Book review: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

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Wicked book coverAs if to prove his point in his author’s introduction, the first few chapters of Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire include: slut shaming; puppet porn; mob violence and a pretty detailed childbirth. This book is very much not for children. It is so much better, darker and more politically complex than I had expected from having seen the musical years ago on the West End.

This is not a sweet and light tale of female friendship regretfully torn apart by loving the same man. It’s a politically complex novel about the spread of right-wing ideology and one woman who finds that not playing along with the majority opinion comes at a high cost. Put another way, it’s Elphaba’s story, from birth to death.

Oz is a land slowly falling to a dictator – the Wizard – who is sowing hate and discord to divide and conquer the four previously autonomous regions around Emerald City. Elphaba is the daughter of a preacher and a woman who is already unhappy before her first child is born with green skin. Everyone fears her, child and adult.

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Book review: The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

The Skin and its Girl cover

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is one of the stories of Palestinian diaspora that I have been particularly excited to get hold of. Reviews made it sound right up my street – and it absolutely is. It celebrates language and storytelling; questions ideas of truth and honesty; features queerness; and is beautifully written.

Betty Rumanni tells the story of her life so far, starting with the day of her birth. At first she wasn’t breathing, doctors thought she was dead, then she took her first breath and her skin turned cobalt blue. Betty’s skin has been bright blue ever since.

This is not some alternative universe where some people are blue-skinned. Betty is one-of-a-kind. And while it’s a clear metaphor for standing out as an Arab American “soon after 9/11”, it also makes for a kind of modern myth.

It becomes clear that Betty is telling her story to a specific person, her great aunt Nuha. Or more accurately, Nuha’s grave. Betty is trying to figure out whether to stay in America to take care of her mother, or to follow her girlfriend overseas to build a new life together. But more than that, she is trying to piece together her aunt’s story and that of the Rumanni family.

Betty’s knowledge of the Rumanni family largely comes from Nuha’s bedtime stories. There’s a family feud relating to a soap factory in Nablus; a girl who follows a silver gazelle to Haifa; even a tattooed ogre. And mixed in with these stories of Palestine are Bible stories, retold by someone who believes in God but does not feel God has ever been there for her. How do these tales relate to the friction between her grandmother Saeeda and great aunt Nuha in America? Are these the roots of Betty’s mother Tashi’s fragile mental health?

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February 2025 reading round-up

Elektra

Not such an eventful month as January or nearly as prolific reading-wise. It’s honestly been a bit of a tough one as recovery from surgery is proving much slower than I had expected. But I’m now cycling again, which feels like a big step.

We ended the month with a trip to London to see Brie Larson on stage in Elektra. She was absolutely brilliant in this bare bones, angry, punk staging that uses Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles. It’s the most experimental play I’ve ever seen in the West End or indeed in any traditional old theatre. If it weren’t for the huge Hollywood and Broadway names (Clytemnestra is played by Stockard Channing) this play would have felt right at home at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatre or South Street Arts Centre in Reading. I loved it, even if I didn’t quite understand a couple of the set details (why is there a zeppelin?).

I’m still not sure I’m quite ready to read the Ancient Greeks, even in modern translation. But this has reignited my interest in these stories enough to queue up the second part of Claire North’s Songs of Penelope series to read soon. The blurb suggests this novel heavily features Elektra and her brother Orestes. (They were minor characters in the first book, Ithaca.)

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Book review: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Woman on the Edge of Time book cover

I forget where I heard about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, but as its cover proclaims it is “the classic feminist novel” and it’s speculative fiction written a woman, it’s not hard to see why I added it to my wishlist at some point.

This is quite a dark, grim, even shocking, book. And it’s also a vision of a hopeful, more equal future. Or is it?

In 1970s New York City, middle-aged Connie tries to stand up to her niece’s abusive pimp and he has her committed to a mental institution. Conditions there are pretty bleak and no-one listens to her, or any other patient – particularly people of colour. Connie is Hispanic, which means she isn’t treated quite as badly as Black patients but she is still “othered” by the doctors, spoken of as more animal than human. What it comes down to is these patients are all poor, and therefore expendable. And she is also a woman, while the pimp is a man. Connie’s one relief from her awful situation is her ability to contact a community in the far future.

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January 2025 reading round-up

January projects

Well that was a month. I usually don’t mind January as much as other people do. After all, it starts with my birthday and ends with the first spring flowers. Plus I really don’t mind cold weather for walking the dog in crunchy frost and then warming up at home with a hot drink and a book.

But I have to say this year January was tough. It’s been wet. World news is awful. And it turns out that recovering from shoulder surgery is more slow and painful than I anticipated. Plus, I have yet to see a spring flower that’s, you know, flowering (in fairness, I haven’t left the house all that much).

The list below makes it look like I read a lot of books in January. Which technically is true. But the pain and reduced range of movement I’m experiencing, though both are improving week on week, means it is still difficult for me to hold a book that requires both hands to read. So I’ve mostly restricted myself to my ereader (which I can use one-handed) and the set of tiny 50-page Penguin Modern mini classics that Tim bought me a few years ago. Plus a couple of chapbooks of Korean short stories from the University of East Anglia’s Yeoyu project.

