Someday, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time

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Kitchen book coverKitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto
translated from Japanese by Megan Backus

This novella and short story about grief are an excellent demonstration that you can depict dark, devastating emotion without being hyperbolic or overwrought.

“Kitchen part 1”, “Kitchen part 2” and “Moonlight shadow” each follows a young person (college age ish) who has lost a significant person from their lives. The relationship to the deceased is different and on the surface the reactions are different, but at heart the grief is similar.

One of the keys that Yoshimoto taps into is the comfort of specific places, for example a kitchen or a bridge in a park, in helping the process of grief. In “Kitchen”, Mikage doesn’t even need a specific kitchen to help her feel better – any kitchen will do, though she is particularly enamoured by the kitchen of her friend Yuichi, a young man she barely knew before her recent bereavement.

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A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness

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The heart is a lonely hunterThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

This is a beautiful, devastating novel that explores loneliness and poverty. It starts quietly and builds to an angry climax. I can’t quite fully believe that Carson McCullers was only 23 when she wrote this.

Set in a small mill town in 1930s Georgia, the plot revolves around John Singer, a deaf man who touches the lives of several others. He has a job at a jeweller, is educated (including knowing sign language) and serenely gets on with his life. After his deaf friend and room mate Spiros Antonapoulos is taken away to an asylum, some of the town’s more disaffected residents begin to notice Singer, turning to him as a confidante.

This group includes Mick Kelly, a tomboyish teen girl who is developing a deep love for music, though her family can’t afford for her to pursue this love beyond listening to other people’s radios. She tries to describe music to Singer in a way that is so moving that it doesn’t seem strange.

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K-drama review: Ms Panda and Mr Hedgehog

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I deliberately picked another TV show that looked light and fluffy – I mean, it’s called Ms Panda and Mr Hedgehog (2012 Channel A). This romantic drama about patissiers certainly delivered on the fluffy front, but also managed to surprise me in a few areas (while being both lame and predictable in others).

Go Seung-ji (Lee Dong-hae AKA singer-songwriter Donghae) is a skilled 26-year-old patissier working in a small neighbourhood bakery run by the sweet, elderly Park Byung-moo (Park Geun-hyung). He’s also a little rough and wild, making money on the side as a loan shark. His nickname is Dochi (“Koseumdochi” is hedgehog in Korean) because he is prickly on the outside…

Pan Da-yang (Yoon Seung-ah) is a 28-year-old former journalist desperately trying to keep the family business Cafe Panda afloat following her parents’ death. Her younger sister Da-na and her aunt Mi-ra help out, but they are all reliant on hired baker Gil Dong-goo who is terrible at his job. On the verge of having to sell her home to pay her debts, she serves Dong-goo notice and advertises for a new baker – one willing to work solely for room and board for the first few months,

It’s a tall order, but handily Dochi has just learned that he is being paid more than the old man can afford, so he fakes a desire to strike out on his own and takes the job at Cafe Panda. Sparks immediately fly between him and Da-yang, but he doesn’t like to get close to anyone.

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January 2020 reading round-up

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Kinderdijk
New Year’s Day excursion to Kinderdijk.

Today is not a good day. I’d quite like to pretend Brexit isn’t happening, even though I know that the better approach is to reaffirm my love for Europe and the EU. I love the EU so much and will greatly miss being part of it.

This month started strong, with our holiday in the Netherlands, and ended terribly. Maybe February could average out a little? That would be nice. (There is a chance I am also suffering a little from late-winter blues, so as the days get longer I’ll hopefully cheer up, whatever politicians gets up to.)

As well as the Dutch loveliness, this month we also had a very nice weekend with friends in Leicestershire and we saw the excellent JoJo Rabbit at the cinema. If you’re a Taika Waititi fan (and why wouldn’t you be?) you will not be disappointed.

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That faraway summer when he discovered magic

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Prince of MistThe Prince of Mist
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
translated by Lucia Graves

This was my Spain choice for my EU Reading Challenge, which I am clearly not going to finish before the UK leaves the EU, but maybe I’ll manage it before the end of the year. I guess it’s appropriate for this month that I didn’t really enjoy this book.

This is a YA mystery by the author of The Shadow of the Wind, which I loved. It’s not the first of his YA books that I’ve read, but this was definitely inferior to The Watcher in the Shadows. This may be related to the author’s note that opens the book, which says that this was Zafón’s first published novel.

It starts strong. It’s 1943 and the Carver family decide it will be safer to leave the city for a sleepy seaside town that is less likely to be bombed. The three children Alicia, Max and Irina are unimpressed by the move and hope it’s just for the summer. Their new house is described in classic Zafón style as a creepy wooden house with a sad history. Then the weird stuff starts, beginning with a stray cat.

