November 2019 reading round-up

Holly tree

Well, once again I only finished four books this month, but in my defence one of them was massive. We started November with a weekend away in London and ended it with a trip to Glastonbury. Both involved bookshops, as did the weekends in-between in Bristol. I bought far more books than I read this month and I am not sorry (about the first half of that statement; I’m a little sorry about not reading more).

Happy December!

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Wherever I go on the island, you’re with me

Letters from Tove coverLetters from Tove
by Tove Jansson
edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson
translated from Swedish by Sarah Death

This is a giant warm cuddle of a book. It took me a while to read as the letters are many and to some extent a little repetitive, but I loved effectively being able to hear Tove Jansson speak honestly to the people she was close to. The book only includes Tove’s letters, not the other half, so there is always part of the conversation missing, which also makes it a little bit of a mystery puzzle.

The correspondence is organised by addressee, beginning with letters that Tove sent to her family when she went to art school in Stockholm, and then two long trips to France and Italy to further her art education. Young Tove was very adventurous, sociable and passionate – about art and about people. I laughed out loud at her descriptions of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she was treated awfully and quickly left for a smaller school where she felt she was actually learning.

Her parents were both artists themselves and lived for part of every year in an artists’ colony – a lifestyle that Tove carried into her own adulthood, but it often clashed with her desire for solitude and peace, and this clash is something that is increasingly the focus of her letters. But her biggest fight is always with her own art.

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K-drama review: Abyss

Abyss poster

Not the classic 1989 sci-fi film, I’m talking about the glossy new tvN/Netflix series Abyss – though it is arguably also sci-fi. Or maybe crime drama. Or fantasy. Somewhere in-between, with a large dollop of romance thrown in. Of course. This show makes little sense but is still fun.

In the first episode we meet most of our protagonists, but don’t get too attached as there are multiple deaths. Cha Min is a young businessman (and heir to a fortune, natch) who has just been dumped – and fleeced out of money – by his girlfriend Jang Hee-jin. He is devasted and attempts suicide, but as he dies he is approached by two…spirits?..who revive him and hand him a glowing orb they call Abyss. They tell him he can revive other dead people with Abyss but there are rules he will need to follow. Oh, and he has a new body now that is a truer reflection of his soul – he goes from plain/odd looking to very tall and handsome (now played by Ahn Hyo-seop), which in theory gives us some insight into his character.

Min’s best friend since childhood is prosecutor Go Se-yeon. She has been working on a serial killer case, and just as she thinks she’s closing in on the culprit, she herself is murdered. Min is devastated and decides to put Abyss to use but he can’t get to her until after her autopsy, by which time the whole country knows she is dead. Min is considered to be missing (as no-one witnessed his suicide) and is now the lead suspect in Se-yeon’s murder. He has to explain quickly to Se-yeon why she is waking up in a morgue faced with someone who looks like a total stranger and why she really shouldn’t interrupt her own funeral when she doesn’t look like herself anymore.

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My father bleeds history

Maus cover

The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman

I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind, but for some reason the celebrations surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last weekend made me pick up this book that famously covers some of the worst stories of the Holocaust. It’s a deeply upsetting book that I had to take breaks from to recover emotionally.

Art Spiegelman’s celebrated graphic novel alternates between telling the story of his father Vladek – a Polish Jew – from the 1930s to the late 1940s, and the story of Art’s own relationship with his father in the 1980s. It’s darkly sad and darkly funny. Oh – and all the people have animal heads. Jewish people are mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats (later on, Americans are dogs and the French are frogs). It’s odd and it isn’t really ever explained, but the insinuations are clear.

Art and Vladek have a fractious relationship. Vladek is happy to tell his son details of his war-time experiences, but he also needs someone to vent to about getting old, about arguments with his second wife Mala. It’s uncomfortable to read at times.

Vladek narrates his history in broken English. And it’s a tough story, even in Holocaust terms. Vladek and his first wife (Art’s mother) Anja lived in south-west Poland, near Krakow. They went from owning a large successful business, to having their home and factories confiscated, to being moved to a series of ghettos and then work camps. Vladek was initially held as a political prisoner but was released back to the ghetto, primarily because political prisoners enjoyed some level of international protection.

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The real physics of fantasy

Fire Ice and PhysicsThis is just a quick note to say that my review of Fire, Ice and Physics: the Science of Game of Thrones by Rebecca C Thompson has been published over at Physics World.

The book is just what it sounds like: a popular-science study of the book and TV series Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, from the materials science of an ice wall to whether an animal the size of the Game of Thrones dragons could actually fly. It’s really well written, and a fun way to approach topics from hypothermia to nonlinear dynamics.

The book also includes a foreword by physicist and science writer Sean Carroll that reminded me that I really should check out some of his books, as he’s very eloquent.

Intrigued? You can read more over at Physics World.

October 2019 reading round-up

reading at the pubNot my greatest month on the reading front. I blame lupus. I’m partway through two large books, but even so I only finished one full-sized book, plus three comic trade paperbacks. It’s a poor record and means my EU Reading Challenge hasn’t progressed at all. Probably not the best reason to be glad of another Article 50 extension, but yay! We’re still in the EU (for now).

Happy November.

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K-drama review: Descendants of the Sun

From left: Captain Yoo Si-jin, Dr Kang Mo-yeong, Sergeant Seo Dae-young and Lt Yoon Myung-ju.

