Reviews and other ramblings
Another quick post to celebrate the stack of beautiful new books I received for my birthday that I’m eager to get stuck into (what about my existing TBR of 140, you say? I mean, they’re also great books I’m sure, but less new and shiny!). Yes, I did also receive a lamp in the shape of a book, with a remote control to change the colour.
Continue reading “New year, new books, 2021 edition”
I read 63 books last year, which is a better total than I feared it would be. Some of them were amazing books, some stretched my perspective, some purely entertained. Like many people, I am ashamed to say, 2020 was the first year when I put real effort into my anti-racism education, and I am now determined that will continue in my reading and in the rest of my life.
Of those 63 books, 40 were written by women and 12 were works in translation. A small change this year is that 17 of those books were non-fiction and only three were SF. But the real point of this post is my favourite reads of 2020, so here we go.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Loving Sabotage by Amelie Nothomb
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
We That Are Young by Preti Taneja
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Giant Days Vol 13 by John Allison
The Smallest Lights in the Universe: a Memoir by Sara Seager
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou
Continue reading “Best of 2020, books edition”
It’s been a cold, wet, grey end to a difficult year. Which means we’ve spent most of the last week curled up indoors with blankets and hot drinks. I think even Beckett is feeling the cold, despite her double fur coat, as she’s been cosying up to us more than she had for a couple of months. It’s either the cold, or she’s just grateful to have more of our attention while we’re not working for a week and a half. Next week could be stressful for her.
This month I finished seven books, which is pretty high for 2020, though it should be said that includes two books I started last month and one that I started in October. I blame Christmas and my dead/dying laptop for my not having written a book review despite having had a week of holiday.
I think I badly needed to unwind this past week. And the quantity of TV that I’ve watched suggests I’ve not done too badly at that. I have watched and thoroughly enjoyed both seasons of Home For Christmas, a Norwegian romcom about a nurse who lies to her family on 1 December that she has a boyfriend who she will be bringing to her parents’ on Christmas Eve, and then spends the next three weeks trying to find a suitable man. It’s not cheesy or simplistic, the characters are all interesting and varied, but it’s still fun and very Christmassy.
I also watched the first season of Dash & Lily, another show set in the run-up to Christmas, this time set in New York and based on the books by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. As there are multiple books I’m guessing they hope to do another season, but they probably couldn’t shoot it this year so the teen characters might look rather older when next we see them! This one was also enjoyable but quite cheesy and fluffy, and I am starting to get a little annoyed by the trope of the bubbly, happy-go-lucky girl being paired with a sulky, constantly negative boy.
Continue reading “December 2020 reading round-up”
My annual Christmas post is very belated this year, because my laptop died last week. While trying to connect to a Zoom call, so that was helpfully dramatic. So I will give you my usual Christmas greeting – merry Christmas! – alongside a quick summary of my holiday so far.
Tim and I have bubbled with a close friend, so we spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as the three of us, plus Beckett. The dog was thoroughly spoiled – including a couple of hours of tearing apart all our wrapping paper – and we all ate too much. It was glorious. Which at least partly makes up for the hideous weather we’ve had the rest of the holiday season.
Continue reading “Merry Christmas”
November was a tough month. I didn’t think I would mind a second lockdown but it’s actually been hard, particularly in combination with the short days and bad weather. At least Beckett doesn’t seem to mind the cold.
On the plus side, I have continued to find excellent films to watch on streaming. Highlights include Animals, Sorry to Bother You and Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (which we’d seen and loved at the cinema; still love it second time around).
TV-wise, I watched the BBC drama of Normal People immediately after reading the book, and it was excellent. I’ve also been thoroughly enjoying season two of His Dark Materials. And because I have spent a lot of evenings too tired/in a funk to concentrate on something new, I have also been rewatching Gilmore Girls for the thousandth time. It’s really comforting.
