Reviews and other ramblings
“The hardest button to button” is not just a great song that reminds me of university and the friends I made there, it’s also a great video by one of the masters of music-video directing: Michel Gondry. I’m really pleased he’s come back to music videos this year (for Metronomy’s “Love letters”) after a few years’ hiatus. His creative genius works so well in this format.
But it’s also a really good song.
Aren’t we having a lovely summer? Well we are here in Bristol and I hope that you are too. Not that I’ve had a lot of free time to enjoy it properly, but it’s still nice to have long sunny days. I’ve been busy helping my Mum celebrate her 60th birthday, visiting Oxford with my friend H, redecorating the living room (still a work in progress) and I even squeezed in writing an article for For Books’ Sake. Not to mention, y’know, doing my job.
Somehow, I also managed to get through several books this month (I’m halfway through two more as well), though I notice I only read three short stories. Three! This despite the New Yorker opening up its content free to all for the summer, including their wonderful short stories. I must make time to read some of them before they’re locked down to subscribers only again.
Here’s to continued summer loveliness, with added free time to enjoy it.
Books read
Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey (review here)
Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson (review here)
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe by Romain Puértolas (review here)
Gold by Dan Rhodes (review here)
Paintwork by Tim Maughan
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (review here)
Short stories read
“How many miles to Babylon?” by Megan Arkenberg (Lightspeed Magazine, issue 20)
“Gene wars” by Paul McAuley (Lightspeed Magazine, issue 20)
“Always true to thee, in my fashion” by Nancy Kress (Lightspeed Magazine, issue 20)
Happy summer everyone!
Just a quick note to say that today you can read my thoughts about women writing popular science over at For Books’ Sake. Inspired by my 2014 Popular-Science Reading Challenge and the feminist focus of For Books’ Sake, I picked out my top five pop-sci books by women. Please do go take a look and leave a comment with your own favourites, or your thoughts on the ones I picked.
In this month of #bookaday running into Independent Booksellers Week I certainly haven’t read a book a day or even some of a book every day, but I have visited my favourite independent bookshop: Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. Despite the towering TBR I couldn’t leave empty-handed, so Tim and I picked two books each to treat ourselves!
I’ve been busy at work and enjoying the glimpse of summer we had until the last few days, so it wasn’t my greatest or my worst month reading-wise, but to spice things up I did review a great musical at Bristol Old Vic and Germaine Greer’s talk at Bristol Festival of Ideas. I love living somewhere with events like those pretty much every night. If only I had the time, money and energy to go to them all!
Books read
Tales from the Secret Annexe by Anne Frank (review)
Captain America: Castaway in Dimension Z – volumes 1 and 2 by Rick Remender and John Romita Jr (review)
In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall (review)
Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky (review)
The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble
Short stories read
“Father’s last escape” by Bruno Schulz (New Yorker Fiction podcast)
“St George” by Gail Godwin (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The trickle-down effect” by Annie Proulx (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Now that you’ve died” by Patrick Ness (Guardian Books podcast)
“The lone pilgrim” by Laurie Colwin (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The night bookmobile” by Audrey Niffenegger (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Home” by Jess Pineda (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Stolen child” by Jennifer Quintenz (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Still waters” by Lisa Randolph (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Martyoshka” by Kay Reindl (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Bat Girl” by Kira Snyder (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Crystal Brook” by Jeane Wong (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
Happy summer everyone!
I thought rather than waiting until December to see how I’ve performed against my goals, I’d check now and see if I need to make any adjustments! First, let’s look at the reading plans I made back at the end of last year.
1. Read more science fiction
I’ve read four SF books in the last six months, plus you could argue that some of the comics I’ve read count toward this goal. Not an amazing showing but I think it just about counts. (Oh, and I’ve just remembered that a big chunk of the short stories I’ve read are science fiction, so that makes me feel better!)
2. Read popular science
After a slow start, my 2014 Popular-Science Reading Challenge is going great guns (as my Dad would say). I’ve so far read six books and I have my next read (Silent Spring by Rachel Carson) lined up on my bedside table. Now I just have to keep it up!
3. Re-read
Oh dear, this one isn’t going well at all. I have re-read one book so far and even that was strictly a revised edition with added material. The ever-growing TBR makes it hard to justify re-reading and yet, if I don’t, what’s the point in keeping read books at all?
More generally, how’s my reading looking? So far this year I’ve read 33 books, which is less than half of last year, so I’m definitely reading slower (or spending less of my time reading). Of those, 20 were written by women, which is a massive improvement on previous years. However, only 3 were written in a language other than English, which is shameful, especially considering I subscribe to And Other Stories and have several of their books languishing in the TBR. Must do better.
