November 2024 reading round-up

Beckett meets Ted

Well that was November. We had snow! I met my Dad’s puppy! Also there were fireworks for weeks, which is not great with a nervous dog. And my shoulder pain is back with a vengeance. Chronic illness is fun.

I didn’t speed through books this month. Pain makes concentration harder, so I watched a lot more TV instead. We’re most of the way through season one of Three Body Problem – based on the book by Cixin Liu – and I’m also most of the way through the K-drama Hometown Cha-cha-cha. One of those is considerably lighter on the ol’ brain.

I went with friends to see the stage production of Never Let Me Go – based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro – at Bristol Old Vic. It was excellent. Tissues definitely required. I also went with the same friends to an evening of traditional Egyptian and Lebanese music. We sat on cushions on the floor, drinking tea – a very chill night out.

The Christmas activities have already begun. I took my Mum to see Luxmuralis: In the Beginning at Bristol Cathedral – a light art installation that tells the story of the Nativity through laser projections. It’s a bit cheesy but also quite impressive. And again, quite chill.

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Book review: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

I would never have picked up a book about boxing but Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel was sent to me as part of the Good Book Club subscription. And then I saw it was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, so I figured it was time to give it a try. I didn’t love it but I do think the writing is great, Bullwinkel is talented and the only negative for me is the boxing. Which arguably isn’t the point of the novel at all.

Headshot follows the finals of the Women’s 18 And Under Daughters of America Cup. Over two days, eight young women compete to be the US national youth champion. Each chapter follows one match, describing both the bout itself and the thoughts of the two fighters. We get brief flashes back to their lives so far and flashes forward to the futures ahead of them, so that in 240 pages eight stories are told, stories that intersect at this one point.

These are not rich girls; their backgrounds vary from dirt poor to lower middle class. They are all aware this might be the one time in their life they have a shot at winning something notable. Some have family expectations resting on them but most are here under personal ambition alone. Which makes the wins and losses personal too.

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October 2024 reading round-up

I do like autumn. This month has been mild, mostly dry and my health is finally in a good enough place to cycle the dog off on Sundays for long walks again. I’d missed our adventures.

October was socially pretty full – we went to the Great Western Brick Show, saw the Dandy Warhols and celebrated Tim’s birthday. I went to the first night of Neneh Cherry’s book tour and a folk concert of spooky music. Plus our usual film nights and pub quizzes.

I read some great books this month but the highlight was definitely Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang. I don’t know why it took me so long to read any of her books. I’m tempted to jump straight into Babel next.

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Book review: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

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Enter GhostAfter a year of war, starvation, genocide, reading books by Palestinian authors feels like such a tiny, insignificant act. But – alongside campaigning, writing to MPs, boycotting and divesting – I do think there is real value in sharing Palestinian stories. Sadly I think there are people who need reminding that Palestinians are human beings, who had stuff going on in their lives beyond minute-to-minute survival before all this. And for the rest of us, learning everything we can about Palestine past and present certainly can’t hurt.

Perhaps most important, I want to share genuinely good books by less-well-known authors. And while there are many excellent Palestinian writers, very few could be considered well known. So I will continue scouring all the lists of Palestinian books, buying them, reading them and sharing them.

British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad features on a lot of those lists, and in particular her 2023 novel Enter Ghost. It’s about Sonia, a Palestinian-British actress who finds herself without work for the summer after a disastrous affair with a director, whose casting promises evaporate when they break up. So she decides to visit her sister Haneen who lives in Haifa (in what is now Israel), where their grandparents lived. While there, Sonia is talked into joining the cast of an Arabic production of Hamlet in Ramallah, directed by her sister’s friend Mariam.

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Heartstopper – Isaac’s reading list in season 3

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Heartstopper logo

It’s that wonderful time of the year again. No, not autumn, I mean the release of a new season of the Heartstopper TV show on Netflix. It is an excellent adaptation of the comics by Alice Oseman. One of the major differences made for the TV show is the introduction of the character Isaac, a bookworm who gradually realises over the first two seasons that he’s ace and aro. Which is a great addition. And has given the world the great gift that is Isaac’s reading list.

I have done my best to pause to see clearly every book we see Isaac reading in season 3. Sometimes the title isn’t clear and it’s only identifiable if you recognise the cover design. So if you spotted a book in Isaac’s hands this season that I haven’t listed here, please do comment below and I’ll add it to the list.

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September 2024 reading round-up

A quieter month finally. Fatigue kicked in a little after our busy summer so I’ve read less than usual but the four books I finished were all good, two of them excellent.

Last week I saw Elif Shafak speak about her new book There Are Rivers In the Sky. As expected she was smart, eloquent and humane. And the new novel sounds amazing, of course, but I also realised there are still several books from her backlist I haven’t read yet. So my to-read list got longer again.

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Book review: Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen

boy friends book coverThe world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

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August 2024 reading round-up

Done a cruise

We knew August was going to be packed and indeed it was. We bookended the month with holidays celebrating weddings. It’s been a lot of fun and I am exhausted. I need a quiet September.

Somehow I did manage to read eight books in August, three of them by women in translation, most of them excellent.

Also, Tim and I celebrated 22 years together. Which is a lot of years. More than half my life. Go us.

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Two book reviews: Rosewater and Rosewater

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Two paper back books called Rosewater

A couple of months ago I spotted that I had two books on my TBR with the same title. Rosewater by Liv Little and Rosewater by Tade Thompson are very different novels but I thought it might be interesting to read them back to back.

In one book Rosewater is a poem, in the other it’s the name of a town, but both refer obliquely to the scented product. The poem is an ode to a person who wears that particular scent. The town is in its early days especially smelly, so the name is ironic.

Little’s book follows Elsie, a 28-year-old poet in London struggling with debt in the gig economy. In short succession she loses her home and almost loses her job thanks to a racist customer. To keep a roof over her head she must go crawling to her best friend Juliet, but there is beef in their recent past they haven’t dealt with.

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July 2024 reading round-up

Bristol Pride 2024

Stupid Covid is stupid. We had a rainy start to the month, attending multiple birthday barbecues in the rain. Then the sun came out and a few days later I caught Covid and had to spend the last 10 days of the month confined to home, feeling too ill to read anything more challenging than YA.

But if I cast my mind back a few weeks to the start of the month there were some highlights. I went to Bristol Pride with a bunch of friends (and the dog). The parade was huge this year (apparently 20,000 marched) and we were near the back, missing a lot of the spectacle but thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere. It was a beautiful, uplifting experience. But as we walked home and left the safety of the Pride crowds, there were some hateful comments directed our way. Even this open-hearted, forward-thinking city has its haters, sadly.

And of course we had a general election that resulted in a Labour government and 4 Green Party MPs. It does feel like I can breathe clearer and hope for a better future again. But the current Labour leaders aren’t perfect. They have a long way to go to improve the status of trans people, refugees and disabled people, and I’m still worried for the NHS. But it does look like they will improve the UK’s environment and carbon emissions.

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