Book subscriptions

Book and a Brew box
Book and a Brew box.

I’m not generally on top of the latest trends, but I couldn’t help but notice that book subscriptions are in right now. There are suddenly hundreds to choose between, from local, national and international sources. I think the first one I ever heard of was from Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, probably my favourite bookshop. Over the last few years I have seen lots of online-only offerings, often specialising in a certain genre or also acting as a form of book club. And then in the last two weeks a new bookshop called Storysmith Books opened right here in South Bristol and almost immediately launched its own range of subscriptions.

Book subscriptions work in different ways – some are personalised, some come with book-related merchandise, some tell you in advance what books you’re getting – but the basic premise is the same. You pay upfront for a certain number and frequency of book parcels.

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October 2018 reading round-up

Bulrush tasting menu

I ended last month swimming in the Med, reading in beautiful gardens, eating Neapolitan pizza and drinking Ischian wine. I ended this month eating delicious Michelin-starred food right here in Bristol (if you click on the pic above and go to my Flickr page, you can read what all the courses were at the very excellent Bulrush). And the wine might not have been made two miles from where I drank it, but it was pretty damn good. So being back home isn’t so bad (but I still miss holiday).

I have started three or four books since coming back from holiday, but finished none of them. Maybe I need to set aside a day for nothing but reading sometime soon – a good old-fashioned read-a-thon. That would be nice.

Lack of reading aside, this month I watched a couple more K-dramas – Love in the Moonlight and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon – and I also went to the cinema for the first time in ages, to watch the excellent biopic First Man.

Here’s to a happy November.

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K-drama review: Strong Woman Do Bong Soon

Strong Woman Do Bong Soon

I am very torn in my reactions to this K-drama. On the one hand, I love the lead character and the setting felt more like a realistic modern Seoul than any of the other dramas I’ve seen set there, except maybe Doctors (Strong Woman Do Bong Soon first aired in Korea in 2017 so it is the newest K-drama I have watched). On the other hand, the sense of humour can be not only juvenile, but also homophobic.

And it started so well! This show juggles a few different genres and to begin with I loved the switches from one to another, but they were less well balanced in the second half. Similarly, the storylines all started strongly, but got a bit lost around the halfway point. It’s almost as though different writers took it over. It’s certainly the first time with one of these K-dramas where it hasn’t felt carefully plotted from start to finish.

Genre one is superhero, and the superhero in question is Do Bong-soon (played by Park Bo-young). She is a petite 27-year-old who didn’t do well enough at school to go to university, has never held one job for long, but dreams of designing computer games. Oh, and she has supernatural strength, which she uses to save people from danger. She’s cute and girly but also a little bolshy, which probably comes from her experience of standing up to bullies.

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Everyone’s waitin’ for the fires to start

Peyton PlacePeyton Place
by Grace Metalious

I picked this off my Classics Club list (which I’m woefully behind on). The premise – revealing what’s behind the twitching lace curtains of small-town America in the 1930s and 1940s – definitely intrigued me, but I didn’t realise quite how much would be revealed.

This is the book equivalent of an ensemble drama – there isn’t really one lead character. Metalious beautifully establishes the setting, describing autumnal New England in its colourful glory before beginning to introduce the town’s inhabitants. There are the rich elite of Elm Street, the gossiping poker-playing old men, the class-boundary-defiant teenagers, the middle-class mothers fearful that their secrets will be discovered.

“Clayton Frazier set his coffee cup down with a little click, and then he looked hard at the stranger for a moment.
‘Go fast, mister,’ he said. ‘Get over that line of hills as fast as you can go. Mebbe they got rain up to Canada.’
The stranger laughed… ‘What does rain in Canada have to do with my getting there quickly?’
‘We ain’t got rain here,’ said Clayton Frazier, turning to look out the window. ‘Ain’t had none since June.’
‘Oh,’ said the stranger, feeling rather disappointed. ‘Is that what everyone is waiting for? Rain?’
Clayton Frazier did not look at him again. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s waitin’ for the fires to start, mister. If you’re smart you’ll go fast. You’ll get past the hills before the fires start.’ ”

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I have faith in the world inside the light-filled box

convenience store womanConvenience Store Woman
by Sayaka Murata
translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

This is a fascinating Japanese novella about an unusual person trying to understand the world. It’s funny and empathetic and the Tokyo setting really brought back moments from our Japan holiday.