Overall, it looks like my efforts to include popular science have been achieved at the expense of translated fiction, but I’m going to really try during the rest of the year to read both. This may be over-ambitious, but it’s important to have aims, right?
Did you make any reading plans for 2014? Have you checked to see how you’re doing?
White Beech: the Rainforest Years
@Bristol, 12 June
The packed audience for Germaine Greer’s talk at Bristol Festival of Ideas were mostly women, as you might expect, but for once the topic at hand was not feminism but the environment and conservation. Greer was introducing her new book White Beech: the Rainforest Years by giving some background to what might seem like a surprising episode of her life.
In 2001 Greer bought an abandoned farm in Australia with the sole intention of returning the land to the sub-tropical rainforest it once had been, a small area of which remained. She had very clear ideas about how and why she wanted to do this and had spent some time choosing the right piece of land, but where did this unusual idea come from?
Greer spoke eloquently and passionately about her lifelong love for nature and her growing realisation, as she got older, that she preferred “real” nature to anything artificially managed. She spoke about the difference between the artistic notion of “landscape” and the Aboriginal term “country”, which encompasses not only land and vegetation but also sky above and creatures living there. (I say “creatures” deliberately because as president of the charity Bug Life, Greer tends to be more concerned with insects, crustaceans and the like rather than birds or mammals). While landscaped land can be pretty or picturesque, Greer finds real beauty in wilder nature. She also finds that natural plants in their natural habitat tend to make sense and work together, creating more biodiversity than anything artificial manages.
Which led her to begin educating herself about natural vegetation versus introduced species. She has become pretty knowledgeable on this subject about both the UK and Australia. The UK’s long history of landscaped gardens and parks hasn’t done our native species any favours. There are now more monkey puzzle trees in the UK than in their native Chile but the very British larch tree is struggling.
Greer is nothing if not opinionated and while her passion and her project are both wonderful, there are points on which she seems wilfully naïve. For instance, she is very against captive breeding programmes for endangered animals and says that we should instead declare their habitats protected areas and leave them to regenerate. It would be a wonderful world if that were possible but look at the number of protected reserves around the world that have failed to protect animals from poachers or illegal tree felling or other damaging human activity. Humans are just not that easy to control.
Greer also says that her hope with this project is to start a trend, to encourage others to do as she has. Which is all very well for her to say but most of us don’t have the time or the money for such a huge project, or even a smaller version of it. She employs a staff of botanists on her bit of Australian rainforest and made sure we all knew that she pays them a decent wage (apparently paid work is a bit of a rarity for botanists these days). I’m glad for them but perhaps this section of the talk would be better saved for audiences of the very rich, rather than having multiple questions from the audience about what the average person can do be dismissed out of hand. Not a lot, was the largely disguised answer. This is a rich person’s solution.
However, Greer’s eagerness to do what she considers to be the right thing and her pleasure in the success she has had so far on her own project shone through. She describes the experience as “fun, surprising, joyful, unalloyed, exciting and dramatic”.
My May reading is looking very female-author heavy, which I’m happy with. And includes not one but three popular-science books! Take that complete-failure-that-was-me-in-March. However, my reading has also been heavily borrowed from friends/the library, so my TBR has not shrunk at all. One day I will achieve my aim of owning fewer than 100 unread books. One day.
We’ve had lots of weekend fun this month, distracting me from my books, plus we’re back in redecorating mode (we’re currently at the stage where everything looks much worse than when we started so no I will not post any photos just yet) so frankly I’m pleased to have read anything at all. Amazing how I manage to find the time to read when I’m actually enjoying every book I pick up and struggle to fit in reading when the books are a little bit disappointing. Can’t imagine what the lesson there is!
Books
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (review here)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (review here)
Saga volume 3 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Breasts by Florence Williams (review here)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (review here)
Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker
Short stories
“Shakespeare’s memory” by Jorge Luis Borges (New Yorker Fiction podcast)
“Where the Cluetts are” by Jack Finney (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Lederhosen” by Haruki Murakami (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Outlaw” by Amy Berg (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Healthy happy hailie!” by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Hallelujah” by Akela Cooper (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Three minutes” by Liz Edwards (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“INT. WOLF—NIGHT” by Jane Espenson (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“XAYMACA” by Shalisha Francis & Nadine Knight (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Collapse” by Lisa Klink (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Suzie homemaker/apocalypse ass kicker” by Pang-Ni Landrum (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Positive symptoms” by Lauren LeFranc (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Dangerous stars” by Kam Miller (Empower: Fight Like a Girl! anthology)
“Recording angel” by Ian McDonald (Lightspeed magazine, issue 13, June 2011)
“The treatment” by Daniel Menaker (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Palais de Justice” by Mark Helprin (Selected Shorts podcast)
Hope you had a great May and here’s hoping for more happy reading times in June!