I know, it’s barely two weeks since my last K-drama review and this show is 16 hours long. No wonder I haven’t read much. My excuses are twofold: I was a bit brain foggy and I found this series addictive. From the first episode of Descendants of the Sun (KBS 2016), I knew I was in trouble.

After the low stakes of Coffee Prince, this drama was much more serious, but still sweet. It opens with an impressive set piece in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After soldiers from both sides of the border fight with knives in a stand-off that the public can never be told about, the triumphant leader of the South Korean commandos removes the scarf covering his face to reveal our hero: Captain Yoo Si-jin (Song Joong-ki).

Our heroine has a slightly less violent introduction but is still instantly impressive. Dr Kang Mo-yeong (Song Hye-kyo) is a surgeon at a big hospital in Seoul. She’s great at her job but keeps getting overlooked for promotions because she doesn’t have connections. She doesn’t take any shit from patients but does get on well with her colleagues and is willing to suck up to her superiors so long as it doesn’t break her moral code.

Si-jin and his best bud Sergeant Seo Dae-young (Jin Goo) are on leave and enjoying a funfair when they foil a robbery. The thief, Kim Gi-bum (Kim Min-seok, who I know from Doctors and Hello, My Twenties) is taken to hospital, with Si-jin and Dae-young in pursuit when they realise he still has one of their phones. Dr Kang initially thinks they are hoodlums harassing her patient and refuses to let them near Gi-bum (who, for reasons that I could never figure out, has as his next-of-kin Dae-young’s on-off girlfriend Lt Yoon Myung-ju – a military doctor who trained with Dr Kang). But when Gi-bum tries to run away from the hospital, he runs into a real gang and ends up being saved by Si-jin and Dae-young in the pilot’s second excellent set piece.

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October is #LupusAwarenessMonth

Lupus UK 2019 posterRoughly once a year I write a post about having lupus (SLE), partly to raise awareness of the disease, but also because it helps me to talk about it in a space where I’m not worried about boring the same poor people who hear about it all the time! Here in the UK, October is Lupus Awareness Month so this seems like a good time.

The symptoms of lupus that I struggle with most are fatigue and brain fog. I had a really dispiriting experience with my rheumatologist earlier this year when I asked him if there is anything I can do medically to help with this and he responded “Everyone gets tired.” That’s so incredibly unhelpful and frankly offensive, though I didn’t have the words to explain that to him at the time.

For one thing, chronic fatigue is not just “feeling tired”, it is extreme and long-term and has a lot of side-effects that can make daily life really hard. Think about the most tired you have ever been. You may have experienced headache, sore eyes, double vision, dizziness, nausea or confusion. You might find yourself unable to think clearly or concentrate. You might find lights too bright, or noises hard to distinguish. Now imagine some or all of that happening every day, no matter how much sleep you get or how careful you are to eat healthily and do regular exercise.

A medical professional should know that’s what chronic fatigue means. So did he not believe me, or was he just being glib without realising how rude and dismissive it sounded? I’m annoyed at myself for not speaking up but then one of the things that I find especially hard is conversation with strangers. I often can’t manage to say what I want to because either I can’t find the right words, or I’m too tired to judge the right moment to jump in and speak.

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K-drama review: Coffee Prince

Coffee Prince advert

I haven’t written about the last few TV shows I’ve watched, but this one had some interesting quirks that I thought were worth a blog post. Coffee Prince (MBC 2007) was a successful enough show that it’s been remade in at least four other countries and the old cafe used for the main set was turned into a real coffee shop that’s a popular tourist attraction in Seoul.

The set-up is that our heroine, Go Eun-chan (played by Yoon Eun-hye), is a 24-year-old androgynous-looking woman who is often mistaken for a man and rarely bothers to correct people. She is the sole wage-earner in her family since her father died, and is determined to earn enough to send her younger sister Eun-sae to college, which means that she works several low-paying jobs. In the first episode, she meets the two men who will be rivals for her love, and of course they are cousins and close friends.

Choi Han-gyul (Gong Yoo) is the heir to a major food corporation and after spending a few years in America “dabbling” with being a toy designer, his grandmother is keen to get him suitably settled down. Her first aim is to find him a wife, so Han-gyul hires Eun-chan – who he thinks is a man – to play his boyfriend who breaks up every blind date. Eun-chan doesn’t like Han-gyul but she has just lost one of her jobs and needs the money.

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What exactly about the bag is Jewish?

Chasing the King of HeartsChasing the King of Hearts
by Hanna Krall
translated from Polish by Philip Boehm

This is my Poland choice for the EU Reading Challenge, one of several I bought from Peirene Press. It’s a true story from World War Two, retold by a journalist who herself survived the war by hiding in a cupboard. Which sounds like quite a story itself, but possibly not one as eventful as that of Izolda.

Izolda Regensberg is a Jewish woman whose history took her from the ghetto in Warsaw, to working for the Underground, to various workcamps and even Auschwitz. But we know early on this book that she survived, thanks to interspersed chapters about her attempts to communicate with her Israeli grandchildren.

Language is key to this amazing story. Language and love. Izolda speaks Polish, Yiddish, Russian and French, and during the war learns German, which helps her to fake her identity, make friends and make money. But in her old age she can’t speak even a sentence of Hebrew and can only communicate with her granddaughters through her own children. It’s an interesting comment on the reduced capacity for new language as we get older, even in people who are polyglots.

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