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K-drama review: When the Camellia Blooms

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When the Camellia Blooms poster

I really enjoyed this recent release, which came out in September – November 2019 (KBS/Netflix) and is already award winning. When the Camellia Blooms effectively combines a really sweet romance with a modern twist and a suspenseful crime drama.

(I say “modern twist” because it’s about an unmarried mother finding romance, which wouldn’t be particularly novel in a European or American drama, but in Korean TV these things just don’t get depicted.)

Oh Dongbaek (Gong Hyo-jin, who I know from the excellent Don’t Dare to Dream and the mediocre Pasta) moves to the small (fictional) town of Ongsan as an unmarried single mother of a toddler. She opens a bar and surprises everyone by braving the locals’ cool reception and malicious gossip to make a modest success of her life. Six years later, romance comes knocking but at the same time, Kang Jong-ryul (Kim Ji-seok), the father of her son Pil-gu, finally tracks her down. He’s been busy playing pro baseball and making a reality show about his perfect-on-the-surface marriage to model Jessica, so he has money but not a lot else going for him.

Hwang Yong-sik (Kang Ha-neul, who has the most adorable goofy smile) is a police officer who was raised in Ongsan but has been away for years. Now he’s back, causing problems for his mother, his police superiors and for local criminals. He’s passionate and tends to throw himself full-throttle into situations. He falls hard for Dongbaek when he sees her stand up for herself to a rude customer and begins to woo her. And when he realises that an old serial murderer he’s been looking into may have reason to target Dongbaek, he makes solving the case his priority (despite being a junior officer whose responsibilities lie more in the realm of petty theft and neighbour disputes).

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Part of the natural evil that permeated man’s existence

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Deep Water book coverDeep Water
by Patricia Highsmith

I picked this up in a huge secondhand bookshop in Amsterdam where I was overwhelmed with choice. I always like a crime novel on holiday and this is a thriller par excellence. I don’t think Highsmith has let me down yet.

This psychological thriller seems cosy at first but with an undercurrent of something terrible coming. In the small New England town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, there is a cocktail party under way. Local publisher Victor Van Allen is making small talk, but he is embarrassed that his wife Melinda has insisted on bringing along her current lover, Joel Nash. Vic is sure that everyone else knows the nature of Melinda and Joel’s relationship and that they all judge him for accepting it.

This is not Melinda’s first extramarital affair. She has had a string of them for the past few years and Vic didn’t mind much at first, but it is starting to bother him. So he decides to have a word with Joel before they leave the party. It just happens that an ex-lover of Melinda’s, Malcolm McRae, was murdered six months earlier and the case has not been solved. Vic decides to tell Joel that he was the murderer, to see how Joel reacts.

It’s an intriguing introduction to a character. Though the narrative is not first person, it is a very close third person that gets right into Victor Van Allen’s mind. And though it gradually becomes clear that Vic’s mind is not a comfortable place to be and that he has the potential to be capable of doing terrible things, you also sympathise with him right from the start.

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2019 reading round-up and favourites

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fireworks in Rotterdam
New Year fireworks on the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam.

Well I don’t know if it was a lucky guess or if I know myself well, but this year I read exactly the number of books I set as my 2019 Goodreads challenge: 70. I’ve had a few dry spells so a lot of those have been mini books, but I have enjoyed sampling several famous authors that way.

Of those 70 books, 37 were written by women and two were by multiple men and women, so that’s pretty close to even. 27 were translated from other languages, which is much higher than I have achieved in previous years and is probably the result of my EU Reading Challenge.

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Merry Christmas from Amsterdam

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Amsterdam city hall, only slightly raining.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate. This year we are in the Netherlands, where it has been a little grey and very chilled. I decided I wanted to do more film photography again, so I don’t have many digital photos to share, but at some unknown point in the future I’ll hopefully have some cool film photos to post.

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Life is nothing like a story in a book

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tokyo ueno station book coverTokyo Ueno Station
by Yu Miri
translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles

This is an astonishing novella, packing so much insight and commentary and humanity into so few pages. And it taught me snippets of history as well. I’m really not sure how Yu managed it.

The tale is narrated by Kazu, an old man who has spent the last few years homeless, living in Ueno Park in central Tokyo. He tells his life story, but not linearly. An overheard conversation will remind him of his son. A piece of rubbish will remind him of a friend who died. A rain storm will remind him of a certain day in the past. And so on.

Kazu is an ordinary man, which is of course the whole point. He didn’t become homeless because he’s a junkie or had been in prison. Yu doesn’t spell out the reason he ended up in Ueno Park, but as we see his long lonely life getting sadder and lonelier, we can fill in some of the gaps.

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