I was going to do one of my “what I’ve been up to lately” posts today but then Michael Gove’s comments about the new GCSE curriculum were all over Twitter and I had to respond. I know that what Gove said (or is quoted as saying) does not accurately reflect the content of the new GCSE curriculum, it was just his own bizarre prejudices and ideas, but the man is the education secretary and sadly his words have consequence. So this is a riposte to him, not necessarily the curriculum.
I went to secondary school already loving books. Whether that was something innate in me or the influence of my parents and some or all of my primary school teachers I don’t know. But that’s why I survived five years of indifferent teaching of English lit and came out the other end as a lover of books. I would not be surprised if a lot of my former classmates don’t read as adults. We were not inspired to.
I should add for the record that my secondary school did have some great teachers – in history, maths and French I was very well served. And English language was handled well – I learned to debate, to write in different forms, especially creatively. But that cornerstone of education – reading books – was not handled in a way that inspired.
It can’t have all been about the choice of books. Because we did read some great books – Goodnight Mister Tom, Romeo and Juliet, Uncle Tom’s Cabin – but I can remember six books or plays that I studied in five years. That’s pretty poor. Is that the way the books were taught or the choice of books? I don’t know but I suspect it’s both.
Again, I was already a lover of books. My home was filled with books and I was encouraged to visit the library for more. My parents read and would recommend titles to me. I was given books and book vouchers for birthdays and Christmas. I was lucky. Many people don’t have that luck. For far too many children school represents all of their access to books, and that makes the books that are chosen to be taught – and the way they are taught – really really important.
At GCSE I studied A View from the Bridge, The Merchant of Venice, To Kill a Mockingbird, big cat poetry (including “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” and something about a caged animal in a zoo)…and that’s almost all I can tell you. There might have been a couple more novels, I’m not sure. I remember basically nothing about the first or last items on that list. We didn’t see A View from the Bridge or The Merchant of Venice performed, even on film. We did watch the film of To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact I remember the assignment was to compare and contrast book and film. Which was interesting and different but didn’t really touch on any of the key themes of that amazing book. I was convinced until I studied Shakespeare again at university that The Merchant of Venice was the dullest of all his plays.
Even at 15/16 it broke my heart that my English teacher was not inspiring me or my class, that I was not in love with each and every one of the books we studied. I know some people say that they learned to hate every book they studied at school but I maintain that’s not a natural outcome, it’s a result of the teacher and the choice of book. I would see friends in another English class with a different teacher filled with enthusiasm about their texts. I don’t know what limits were placed on the curriculum for my school in the 1990s and maybe my perception of that other class was wrong – perhaps all English teaching was constrained back then in just the way people fear it’s about to be again.
The thing I take from this is that teaching is hard and putting ill-thought-through reactionary limits on the books that can be taught to children at that crucial age is unhelpful. Declaring that all the books must be British is ridiculous – teenagers need to learn about the rest of the world too, if only to learn that it’s not all that different from the life we know, even when at first glance it’s completely different. And limiting the curriculum to pre-1900 is more than just ridiculous. When are we most sneering about boring old stuff? When do we most need to feel a connection to a world that is increasingly scary and full of big life-changing decisions? And yet when are we most receptive to big new ideas? This is when we should be exposed to science fiction, foreign fiction, the politics of gender, race and, well, politics in general.
So what saved my love of reading? I left that school and went elsewhere for my A-levels. It was a great decision because it led me to a great teacher. Linda picked a varied reading list for us but equally importantly she overflowed with enthusiasm for those books. (In fact, sometimes we mocked her a little for her exuberance but we loved her for it really.)
Not only can I tell you what books I read for A-level but I still have my copies of all of them and I can remember what they were about and what they taught me. We went to see both plays we studied – Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and David Hare’s Murmuring Judges – performed on stage (Linda had made sure this would be possible before picking them for us), which showed me that sometimes humour needs to be spoken aloud to be funny. Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander Jacaranda made me yearn to go to Egypt, even though I knew I would, like Lively, never know what it was to be Egyptian. (In fact, my first foreign holiday that I paid for and arranged by myself was indeed to Egypt.) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein filled my passionate heart with dramatic images of snowy mountains and Arctic tundra and also, in Shelley, gave me a heroine to admire. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart showed me a completely alien yet still relatable way of life and taught me to question colonialism and Christianity. But in some ways Henry James’s Washington Square was the real turnaround. I did not like that book, I found it tedious, but Linda still taught me to appreciate it. She used it to teach us about irony and sarcasm, and about the changing role of women in society.
