose days on end to playing it but it has been several years since we last did this. We are effectively telling a story together, making decisions that are both life-or-death and completely meaningless. It’s really a lot of fun.

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