March 2020 reading round-up

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My current office space.

Well, the world sure changed over the course of this month. I cannot believe just over two weeks ago we were going to work, to the pub, hanging out with friends. The Great Isolation has barely started and looks set to last for months, so we’re going to have to figure out new ways to be sociable.

Tim and I are luckier than most right now – we’re healthy, still working, safe at home – but it’s hard not to be a ball of anxiety. Which is taking a toll on my reading. For most of the month I’ve only read comics, plus the news. I’m putting what spare energy I do have into trying to make sure I get enough exercise. But reading is still the best means I know to get to sleep. And my work-from-home set-up is in our dining room/library so I’m surrounded by my books all day, and that’s comforting.

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A language that hasn’t learned to depict reality

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The Ministry of PainThe Ministry of Pain
by Dubravka Ugresic
translated from Croatian by Michael Henry Heim

This book started really strong for me and then tailed off. It has a lot of interesting things to say about language, story and identity, but two unfortunate decisions toward the end undermined my pleasure. This is my Netherlands read for the EU Reading Challenge.

Tanja Ludic left her home in Zagreb during the 1990s Yugoslav civil war. A few years later she is teaching Servo-Kroat at the University of Amsterdam, a temporary contract and almost certainly a temporary subject. She quickly realises that all her students are floundering, most of them like her are refugees from a forever-changed homeland. So she expands her course to cover “Yugo” culture, in fact any memories that her students will share with her and each other.

Initially, the novel flits between these recollections and Tanja’s musings on language, on life in Amsterdam, on being a migrant. As she gets to know her students, they become a larger part of her life and the story. But events conspire to prevent this from becoming the cosy situation she craves.

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Book blogging, 10 years on

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When books are opened, you discover you have wings

It was 10 years (and 2 weeks) ago, after a few months of deliberation and speed-learning WordPress, that I published this website and my first book review. A lot has changed since then, not least the amount of time I dedicate to blogging, but some things thankfully remain.

Books are still a source of comfort both to read and to discuss. I find online book communities are still a kind, gentle place to be, even if very few interactions happen on the blogs themselves now. I still buy books faster than I read them and I still want to know about all the latest releases even though I can’t possibly keep up with them all.

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Cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers

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Kitchen ConfidentialKitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain

Just as it pleased me that my Dad gave me copies of this book and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto in the same parcel, it also pleased me to read them one after the other. Aside from the titles, I’d say they have zero in common, but I very much enjoyed both books.

The book that made Bourdain famous is a highly entertaining memoir about his career in the restaurant business, from washing up as a summer job, to being a head chef far too young to maintain his success, to having drug problems and clawing his way back up to the top job.

This isn’t a straightforward memoir. Essays on various aspects of working in a busy kitchen are interspersed between recollections of specific periods in Bourdain’s life. He starts with his childhood discovery of really good food on a summer trip to France. After recounting his training and career, he skips to an essay titled “Who cooks?”, which describes general and specific traits of kitchen staff. And it’s not a pretty portrait.

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K-drama review: Because This is My First Life

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Because This is My First Life still
Lee Min-ki and Jung So-min co-star.

Finally, the first K-drama in a while that I have thoroughly enjoyed without any caveats. Because This is My First Life (TvN, 2017) is unashamedly romantic but also modern and, dare I say it, feminist?

Nam Se-hee (Lee Min-ki) is an app designer who is struggling to pay the mortgage on his home. Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min) is an assistant TV writer who can’t afford to rent a place on her own in Seoul (she had been sharing with her brother but when he gets married their parents decide Ji-ho must move out). So it’s initially an ideal situation for Ji-ho to rent Se-hee’s spare room. They’re both in their 30s, reserved, love football and like to keep a clean home.

It becomes apparent that other people are uncomfortable with the idea of an unmarried man and woman living together. So they do what seems logical: they get married, promising to each other that it is purely a financial arrangement. But of course, not only does the rest of the world have ideas about what marriage is, they also find themselves questioning what it means for their relationship to be quite so transactional.

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February 2020 reading round-up

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Frame Perspective

February dragged on forever and then was suddenly over. We’ve had endless rain and wind, but the month ended on a high note for me. On Friday, Greta Thunberg came to Bristol to lead the Youth Strike 4 Climate. I went along to hear the speeches and join the first part of the march and it was amazing.

This weekend is also Bristol Light Festival, with a series of light-based sculptures around the city. It’s currently quite small, but I’m hoping it’s proved enough of a success to become an annual event, like the one in Amsterdam.

This month we went to see Parasite, which we not only loved but are continuing to analyse every detail of two weeks later. It is such a good film. And I went to see a screening of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with live improvised musical accompaniment. Those 1920 film sets are gorgeous!

On the reading front, I seem to have continued my slowed-down pace of one book per week. I know for most people that would be plenty, but for me it seems very little. Thankfully, the books I did read this month were all great.

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Greta Thunberg comes to Bristol

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Today, Greta Thunberg came to Bristol to lead the Youth Strike 4 Climate (which has been held monthly for almost a year in Bristol now). I went along to College Green to hear the speeches and join the first part of the march and it was amazing. So inspirational and hopeful.

In the non-stop rain, I did my best to take some photos and scribble down some quotes, though I realised later I had a better time during the bits where I just stood back as part of the crowd (estimated at 30,000 people). It was all very friendly and supportive (unless you got too close to the national press jostling for the best photo of Thunberg).

Bristol-based climate activist Mya Rose-Craig spoke passionately about how the approach to the climate crisis must be global, and in particular must not make life better for the West at the cost of less advantaged parts of the world. As she says, “The solution to climate change cannot rely on the exploitation of human beings.”

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K-drama reviews in brief

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Reply 1994
In Reply 1994, Sung Na-jung (centre) winds up marrying one of the five men in her life – but which one?

I have been trying to learn a little Korean on Duolingo. I enjoy learning new languages and I figured this was one I might actually make use of semi-regularly – to understand more of the K-dramas I watch. Not that I expect to be able to do away with using the subtitles, but I had already learned enough to notice some differences between original and translation. (That isn’t necessarily a failure of the translation – a literal translation is often not the best solution.)

Which is to say, no I have not stopped watched K-dramas, I just haven’t been reviewing all of them because I have less to say about some than others. I’m not going to stop reviewing them altogether, but I thought this might be a good time to reflect on some more briefly.

Toward the end of last year I watched Reply 1994 (tvN 2013),which is the second of three series with the same basic set-up. In modern-day Seoul, a group of friends are gathered together and reminiscing about the year when they all met: 1994. The action switches between 1994 and 2013 and the concept is that the female lead Sung Na-jung (Go Ara) has ended up marrying one of the five men who co-star – but which one? They all shared the same house during university and have stayed in touch, but the husband is not revealed until the final episode.

It’s a really cheesy concept and I found the contrivance immensely annoying, but other than that this was an enjoyable show. Most of the annoying K-drama tropes were mercifully absent, the relationships felt more realistic than many I’ve seen, and there were details of the recent-historical setting that added interest for me. The other two Reply series are also on Netflix so I might check them out.

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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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