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January 2023 reading round-up

February 1, 2023March 15, 2023

I usually quite like January. It includes my birthday, for one thing. The concept of a fresh start is a nice idea, even if I rarely make any real change. Lots of people take a month off socialising so there’s good reason to stay at home reading books, watching TV and playing games. And though it’s still winter, the days are getting longer, the first spring flowers are coming through, and really not much can beat a crisp dry sunny winter day.

However, this month has been mostly grey and wet. There’s been a resurgence of COVID to add to all the other winter bugs doing the rounds, so half the people I know have been unwell or still are. And we said a final goodbye to my grandad, who died at the end of December. So it’s not been the best January.

My reading was, perhaps appropriately, mixed. I started strong, with a book I knew I would love – Taste by Stanley Tucci. I ended the month with another real-life tale, a story far more extraordinary but not as well written: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming. The difference? It wasn’t told by its protagonist, and there was no good reason for that. It distanced me from what should have been an incredibly powerful experience. Ah well. Not every book can be a winner.

I also watched the usual large quantity of films and TV. The last two films I saw were the best: The Wonder – a period drama on Netflix starring the ever-excellent Florence Pugh – and Apocalypse Now: the Final Cut. The former is a fantastically strange, thoughtful film. While the latter is of course completely unhinged, that being the point it is making. War is insane, full of pointless suffering and death. And seriously, 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne is just as amazing as all the more experienced actors around him.

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My best reads of 2022 and goals for the year ahead

January 2, 2023

I read some great books last year. Looking through my stats on Storygraph, I read 74 books, and gave 16 of them 4.5 stars or higher (out of 5). That’s pretty good going.

I read 17 books classified as LGBTQIA+, 9 sci-fi, 15 non-fiction (including 8 memoirs) and 12.5 books translated from another language into English (there was one short story collection in which about half were translations).

My top 10 books reflect those stats pretty well, except that no translations quite made it into the list (there were two that were very close contenders). I didn’t write full-length reviews of all of them, as that’s a habit I only got back into in the second half of the year, but I did enthuse about them all in my monthly reading round-ups. As well as to Tim at the time of reading (Tim helped me narrow down my longlist to 10 by commenting on which ones he remembers me talking about!).

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December 2022 reading round-up

December 31, 2022January 1, 2023 1 Comment

We didn’t have the greatest December, or the most relaxing end to the year. I’m looking forward to a few days of doing very little before the new year starts in earnest. We did manage a few lovely walks in the woods; put up some Christmas decorations to make the house feel more cheerful on the long dark evenings; and treated ourselves to a lot of chocolatey and alcoholic tasty things. And the dog and I made the most of our one day of snow here in Bristol.

This month I finished a couple of books I spent all year reading in short segments, making it look like I read my usual amount, rather than a fair bit less than I’d hoped to. My favourite read of the month – and a contender for my top 10 of the year – was All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes.

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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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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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September 2022 reading round-up

October 1, 2022November 14, 2022

September was a good month. We saw friends, went on long walks and bike rides, then went on holiday where we did more long walks and bike rides!

We also watched a lot of films, old and new. I would recommend Prey, Midsommar, I Care A Lot, Smokey and the Bandit. I’m also halfway through another K-drama, which I will probably review soon despite all these read books piling up un-reviewed.

Book-wise, I started the month with literary titles that I enjoyed but found slowgoing, then moved on to science fiction that I tore through, before ending the month with a book that arguably combined the two: a sci-fi novella that was philosophical and ponderous, and largely set in a single room. The Vonnegut and McAuley were definitely my favourite reads this month, in quite different ways.

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Taking a break from it all

September 30, 2022October 8, 2022 1 Comment

Toward the end of last year I was drawing up my 2022 work schedule and I made sure to give myself a two-week break in September so that Tim and I could go on a nice holiday to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We spent the next 8 months dithering over where to go, and eventually settled on the Lake District as it ticks all the boxes: accessible by train (in less than five hours, our estimate at the dog’s maximum patience); dog-friendly accommodation; mountains; bike hire; at least one pub, shop and cafe within a mile. We didn’t think these were grand demands but they narrowed the search a lot.

We were very happy with where we ended up – a holiday cottage in Staveley, a village halfway between Kendal and Windermere. We rented bikes for a week, giving us car-free means of getting about and Beckett vastly increased her time spent in the doggy backpack. But she also got a lot of walking (and running alongside our bikes on the two days we were cycling in suitable off-road places) and was very tired every day so we think she appreciated being carried sometimes!

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August 2022 reading round-up

September 1, 2022

Well, August was a bit full. I’ve done some long bike rides, hung out with friends, eaten good food. Plus Tim and I celebrated 20 years together. Twenty years!

August was Women in Translation Month and I read 3.5 books by women in translation. In fact, I’m currently halfway through three different books.

My top films this month were The French Dispatch (the latest Wes Andersen), and Ellie and Abbie (and Ellie’s Dead Aunt) – a sweet Australian teen romance.

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July 2022 reading round-up

August 1, 2022August 2, 2022

Well, July was a bit full. We went on holiday to South Wales with my whole family. We had a record-breaking heatwave that’s an ominous sign of things to come. Beckett nearly had to have surgery but then didn’t. I took myself on lots of solo bike rides for the fun of cycling.

I’ve been taking advantage of the (non-extreme) good weather by taking myself into the garden after work most days with a blanket, a book and the dog. Sometimes there is also wine.

Just over a week ago I went to theatre for the first time since 2019, to see Les Miserables with my Mum. I loved it, just as I did the first time I watched it on stage when I was 18. And Mum loved it just as much as when she last saw it at least a decade before that even. As I expected, it made me cry, but not just because it’s such a moving storyline with music and lyrics designed to give the tear ducts a workout. The first couple of big rousing numbers made me cry from the sheer weight of the experience of being in a theatre filled with a couple of thousand people listening to incredible singers. I suspect I’d have a similar reaction if I went to a gig right now.

Mum reminded me that after she first saw Les Mis, Dad bought her the book – in two volumes because it’s so long – and she ploughed her way through it increasingly slowly. I can’t say her lukewarm reaction to it is very enticing, but on the other hand she did stick with it, so maybe I should give it a go sometime?

What I did read this month was six novels, a couple of which were not what I expected. The Glass Hotel is by Emily St John Mandel, who previously wrote the excellent sci-fi Station Eleven. Even though I knew when I bought it that The Glass Hotel isn’t sci-fi, part of me kept expecting a sci-fi twist and I think that stopped me from appreciating it for what it was. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, on the other hand, I expected to be more biting on the matter of racism in small-town America. That was part of it, but it was much more about different approaches to motherhood, and how our circumstances are so much of who we are.

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