Continue reading “November 2020 reading round-up”
The Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa
translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder
This was chosen by my work book club and I would have loved to join that discussion, but sadly I was in a reading slump and didn’t finish the book in time. It’s a high-concept dystopia but it’s still very readable.
On the island, things disappear. En masse. And their disappearance is policed. Residents wake up knowing that something has to go that day – hats or bells or stamps, for instance. They destroy the items under the watchful eye of the Memory Police and their memory of the thing quickly fades, so that if the word is spoken it no longer has any meaning.
So far so strange, eerie even, but the scary part is that some people remember – and the Memory Police are hunting them down, taking them away.
Continue reading “I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes”
I don’t know if it’s the onset of winter weather or the prospect of a second lockdown, but I am struggling a little again with reading. I am finding it a little easier to read and reflect on non-fiction at the moment but I have only written one book review all month and even the synopses below took me a few days to put together.
Most of our film-watching this month has been of the super cheesy variety (though I will admit I had forgotten the high calibre of cameos in Blues Brothers) so I will instead recommend two TV shows that I have very much enjoyed, both on BBC iplayer: I May Destroy You – a powerful piece about friendship and sexual assault – and Ghosts, which is silly and funny and I am grateful to the multiple friends who recommended it.
Walking Beckett has been really lovely as autumn deepens into winter. She’s the best.
Continue reading “October 2020 reading round-up”
The last few K-dramas I watched didn’t really hold my attention, but this one was a big success. Two Cops (MBC 2017–2018) is a crime-solving, body-swapping (sort of) action romantic comedy drama with supernatural elements thrown in for good measure.
Cha Dong-tak (Jo Jong-suk, probably my favourite Korean actor, who I loved in Don’t Dare to Dream and Oh My Ghost) is a Seoul detective in the violent crimes unit. He’s a little rough around the edges, a skilled martial artist and hyper-focused on solving the murder of his former partner, despite attempts from his superiors to get him to concentrate on current cases instead.
One suspect in this case is Gong Su-chang (Kim Seon-ho), a smooth-talking small-time crook. When circumstances conspire to land Su-chang in a coma, his spirit is left roaming the world and has the ability to possess Detective Cha’s body. But a medium tells him he has to find a way to resolve his unfinished business within 49 days or he will die. He has to find a way to work with the detective despite their very different personalities and careers.
Continue reading “K-drama review: Two Cops”
Betty Shabazz: a Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X
by Russell J Rickford
A late-night read on my Kindle while trying to get the dog to sleep, I was starting to feel bad about how long it was taking me to read this autobiography until I saw on Goodreads that it’s over 600 pages. In fairness Dr Betty Shabazz lived a full and fascinating life that deserves every one of those pages. She was so much more than Mrs Malcolm X, though of course that marriage made her famous and opened the door for her to be an activist and ambassador.
Rickford says in his introduction that he will concentrate on Betty’s life before and after Malcolm, but inevitably their seven years of marriage form a lot of the narrative and at times this veers into being yet another Malcolm X or Nation of Islam biography. He also refers to her as “the widow” a lot, which somewhat undermines his stated mission to depict her as more than that role. Not that it was easy role to hold.
Continue reading “She had once been threadbare, with seven lives to weave from darkness”
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Not that I ever doubted it, but this book is excellent. It depicts many details of the awfulness of slavery while also being a highly readable adventure narrative. Please forgive the short review – this book deserves more analysis but it’s now a while since I read it and I just want to share my praise for it before I forget even more.
Cora is a slave in Georgia. She is an outcast of sorts among the slaves on the plantation, tarred by her mother’s reputation of madness and her own fierce protection of the tiny garden her mother left her. On the verge of adulthood, new threats raise their ugly head and an offer is made: does she want to attempt an escape with recently arrived slave Caesar? Her journey across America, making use of an underground railroad that is an actual railway underground, is astonishing, terrifying, entertaining and upsetting.
Continue reading “She is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude”