Nose in a book

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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Book review: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

October 16, 2022

Back in early 2019 I received a smart hardback copy of The Godfather by Mario Puzo in the post. I hadn’t bought it. Penguin Classics was issuing a new edition for the book’s 50th anniversary and had sent me (along with many other book bloggers, I’m sure) a free review copy. I put it on my shelf of unsolicited review copies figuring that in one of my periodic clearouts I’d probably get rid of it. But it stayed there, an intriguing option for the right occasion.

Three and a half years later, I have COVID and am isolating from Tim (which sucks) and the rest of the world (less bothered). The one positive is that by not spending my evenings with anyone else, I am flying through books. After finishing the two books I had already started, I asked Tim to select some books for me from my TBR shelves. He left me a stack of three very different books: If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha, A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal and The Godfather by Mario Puso. Well, if there was ever a time to read a 600-page saga…

I’ve seen the films (albeit a very long time ago) and had heard many times that they’re far superior to the source material. Even Francis Ford Coppola, in his introduction to this edition, calls it a “potboiler”, albeit one with Shakespearean-level plotting. And I am averse to the romanticisation of violence, murder and the other terrible behaviours in this story. But I figured I’d give it a go and if it was awful then I would finally add it to the charity pile.

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K-drama review: Extraordinary Attorney Woo

October 12, 2022October 16, 2022

Extraordinary Attorney Woo

I’ve been trying to complete my Netflix watchlist so that we can cancel it (at least for a few months), but they keep on releasing new seasons of shows I like or brand new series from around the world that draw me in. I am always a sucker for a shiny new K-drama. That said, when Extraordinary Attorney Woo (ENA/Netflix 2022) was advertised at me (because the algorithms know) I initially dismissed it based on the poster and the description.

This is the story of an autistic attorney, Woo Young-woo, in her first job after law school, in a country where there is still less support for and understanding of autism than here in the UK. That itself is of interest to me. But this is not one of those grittier, lower budget K-dramas, it has all the sheen of a typical big-budget production and that worried me – would it have any nuance? Or would it treat its lead character with the cliché-ridden and infantilising approach to the autistic brother in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay?

I recently attended a course on neurodiversity in the workplace, and the trainer (who herself is autistic) recommended this show, saying that it is sometimes clichéd but not inaccurate. I think that was the best way possible for my fears to be allayed.

I mean, it’s still high-budget K-drama – it’s glossy, cheesy, repetitive, often silly and sometimes surreal. But it never makes autism the joke. And it feels like it exists in a more “real” world than most K-dramas – albeit still a shiny version of reality where things always turn out for the best and most people wear designer clothes.

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Book review: Segu by Maryse Condé

October 8, 2022 1 Comment

I started this book in August for Women in Translation Month, but it turns out that historical epics take a while to read and even longer to process. Segu by Maryse Condé (translated by Barbara Bray) follows one family in the city state of Segu, in what is now Mali. Though they don’t all stay there, allowing the family saga to become epic in what it encompasses.

The story begins in 1797. Dousika Traore, trusted adviser to the king, has four sons by his various wives and concubines. (I have already forgotten whether he also has daughters, which I think speaks to how generally the women in this book are barely mentioned, though a few do get a bigger role.) They are wealthy, with a large home and money to pay the fetish priests to ensure the continuation of their good fortune.

The first dent in that fortune is the oldest son Tiekoro, who is intrigued by the newly arrived religion Islam – and in particular the access to knowledge that is provided by learning to read and write, a necessity in Islam that is forbidden for the rest of the Bambara (who make up the majority of Segu’s population). Most Bambara – including the king and his other advisers – are deeply suspicious of Islam and look down on Dousika when his son’s secret is revealed, but Dousika sees an opportunity to make strategic alliances through his son. The decision will reverberate through generations and Condé makes no clear statement as to whether Dousika’s choice was right, wrong or inevitable and therefore no choice at all.

The other major force of change is European colonialism. In 1797 the Atlantic slave trade is at its peak but soon Europeans will abandon it one by one and turn to other means of stripping resources from West Africa. Condé depicts the ways in which slavery was part of daily life for many West Africans, and how that is different from the industrial-scale torture introduced by the white men. She doesn’t depict the “local” slavery as good or acceptable, simply shows that it was a part of life at the time.

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