K-drama review: The King, Eternal Monarch

The King Eternal Monarch posterI watched The King, Eternal Monarch (SBS 2020) based on an online recommendation. Like most K-dramas it is enormously long (16 episodes that are 80 minutes each) and I watched it over a few months. I enjoyed it but I definitely have reservations and…questions.

This is a fantasy series based in two parallel worlds: one that’s essentially our modern reality and one where Korea – or rather, Corea – is still ruled by a monarchy. The king of Corea, Lee Gon (played by Lee Min-ho of Boys Over Flowers, Legend of the Blue Sea and many other shows), is a curious mix of modern and traditional. He lives in a large palace in Busan, waited on by subservient staff. He has fancy ceremonial robes and spends his free time practising fencing and riding his beloved horse. But it gradually becomes clear this is also a world with cars, mobile phones, internet and all the other familiar aspects of modern life.

In the first episode we see a flashback to 1994 when Lee Gon witnessed his uncle Lee Lim (Lee Jung-jin) murder his father in an attempt to seize the throne. Lee Gon was saved by a masked stranger, making him the new monarch at just six years old. The masked stranger disappeared, leaving behind a mysterious ID card. The card belongs to a Detective Jeong Tae-eul and was issued in 2019 – 25 years in the future.

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Book review: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

the people in the trees book cover

I have had The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara on my to-read list since it was published more than 10 years ago. It was her first novel, before the worldwide phenomenon that was her follow-up A Little Life. Which I read and loved, but it is devastating, and I think that made me delay reading more from her. And it has to be said that this book also deals with heavy, shocking themes. I think it’s brilliant, but it is not an easy read.

On the first page we are told that the main character, Dr Norton Perina, has been arrested and charged with rape, statutory rape, sexual assault and endangering a minor. What follows is his protege Ronald Kubodera’s attempt to exonerate him, wrapped around Perina’s memoir written from prison. Kubodera does not claim the offences didn’t happen. He thinks everything Perina has done is justified. It is an unsettling angle from which to approach the story. And it is also extremely clever, because it allows Yanagihara to show both the full extent of Perina’s awfulness and the fact that he truly did not see any problem with his own actions.

Perina is an American doctor who, we are told, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for discovering a medical condition that retards ageing. This condition existed only in a remote tribe in a Micronesian island country called U’ivu. We also learn that over a period of decades, Perina adopted 43 children from U’ivu and raised them in the US. It isn’t hard to connect the dots between the facts revealed in the first two pages, but the full horror isn’t revealed until near the end of the novel’s 360 pages.

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Book review: What We Left Behind by Robin Talley

what we left behind book cover

Robin Talley is a pretty big name in YA fiction. What We Left Behind is the second of her books I have read (after Lies We Tell Ourselves) and the second slight disappointment. It’s kinda sweet and fun but definitely suffered from a few problems that mean I can’t recommend it to the young people who really need the book this could have been.

Toni and Gretchen have been a solid couple for years at high school, remarkably free from homophobia despite being out lesbians. They had planned to go to Harvard together but Gretchen has a secret: she also got into New York University and intends to go there instead. She grew up in New York City and misses it. She waits to break the news until days before term starts. It doesn’t go down well with Toni but they’ve never fought before, why start now? And NYC isn’t all that far from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But reality quickly hits. The work is hard, harder than they feared. Toni immediately takes on a bunch of extracurricular responsibilities that take up even more time than schoolwork. They both make new friends who expand their worlds in…interesting ways. And their relationship suffers.

Toni meets some trans and nonbinary students and realises that there might be a reason this group is such a draw. Toni was already thinking about gender a lot – to the degree of not using pronouns for anyone. Which is a weird tic to be honest. But I understand where it’s coming from and that it’s part of Toni’s genderqueer journey. Toni also hasn’t really forgiven Gretchen and keeps cancelling their planned weekend visits.

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June 2025 reading round-up

The Scarlet Letters

Summer is already in full swing and we’ve only just had the solstice. Every weekend is busy, as are a lot of these long warm evenings. We’ve seen some great live music, theatre and comedy. It’s frighteningly easy to forget sometimes that awful shit is still happening out there.

Though June is generally considered Pride month, Bristol Pride Day doesn’t happen until 12 July. I am definitely expecting more serious protest vibes than the happy party atmosphere of recent years.

On the music front this month, our friend T managed to get us all tickets to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Royal Albert Hall, which was amazing. They not only added a string section but also made use of the huge pipe organ behind the stage. They had rearranged a lot of their songs for the venue, to great effect. It was a little weird to experience songs that started life in tiny New York clubs played by a three-piece punk band, reimagined 25 years later as epic rock songs. But good weird.

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Book review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow book cover

Preconceptions and assumptions can be dangerous, or at least misleading. I thought Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin was time-travel SF – I guess I didn’t recognise the Shakespeare reference. But perhaps if I had, I’d have expected something very heavy and “worthy”, and might not ever have read it. Which would have been a true shame as this is a gorgeous novel.

