January 2023 reading round-up

Tricks for treats

I usually quite like January. It includes my birthday, for one thing. The concept of a fresh start is a nice idea, even if I rarely make any real change. Lots of people take a month off socialising so there’s good reason to stay at home reading books, watching TV and playing games. And though it’s still winter, the days are getting longer, the first spring flowers are coming through, and really not much can beat a crisp dry sunny winter day.

However, this month has been mostly grey and wet. There’s been a resurgence of COVID to add to all the other winter bugs doing the rounds, so half the people I know have been unwell or still are. And we said a final goodbye to my grandad, who died at the end of December. So it’s not been the best January.

My reading was, perhaps appropriately, mixed. I started strong, with a book I knew I would love – Taste by Stanley Tucci. I ended the month with another real-life tale, a story far more extraordinary but not as well written: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming. The difference? It wasn’t told by its protagonist, and there was no good reason for that. It distanced me from what should have been an incredibly powerful experience. Ah well. Not every book can be a winner.

I also watched the usual large quantity of films and TV. The last two films I saw were the best: The Wonder – a period drama on Netflix starring the ever-excellent Florence Pugh – and Apocalypse Now: the Final Cut. The former is a fantastically strange, thoughtful film. While the latter is of course completely unhinged, that being the point it is making. War is insane, full of pointless suffering and death. And seriously, 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne is just as amazing as all the more experienced actors around him.

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Book review: Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

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Taste book cover

I’ve had a soft spot for actor Stanley Tucci since his brief stint on ER, though I was aware of him before that. His food-and-travel TV show Searching for Italy is a true delight, a relentlessly positive journey around the gastronomic delights of probably my favourite cuisine, with the gorgeous backdrop of Italy’s stunning scenery.

Between making series one and two, Tucci wrote a memoir – Taste: My Life Through Food. As the title suggests, he tells his life story through memories of meals, foods, cooking and eating. Despite his fame and years of worldwide travel, family and home seem to be hugely important to Tucci – and central to both, for him, is food.

He says this emphasis on food is a legacy of his Italian heritage. It certainly sounds like his childhood home was filled with food far more delicious – and healthy – than his school friends’. A year of his youth was spent in Italy, a revelation of new foods and ingredients.

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My best reads of 2022 and goals for the year ahead

My trusty reading companion

I read some great books last year. Looking through my stats on Storygraph, I read 74 books, and gave 16 of them 4.5 stars or higher (out of 5). That’s pretty good going.

I read 17 books classified as LGBTQIA+, 9 sci-fi, 15 non-fiction (including 8 memoirs) and 12.5 books translated from another language into English (there was one short story collection in which about half were translations).

My top 10 books reflect those stats pretty well, except that no translations quite made it into the list (there were two that were very close contenders). I didn’t write full-length reviews of all of them, as that’s a habit I only got back into in the second half of the year, but I did enthuse about them all in my monthly reading round-ups. As well as to Tim at the time of reading (Tim helped me narrow down my longlist to 10 by commenting on which ones he remembers me talking about!).

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December 2022 reading round-up

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Snow day

We didn’t have the greatest December, or the most relaxing end to the year. I’m looking forward to a few days of doing very little before the new year starts in earnest. We did manage a few lovely walks in the woods; put up some Christmas decorations to make the house feel more cheerful on the long dark evenings; and treated ourselves to a lot of chocolatey and alcoholic tasty things. And the dog and I made the most of our one day of snow here in Bristol.

This month I finished a couple of books I spent all year reading in short segments, making it look like I read my usual amount, rather than a fair bit less than I’d hoped to. My favourite read of the month – and a contender for my top 10 of the year – was All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes.

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Book review: The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai

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The Mountains Sing book coverSometimes a book breaks your heart but you love it anyway. For me, The Mountains Sing by Nguyén Phan Qué Mai hit that spot. It’s a novel about Vietnam through most of the twentieth century, told through one family.

After a very brief prelude, it opens in Hanoi in 1972. Twelve-year-old Hương and her grandmother Diệu Lan are running to a bomb shelter as the air raid sirens sound yet again. Hương’s parents and uncles have disappeared down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight in the war. Years later, Hương can only hope no news is good news.

Hương and her grandmother decide they must walk up into the mountains with only the food and clothing they can carry, in search of safety from the American bombs. They return months later to a devastated Hanoi and must piece a life back together, including literally rebuilding their home.

This tale is interspersed with the story of Diệu Lan’s childhood further south, in central Vietnam. Like Hương has experienced in her short life, Diệu Lan had a happy, comfortable home until a series of invaders culminating with the Japanese unsettled everything, and then came the blow of the North Vietnamese Communists, who took an extreme, violent approach to redistribution of wealth.

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Book review: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

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How We Disappeared book cover

When a book gets a lot of hype on publication, it can be hit or miss whether I like it. Even a very good book can be spoiled by expectations that are too high. But How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee is one of the cases where I absolutely agree with all the five-star reviews. This novel is excellent.

It’s set in Singapore, with two timelines. In the year 2000 two people are trying to uncover secrets from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Wang Di is an old woman who has her own terrible memories of that time. Kevin is a 12-year-old boy desperate to help his father by following up on his grandmother’s deathbed confession.

While both our lead characters have their struggles, the stakes are rather different. As the novel opens, Wang Di’s husband has just died, leaving her alone. She never learned to read, and scrapes a living by collecting scrap to resell for recycling. In her husband’s last days, Wang Di finally told him the story she had hidden for more than 50 years – though he guessed some of it the day they met. But he died before there was time for him to reciprocate – to tell her his own war story. Now Wang Di is filled with regret. And shame, as her neighbours laugh at her and call her names.

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November 2022 reading round-up

Chapbook with an egg sarnie

November started out far too warm (when looked at from a climate crisis perspective rather than personal comfort) and ended super cold. In two weeks we flipped from no central heating and light sweaters, to all-day central heating, thick jumpers and blankets everywhere we sit.

Reading-wise it was an excellent month. Every book was great, with my favourite probably being How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee (though it was tough to choose a favourite). I did a book swap with a friend so I’m now alternating borrowed books with TBR titles. It was meant to stop me from buying new books for a while but I slipped up and bought two of the little Faber Stories series in the Barbican gift shop.

Speaking of which: I went to London! For the first time since very early 2020. And it felt like I’d never been away. Not that nothing had changed, but I expect London to be in constant flux. I even went on the shiny new Elizabeth Line on the Tube, which is indeed very shiny still. The main highlight was seeing my friend H for lots of chitchat, hugs, food and boozing. But we also squeezed in trips to the Vagina Museum and the Barbican Arts Centre, because we are very cultural. I highly recommend both. They’re opposite ends of the spectrum, inasmuch as the Vagina Museum is pretty small and I suspect most visitors spend less than an hour there. While the Barbican is enormous and could occupy you and your whole extended family for days.

Top films this month were probably See How They Run (period comedy mystery about a murder in the theatre staging Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) and Thor: Love and Thunder. We’re also very much enjoying the TV show The Peripheral, which is based on a William Gibson book that Tim and I went to a launch event for but neither of us has yet read. That pesky TBR just keeps on growing.

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Book review: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

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Earthlings book cover

In 2020 when Earthlings by Sayaka Murata came out (in translation from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) everyone was raving about it. Our local bookshop Storysmith promoted it as one of their bookseller favourites (technically they’re no longer our closest bookshop thanks to the sudden boom in indie bookshops in Bristol, but that’s a topic for another blog post). I was intrigued, and I’d really liked Murata’s previous novel Convenience Store Woman, but I was feeling guilt about how little I was reading (for me) so I put buying new books on hold. Then this summer I fed a friend’s cat while they were on holiday and as a thank you they bought me this. Yay for awesome friends who know the way to my heart.

Like her bestselling previous novel, Murata’s hero in Earthlings is a woman who is emotionally disconnected from the world. But in Natsuki’s case, this may not be due to an innate neurodifference, but rather trauma. Or perhaps a combination.

We meet Natsuki as a child. She believes that her cuddly toy hedgehog Piyyut is an alien from the planet Popinpobopia, a country she first heard of from her beloved cousin Yuu, who she only sees during the summer holidays they spend in the mountains at her grandparents’ home. Yuu claims he is also Popinpobopian and is searching for a spaceship to take him home.

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Book review: Austral by Paul McAuley

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Austral book coverPaul McAuley is Tim’s favourite author and I completely understand why. I am surprised McAuley isn’t more widely known, as he is in my experience consistently excellent, creating thoughtful, hard science fiction with great characters and exciting stories.

His 2017 novel Austral imagines a world where the climate catastrophe has happened, the worst-case scenarios came to pass, and the surviving humans have learned little to nothing from it, continuing to put the needs of rich people and corporations before other concerns. It’s depressing in its believability.

A century after the climate catastrophe, Antarctica is now a country with elected politicians and cities to house all the people who work in the plethora of mines the continent is now home to. The first wave of people to move to Antarctica, decades before our story begins, were the Eco Poets, a collective who planted forests, gardens and small farms. But they were targeted as political “undesirables” and now their legacy is the scattered remains of their plantations, and the children they created through gene editing to be better adapted to the Antarctic climate, known as “huskies”.

Our heroine, Austral, is a husky. She’s large, strong and fat so that she doesn’t feel the cold. Discriminated against wherever she goes, she has limited employment options and few friends. Austral works as a prison guard at a penal colony, a rare job that she is well suited for. She dreams of living in an apartment in Auckland, an ordinary life somewhere safe – a dream that is simple and impossible.

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Book review: Kololo Hill by Neema Shah

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Kololo Hill book coverBack in March, I bought two copies of Kololo Hill in an auction to raise funds for British-Ukrainian Aid. The author, Neema Shah, kindly offered to sign the books with personalized recommendations and I thought here was a great opportunity to do a readalong with my friend H, who I was planning to see soon. Cue months of Covid- and non-Covid-related reasons for us delaying our get-together until in August I finally posted H’s copy of the book to her. In September we agreed to start reading the book. In October I finally read it.

It’s a good book; don’t judge it harshly for my delay.

It’s 1972 and Asha and Pran are newly married. They live in the leafy Kololo Hill suburb of Kampala with Pran’s parents, Jaya and Motichand, and his brother Vijay. Pran is planning to expand his shop; Asha is settling in with her in-laws. But in the background of their life is Uganda’s increasing anti-Asian violence, the curfew imposed on them, and the sounds of gunfire at night. Slowly that background becomes foreground, becomes almost all their lives revolve around. And then Idi Amin issues an edict that all Asians must leave Uganda within 90 days. It’s not much time for them to make the necessary plans.

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