Lead character and narrator Keiko is a convenience-store worker. She has worked there since her first year at university and is still there 18 years later because it’s the one place where she feels she belongs. But as the years pass she feels increasing social pressure to conform. And her attempts to conform are at once hilarious, heartbreaking and unsettling.

“I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexibility in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.”

Keiko is not just socially awkward. We are never given a formal label but she struggles to empathise with any human emotions or actions. She is alienated by her inability to truly feel and experience what others do, but she has learned to fake it by copying others. She copies how others dress, speak and react, choosing new people to copy every so often who seem appropriate for her (in terms of age and station in life). This can lead to unintentionally comically or extreme moments.

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K-drama review: Love in the Moonlight

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Love in the Moonlight poster

One of the major genres of Korean TV is historical epic, so I thought I should try one out. I sampled a few before settling on 2016’s Love in the Moonlight (also known as Moonlight Drawn by Clouds). I think I was drawn to the romance element (as well as the Shakespearean cross-dressing comedy) so I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised that this shared a lot in common with Boys Over Flowers. And I do mean a lot.

First thing they have in common: they were both phenomenally successful shows based on books – in this case the novel Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, which was serialized online in 2013 and then published as five separate books in 2015. (I would love to add who wrote the book but there is very limited info available in English and my Korean is non-existent.)

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Long time, no blog

Paris
Tim and I at the start of the holiday.

I know, I have been horribly absent. Tim and have been on holiday, and I know I usually blog when we go away, but this time I needed to fully switch off from the world – which I did. We went to Reading (university reunion), Paris, Milan (briefly), Naples, Ischia and Pompeii. Which sounds packed for two weeks, but eight days of that were spent on a resort on Ischia doing very little indeed and it was pretty nearly perfect.

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September 2018 reading round-up

Shakespeare-and-Co

Ah, September was definitely a better month. Work continued to be hectic but my health has greatly improved and we ended the month by going on an awesome holiday. See above for highlight number one – I finally made it to Shakespeare & Co! I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by walking through its upstairs rooms, seeing the old photos of previous residents and the camp beds made up for current occupants.

While we were in Italy the transition from summer to autumn happened in earnest. I love autumn. Happy October, folks!

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I wish for this intrusion, I’ve hoped for it ever since I began

The story of the lost childThe Story of the Lost Child
Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: Maturity, Old Age
by Elena Ferrante
translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein

Next week Tim and I are heading to Campania for our holiday, specifically to Pompeii and Ischia – the island that features prominently in the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, The Story of a New Name – so this seemed like a good time to read the final part of the series.

This book details the final few decades of the friendship of Elena and Lila, from their early 30s to the moment that opens the series: when 60-something-year-old Elena hears that her oldest friend has gone missing. The backdrop to their friendship is the changing society and politics of Naples, and in particular their own neighbourhood, a rough place filled with corruption.
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K-drama review: Doctors

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Doctors

No, I’m not reviewing the soap opera set in Birmingham that’s been running since 2000. This Doctors is another K-drama, which might be my new favourite thing. This time it’s a 2016 series starring an actress everyone recommended I look out for: Park Shin-hye.

This is pretty much Grey’s Anatomy transplanted from Seattle to Seoul, but with what I am starting to recognise as K-drama characteristics. The thing that possibly attracts me the most is that they all appear to be a single season. They’re long seasons – in this case 20 episodes that are an hour apiece – but they are complete stories where everything gets wrapped up, unlike the usual pattern in TV where storylines get changed, delayed or sped up each time a show gets renewed.

The reason I picked Doctors for my second K-drama was that my main problem with Boys Over Flowers (aside from its addictive quality meaning I stayed up far too late watching it) was the lameness of the main female character, so I looked up lists of K-dramas with kick-ass female leads. This show quite literally opens with its female lead kicking ass, which seemed promising.

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