Reading round-up May 2018

Teenage girls are our future

Oof. I have not read much this month. Or at least, I haven’t finished many books. I have started at least three books I haven’t finished and possibly won’t ever finish. Maybe I’ll blog about those another time.

We had two fab weekends away in London, enjoying sunshine, music, art, time with friends and some spectacular thunder and lightning. This month’s highlight was seeing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform last Friday. I love them so much and they were on top form.

We also visited the South Bank Book Fair under Waterloo Bridge for the first time in years. I used to go there fairly often. It was always pricey and skewed towards maps and antiquities, but books! Tim found a collection of SF short stories edited by Harry Harrison. I found a novel by Yukio Mishima. We went to a bar on a balcony over the Thames and cracked open those books over a drink and a snack. It was beautiful.

Roll on June.

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Dream-catchers that have been there so long their tinkle’s all tinked out

Devoured by Anna MackminDevoured
by Anna Mackmin

This is a strange tale told in a strange way, and I loved it. Sometimes a bit of originality is just what I hanker for.

It’s the tale of a commune in 1970s Norfolk. Beth owns a big farmhouse, which she has opened up to a raggedy crew of hippies from around the UK and the US. She and her partner are raising their two daughters in true New Age style: no school, treated like adults when it comes to chores and conversation topics, encouraged to be artistic in every way.

The novel is told from the perspective of the older daughter, but it is not narrated by her. The narration is in the 2nd person, addressing the older daughter. It’s also told in mostly incomplete sentences, a sort of stream of consciousness. It’s never quite clear if this is meant to be the 12-year-old girl addressing herself from the future or an unusual take on the omniscient narrator.

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Run, stop, lupus

Adam, Mum and me

Once again this year, my Mum talked me into running the Bristol 10k, so I have been training since mid-January. It did not go smoothly. There was snow and ice, injury, busy periods at work tiring me out and then before I knew it my old enemy reared its head: summer.

There is a good reason that May is Lupus Awareness Month in the USA. These long hours of daylight and higher UV levels can come as a surprise, especially on cloudy or wet days. I always have a lupus flare-up in May. Which made me wary of the Bristol 10k’s date of 13 May.

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Someone started to draw on two extra eyes with a felt-tip pen but stopped halfway

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ms ice sandwichMs Ice Sandwich
by Mieko Kawakami
translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai

I picked up this novella primarily because it’s Japanese and I am still excited about all things Japan. And the title is intriguing.

The story is narrated by a young man who, over his summer holiday, becomes slightly obsessed by the sandwich server at his local supermarket. She is aloof, never smiling, never engaging with customers, precise in all her movements. When he starts back at school, he hears rumours about his beloved “Ms Ice Sandwich” and they upset him.

“Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our freezer since last summer. There’s one more awesome thing about her – if you watch when she looks down, there’s a sharp dark line above her eyes, as if when she closed her eyes, someone started to draw on two extra eyes with a felt-tip pen but stopped halfway. It’s the coolest thing.”

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Reading round-up April 2018

CC0 Thought Catalog

I ended my month by going to a friend’s book launch. I am very proud, and impressed, by Lizzie’s dedication to becoming a poet. So I’m going to start my April round-up by recommending that you all go out and buy In Her Shambles by Elizabeth Parker. Look out for my review of it soon.

This month I also went to the Bristol Old Vic production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I had never seen a stage production of this play before, only the Vivien Leigh film, and it was terrific. Funny, disturbing, full of heat in every sense. Many thanks to my friend T for inviting me along.

As always happens with those first glimmers of summer, my lupus is flaring a little, so I am watching a lot of films and TV and not reading many books. But it will pass. And the month’s reading started off strong.

How was your April?