I owe Linda so much. If I had continued with those teachers and book lists I’d had at secondary school I probably wouldn’t have studied English at university. I might not have continued to love reading at all (though I think – hope – that that’s unlikely). Reading is a huge and joyous part of my life still now, 17 years after I left that school, 15 years after Linda hugged me goodbye on A-level results day.
So I want to say thank you to the teachers who are putting their all into encouraging children to not only read, but to enjoy reading, to appreciate books. And to those teachers who aren’t inspired or inspiring? Please don’t give up or become complacent. Please keep trying. What you do is SO important. And definitely ignore that Mr Gove. He’s an idiot. But you knew that.
Women of TV have united against lupus by writing a short story collection! All proceeds go to the Lupus Foundation of America.
This special collection of short stories comes from top women writers of some of the best shows on TV, including: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Family Guy, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Voyager, Eureka, Twisted, Malcolm in the Middle, Being Human, Chuck, Gilmore Girls, Castle and Game of Thrones.
In this anthology, you’ll discover supernatural thrillers, crime mysteries, horror, comedies, and more.
Authors contributing stories to this volume include: Amy Berg, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Akela Cooper, Liz Edwards, Jane Espenson, Shalisha Francis & Nadine Knight, Lisa Klink, Pang-Ni Landrum, Lauren LeFranc, Kam Miller, Jess Pineda, Jennifer Quintenz, Lisa Randolph, Kay Reindl, Kira Snyder and Jeane Wong.
These fabulous ladies contributed to the anthology in honour of the very awesome Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon, who is a singer/dancer/actress/writer/producer who also happens to have lupus (yes, I have written about her before).
As you’ll know, lupus is an issue close to my heart. SLE is an incurable chronic disease with diverse symptoms, from fatigue and joint pain to organ failure and recurrent miscarriage (with a whole lot more besides). It affects about 5 million people worldwide, of which 90% are female, so the female focus of this anthology makes a whole lot of sense. There are many many women around the world fighting hard against this disease and I am all for anything that gives them a boost.
The timing is because, in the US at least, May is Lupus Awareness Month. Lupus UK tends to designate October instead. But any of time of year is good to me for spreading lupus awareness!
You can buy Empower: Fight Like a Girl now for £3/$5 here (UK) or here (US). Enjoy!
After a slow start to the year, this month I really hit my reading stride. I not only finished six books, but I’m also partway through two more that I’m thoroughly enjoying. (I should add that one of those is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which is more than 800 pages long, so next month’s round-up might not look quite so healthy!)
I was perhaps helped in my reading by the fact that I inadvertently installed malware on my laptop, which put it out of commission for a couple of weeks (beware fake software updates, people). As I hate browsing the Web on my phone and felt weird using Tim’s giant laptop, I read instead. It was nice, and possibly habit-forming, so apologies to all those websites I usually visit and comment on regularly! Even now my laptop is back and better than ever (Tim kindly reinstalled everything and upgraded parts while he was at it, because he’s nice like that) I actually don’t want to be on the Internet right now, I want to be reading one of the several books scattered on the sofa next to me.
One quick last note: libraries are great, aren’t they? I went to Bristol Central Library during my lunch hour today and was reminded how much I like them. I only go a couple of times a year because, well, giant TBR and all. But for those times when you’re interested in a book but don’t know if you’ll love it, or want the latest in a series without paying for a hardback, or want to learn a little about a subject the old-fashioned way, you can’t beat a good library. Do you use libraries?
Books read
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (review here)
The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer (review here)
Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell (review here)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (review here)
Machine Man by Max Barry (review to follow)
Short stories read
“The cemetery where Al Jolson is buried” by Amy Hempel (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The night in question” by Tobias Wolff (Selected Shorts podcast)
“I know what I’m doing about all the attention I’ve been getting” by Frank Gannon (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The night the ghost got in” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Examining the evidence” by Alice Hoffman (Selected Shorts podcast)
“It had wings” by Allan Gurganus (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Secondhand man” by Rita Dove (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The relive box” by T Coraghessan Boyle (New Yorker, Mar 17, 2014)
How was your reading month? Read anything especially good?