Category: Reviews

September 2024 reading round-up

A quieter month finally. Fatigue kicked in a little after our busy summer so I’ve read less than usual but the four books I finished were all good, two of them excellent.

Last week I saw Elif Shafak speak about her new book There Are Rivers In the Sky. As expected she was smart, eloquent and humane. And the new novel sounds amazing, of course, but I also realised there are still several books from her backlist I haven’t read yet. So my to-read list got longer again.

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Book review: Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen

boy friends book coverThe world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

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Two book reviews: Rosewater and Rosewater

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Two paper back books called Rosewater

A couple of months ago I spotted that I had two books on my TBR with the same title. Rosewater by Liv Little and Rosewater by Tade Thompson are very different novels but I thought it might be interesting to read them back to back.

In one book Rosewater is a poem, in the other it’s the name of a town, but both refer obliquely to the scented product. The poem is an ode to a person who wears that particular scent. The town is in its early days especially smelly, so the name is ironic.

Little’s book follows Elsie, a 28-year-old poet in London struggling with debt in the gig economy. In short succession she loses her home and almost loses her job thanks to a racist customer. To keep a roof over her head she must go crawling to her best friend Juliet, but there is beef in their recent past they haven’t dealt with.

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K-drama review: Start-Up

Start-up still image

I felt the need for a light-hearted K-drama and Netflix assured me Start-Up (tvN 2020) fit the bill. It’s certainly at the lighter end of TV fare but not the comedy I was hoping for. It’s basically a cheesy romance with a B storyline about tech start-ups.

As always, the centre of the story is a love triangle. This one is more convoluted than most, but actually did keep me guessing for a few episodes which guy would get the girl.

We meet Seo Dal-mi as a young teen. When her parents divorce they tell Dal-mi and her older sister In-jae to choose which parent they want to live with. The sisters choose differently and are separated. To cheer Dal-mi up, her Grandmother hatches a plan with her 18-year-old lodger, Han Ji-pyeong. He becomes a penfriend to Dal-mi but they don’t use his real name, they pick the name of a kid from a story in the newspaper: Nam Do-san. For a year they exchange letters and Dal-mi believes herself in love. Then Ji-pyeong leaves for university and the letters stop.

Cut to 15 years later. Dal-mi (played by Bae Suzy of Uncontrollably Fond and Anna), having chosen to stay with her perpetually in debt father, couldn’t afford university. She works a series of temp jobs and dreams of following in her now-deceased father’s footsteps and starting her own business.

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Book review: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Wasted VigilFor a country that has featured so heavily in major news events in my lifetime, I have read very few books set in Afghanistan. The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam is not only set in Afghanistan, it also covers many of those same major world events. I adored his first book Maps For Lost Lovers and this was his follow-up.

It’s shortly post-9/11. Marcus is an English doctor who has spent most of his life living at the edge of a village near Jalalabad. His progressive, outspoken Afghani wife Qatrina was murdered by the Taliban. Now the Taliban have moved on from the area but two local warlords are sparring for control. A disparate group of people find their way to Marcus’s house. He, meanwhile, is mainly waiting for news of his daughter Zameen who disappeared during the Soviet invasion. Or if she hasn’t survived, perhaps he can at least find the son she is rumoured to have had.

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Book review: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

You Exist Too Much book coverLike the best literary novels, You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat encompasses several big topics in what might seem like a simple, quiet story. I saw this book recommended on several social-media posts about Palestinian books and it is to some extent about being Palestinian, but much more too.

Arafat, like her main character, is Palestinian-American and grew up between the US and the Middle East. Her unnamed narrator has for years struggled to reconcile her queerness with her mother’s conservative values. Now she is finally in her first serious relationship with Anna, even living together in New York City, she feels ready to tell her mother she is bi. She is not close to her mother but does speak to her every day, so this is a big step. One that she has been avoiding for years. But she finds herself sabotaging what she and Anna have by obsessing over a potential new love interest.