Sam and Sadie first meet in the 1980s as 10-year-olds in an LA hospital and bond by playing computer games. Sam is a patient; Sadie’s sister is a patient. For a while they’re best friends, until an argument leads to them not speaking.

Years later while at university they meet in a train station in Boston, where they are both studying. They gradually grow to be close friends again but old habits die hard and failing to tell each other the whole truth leads to years of misunderstandings and resentments.

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K-drama review: Just Between Lovers

Just Between Lovers poster

The drama Just Between Lovers (JTBC 2017–2018), also known as Rain or Shine, is at the more serious end of the K-dramas I have watched. I really enjoyed it despite not having expected something with this tone.

The story’s background is loosely based on the real-life disaster in 1995 when Sampoong Department Store in Seoul collapsed. In reality 502 people were killed and 937 injured. In the TV show, the collapse of the fictional S-Mall kills 48 people and the drama focuses on two of the survivors 10 years later.

Lee Kang-doo (played by Lee Jun-ho) and Ha Moon-soo (Won Jin-ah) both lost a family member when S-Mall collapsed and they are still dealing with grief as well as their own trauma. Kang-doo was badly injured in the disaster and still struggles with physical pain as well as nightmares about the time he spent trapped in the rubble. He works in temporary construction jobs. He acts tough but is sweet at his core.

Moon-soo has trained as an architect specializing in safety regulations. She has her life together but suffers from her mother’s alcoholism. And though she has lost much of her memory from the day S-Mall collapsed, it still haunts her. She’s practical and not easily phased.

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May 2025 reading round-up

Slightly belated wrap-up of the month that was May. I’ve already written about our lovely holiday in Devon at the start of the month. Otherwise it was a relatively quiet month of beautiful weather and apparently overdoing the physical activity as my shoulder is plaguing me again.

I also managed to end the month with a bit of a lupus flare, which often happens in May. Right now I am really very tired, struggling to concentrate, headachy, a little dizzy – hence not posting this monthly round-up sooner.

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Far from the maddening crowds

Devon is nice. Holidays are nice. These are my wholly original observations. The world right now feels stressful, the daily news is awful and in order to keep on fighting for what I believe in, I badly needed a break. So we took ourselves off to Devon for a week. Dartmoor isn’t the easiest place to holiday without a car but we made it work and it was pretty awesome in the end. We had ideal weather, stayed in a cute dog-friendly glamping pod thingy and all got weirdly used to seeing very few people. Which may have ruined the dog for city life – she’s going to need a week or two to get used to people again.

Thanks to a very generous Christmas present from Tim, I now have a new SLR camera that’s much more portable than the old one I had basically given up on for being too much weight to carry around. So for the first time in years I took a bunch of photos on this holiday on a real actual camera and they really are so much better than phone photos. Which was handy as within a couple of minutes’ walk of our holiday park we were in ancient woodland and a mile later on the moor itself. And it was all beautiful.

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Book review: Roots by Alex Haley

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Roots coverRoots is one of those cultural touchstones that I’ve heard referenced all my life, but like most Brits I had never read the book or watched the seminal TV series that closely followed its publication. Then I watched the 2016 remake mini series – largely because I knew the cast included Regé-Jean Page – and immediately added the book to my wishlist.

It’s a big book – almost 700 pages of small print. So it took me a while to pick it up and a while to read it. I also found it a slow read to begin with, but I’m glad I persisted.

For those not familiar with Roots by Alex Haley, it’s the saga of a single family. It begins with the birth of Kunte Kinte in a small village in 18th century Gambia. We follow his life closely until at age 16 he is kidnapped into slavery and transported to the southern US. The book then follows generations of his descendants, beginning with those enslaved like him, and later on, free African-Americans up to Haley himself.

It’s this last detail that was both revolutionary and controversial. The idea that it was possible for the living American descendants of enslaved Africans to trace their family history, that their connection to their roots had not necessarily been severed – no-one had demonstrated that before. Roots inspired a massive increased interest in genealogy, particularly among African-Americans. Now, there is some question as to whether Haley got his research right – many people have picked holes in it both at the time of publication and ever since. I really don’t care if he was actually related to people with these exact names and biographies. I think the concept, and the huge cultural impact of centring these lives and experiences outweighs all that.

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April 2025 reading round-up

It feels like midsummer here in Bristol. Which is kinda lovely but also kinda terrifying on a climate-catastrophe level.

April was busy, mostly with fun things. We made our own spiced rum, went fossil hunting in Lyme Regis and saw the very excellent poet-musician Joshua Idehen perform.

April has also been a shitshow politically, especially for trans people in the UK. I am ashamed of my country right now. I’m trying to help by writing to my MP, donating to the Good Law Project and generally being vocal in my solidarity. Trans rights are human rights. No women are made safer by legitimizing the exclusion and ill treatment of a subset of women. I truly hope this is a short-term setback on an overall upward trajectory and that things will get better.

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