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They didn’t look for long, it was more a practice series of glances

boy snow birdBoy, Snow, Bird
by Helen Oyeyemi

I remember reading Oyeyemi’s debut novel The Icarus Girl in 2005. I was simultaneously highly impressed by her writing, and jealous that someone so young was so talented. (I was at the time trying to sell my own debut novel. It was terrible. I do not blame the publishers and agents who rejected it.) Icarus Girl and Oyeyemi’s 2011 novel Mr Fox both received a rare five-star rating from me, and Boy, Snow, Bird followed suit. Oyeyemi is truly brilliant.

Boy, the lead character, runs away from her abusive father in 1950s New York and sets up home in a small New England town called Flax Hill. She takes a series of short-term jobs, never really fitting in until she marries a local man. Finally she has found safety and security. Boy finds herself stepmother to the beautiful, delicate Snow, a young girl she loves dearly until she finds herself pregnant with her own daughter, Bird.

“I was on shaky terms with [Flax Hill] for the first few months. Neither of us was sure whether or not I genuinely intended to stick around. And so the town misbehaved a little, collapsing when I went to sleep and reassembling in the morning in a slapdash manner.”

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The baby eyed him with a frozen watchfulness

ghost childrenGhost Children
by Sue Townsend

Despite its author, this book is not a comedy. It is not remotely funny. It is a book fuelled by anger, which in retrospect was there in Townsend’s comedy too.

In some ways this is the book that My Name is Leon managed not to be; both look at unwanted or unplanned children, class, social services, neglect and adoption. Where Kit de Waal was all humanism and understanding, Sue Townsend is bleak and unforgiving. It’s a powerful, upsetting book railing against…life? Inequality?

The story follows Christopher Moore, a lonely middle-aged man who is still in love with his ex, Angela, who is now married to another man. 17 years earlier she had an abortion without telling him and it destroyed their relationship, but now he wants to hear the full story.

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I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw

Optician of LampedusaThe Optician of Lampedusa
by Emma Jane Kirby

This book, like The Gurugu Pledge falls somewhere between journalism and novel – a true story retold in novel form.

Lampedusa is an Italian island that is closer to Africa than Europe. Though refugees crossing the Mediterranean rarely aim intentionally for Lampedusa, it has over the last decade become a common site for boats gone astray. A few years ago Lampedusa’s optician Carmine Menna was taking a pleasant boat trip with his wife and friends when they heard the screams of hundreds of drowning men and women. He was reluctant to speak to reporters, but BBC journalist Emma Jane Kirby talked him into this method of telling his story.

“I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw as our boat approached the source of that terrible noise. I hardly want to…You see, I thought I’d heard seagulls screeching…Birds. Just birds. We were in open sea, after all. It couldn’t be anything else.”

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Leaving because it is no longer possible to stay

We Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo

This was my favourite of the six books I read over Easter weekend on the theme of refugees and migration. Perhaps it’s because it’s written from the perspective of a young girl. I know child narrators are difficult to do well, but when they are, I really respond to them.

Darling is 10 years old and lives in a shanty town called Paradise in Zimbabwe (though the country is never named, it’s clear where it is). She spends her days with her friends and lives with her mother and Mother of Bones.

At first it seems innocent, though the poverty is clearly extreme. Hints are dropped, details revealed of how far from paradise this is. Darling and her friends have their ways of dealing with unfairness and poverty and violence, but something worse is always just round the corner.

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Whichever history the whites chose for you

The Gurugu PledgeThe Gurugu Pledge
by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
translated by Jethro Soutar

This is the first of three books I read last weekend that create fiction from real-life accounts. It hadn’t even occurred to me before that was a genre!

On the Gurugu mountain in Morocco next to the border with the small Spanish enclave of Melilla, people from all over Africa hide in caves and tents in a makeshift camp, waiting to make their attempt on the border wall that could get them to European soil. To pass the time, the people on Gurugu mountain tell stories about where they have come from and play football (which also keeps them warm on this northerly point of the continent).

“There are some five hundred of us, black Africans all, and we just want to live, you know? We just want to live, but living is a serious business in Africa, for it’s often very hard and lots of people barely manage it…we need to eat. Do you understand me, Sir? Eat or manger, according to whichever history the whites chose for you.”

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