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TV review: Call My Agent

Call My Agent poster

I loved this show. After our holiday in Paris at the end of January I wanted to keep the holiday magic alive. So I finally checked out French comedy Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent (France Télévision/Netflix 2015–2020) several years after I heard the recommendation from TV critic Rhianna Dhillon. It’s so good I devoured all four seasons within a couple of months.

The show is set at a Paris talent agency, where established agents Andréa (Camille Cottin), Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), Gabriel (Grégory Montel) and Arlette (Liliane Rovère) manage stars’ – mainly actors – careers, egos and dilemmas. We’re introduced to their world through Camille (Fanny Sidney), a young woman who has come to Paris to confront her estranged father and stumbles into a job as Andréa’s assistant.

This is a light, workplace comedy very much in the vein of W1A, the BBC comedy that satirises the BBC. Genuinely great actors with excellent comedy chops are placed in largely frothy and/or satirical storylines. The guest stars are actual, mostly French, celebrities playing themselves. (Which I admit I did not realise for the first few episodes as I did not recognise the names of the early guest stars. I guess huge celebrity in France does not necessarily mean huge international star.)

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Book review: The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo

The simple art of killing a woman book coverFor about six months now I’ve been subscribing to the Good Book Club. Their ethos is intersectional feminist fiction from women, queer men and writers who identify as non-binary. They only choose books from indie publishers and celebrate diverse stories, often in translation. Since March, in addition to being a monthly postal subscription, they run an online book group to discuss that month’s book.

Their April book exemplified all the above. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo (translated by Sophie Lewis) is a Brazilian novel about violence against women, with a particular focus on Indigenous women. It’s angry, funny, provocative and gave us a lot of fodder for discussion in the book group.

An unnamed young lawyer from Sao Paolo narrates this story. After she is hit by her boyfriend she takes a temporary project on the other side of Brazil. It’s a study of femicide cases in Rio Branco, a small city near the border of Bolivia in Acre, a rainforest region. The narrator attends court cases, interviews fellow lawyers and the families of the deceased.

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Book review: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Robber Bride book coverIn my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of Margaret Atwood as a literary fiction writer and I remember my surprise on discovering she also wrote brilliant science fiction.

These days I think of Atwood as primarily a writer of science, or speculative, fiction. So I experience the opposite surprise when I pick up one of her books that’s straightforward fiction. The Robber Bride was published in 1993, Atwood’s eighth novel, of which just one had been science fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). It is loosely based on the folktale The Robber Bridegroom, but with all the major characters reimagined as women.

In October 1990 three old friends meet for lunch in Toronto. Roz, Charis and Tony met at college back in the 1960s, but the real reason they have stayed friends is Zenia – and their shared hatred of her. As they finish their lunch Zenia walks into the restaurant. Which is surprising as they held a funeral for her four and a half years ago, truly thinking her dead.

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Book review: The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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The first woman book cover

I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age novel. Throw in some feminism and inspiration from folklore, and I am guaranteed to pick it up. Hence my interest in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. With a story set in Uganda from 1934 to 1983 it also covers territory I’ve learned a little about in the last couple of years but from a very different perspective.

Kirabo is raised by her grandparents in a small village in the Bugerere region of Uganda. Her family owns a lot of land and is near a good village school, which means their house is always full of cousins sent to live with them. On the brink of her teens, Kirabo is the youngest of the children and is frequently picked on or excluded by the teenagers, but she knows her grandfather Miiro will protect her from them.

What he can’t protect her from is the flying – Kirabo has begun to have out-of-body experiences when it feels like she is flying through her house or the village. The only person she can trust to help is Nsuuta, their neighbour who is widely considered to be a witch. Nsuuta was a pharmacist until she went blind and has always lived alone, so it isn’t hard to see where the witch reputation came from. Her advice to Kirabo is largely feminist teachings.

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