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Book review: This House by Sian Northey

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This House book coverSeeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It’s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home.

We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the remote house called Nant yr Aur, where she lives alone. But she doesn’t have to cope entirely on her own. Soon we meet her friend Emyr, who drops in on her most days. He’s a farmer and her only neighbour within walking distance. They’re both getting old and though Emyr has a wife and two grown sons at home, he clearly values Anna’s friendship.

Between Emyr’s visits, Anna reflects back on her life in the house, prompted by a letter she’s received from someone offering to buy it. This isn’t the first offer she’s had, and she doesn’t plan to accept, but it’s made her reminisce. We learn she had a partner once, Ioan; in fact, the house was his, but she was the one who fell in love with it. When Anna decides to meet Sîon, the young man who’s made the offer, they strike up an unlikely friendship.

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Top reads of 2024 and some fun stats

Line graph showing books read and pages read per month

Happy New Year! I have recovered enough from shoulder surgery to type one-handed for short periods. Which means it’s time for a slightly belated (and shorter than usual) look at my reading stats for 2024.

Last year I read 88 books or 23,928 pages. I get lovely stats and graphs from Storygraph, as their name suggests. For instance, I spent an average 6 days on each book (with lots of overlaps). I read 79% fiction, 21% non-fiction. The average book length was 275 pages. I read the most in May but I liked the books the most in August.

According to my own records, I read 18 books in translation. As for gender split, I read 64 by women, 23 by men and one by multiple authors of various genders. I’ve come a long way since the days when I strived to read as many women as men! It’s perhaps no surprise then that all 5 of my favourite books this year were written by women.

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December 2024 reading round-up

Christmas Day 2024

Happy New Year’s Eve folks!

I actually wrote this post a couple of days ago as I will be incapable of blogging on 31 December. I’m scheduled for minor surgery just before the New Year and expect to be on strong painkillers for a few days. Hopefully after a few weeks of convalescence my shoulder will no longer cause me constant pain. That’ll be nice.

Looking back over December, it was a month of two halves. First half was busy with Christmas parties, get-togethers, shopping and planning. Second half was hospital appointments; keeping myself away from crowds so I don’t get sick before having surgery; and a very quiet chill Christmas at home. My brother joined us for a few days and we ate a lot of very good food.

Staying home more than usual means Tim and I powered through our list of Christmas films. We watched a lot of them, old and new, good and bad. I can recommend A Christmas Affair (1949), Desk Set (1957), The Apartment (1960), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and The Ice Harvest (2005). Plus the new Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is great. It’s not set at Christmas but it was premiered on Christmas Day so it’s basically a Christmas film.

I also read a lot this month. I thoroughly enjoyed Butter and Behind You is the Sea, but I absolutely loved This House. It’ll probably be a week or two before I name my top books of 2024, so here’s a hint: This House will be on the list.

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K-drama review: Hometown Cha Cha Cha

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha posterHometown Cha Cha Cha (tvN 2021) is a sweet, gentle romcom told over 24 hours of television. Like all the better K-dramas it takes its time to establish characters and tell their story without overstaying its welcome. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Yoon Hye-jin (Shin Min-a) is a dentist in Seoul. When she refuses to recommend unnecessary expensive treatments to her patients she is fired. In a thoroughly low place, she decides to spend a few hours in Gongjin, a seaside town her family used to visit when she was young.

A series of mishaps conspire to keep her in this small town for the day and night. And also to repeatedly put her in contact with Hong Du-sik (Kim Seon-ho, who was also in Start-Up). A jack-of-all-trades, he is affectionately called Chief Hong by the town’s residents. When a couple of residents casually mention that Gongjin doesn’t have a dentist, the seed of an idea is planted. It’s about time for Hye-jin to start her own practice, and it need only be for a year or so, until she can move back to Seoul.

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Book review: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You is the Sea coverEvery new book is a gamble. Unless you’ve read it before, you don’t really know what you’re getting. Sure, there are some ways to mitigate risk. Tried and tested author; recommendation from a friend or book blogger who shares your taste; perhaps a bookseller or book club you’ve found you jibe with. But even the best of these can end in disappointment. Not every book can be a gem.

So it’s an extra big risk to pre-order a not-yet-published book by an unknown author based solely on a random Bookstagram post. What can I say? They were persuasive: a way to financially support Palestinian authors and encourage more publishers to work with them is to pre-order their books. Demonstrate there is a demand. So I pre-ordered Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj, mostly forgot about it and then a couple of months later got a lovely surprise in the post.

I actually don’t mind the risk of not loving a book. Makes it easier to decide which ones to keep after reading, which ones to even finish. But in this case I did love the book. And that’s despite some narrative decisions that haven’t always worked for me in the past.

This novel is about three Palestinian families in Baltimore, Maryland. Each chapter concentrates on a different character from these families, following them closely for days, weeks or even months. There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people – a lot of whom will have appeared in previous chapters or go on to appear again later.

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