Category: Reviews

You start off as coal and you end up as coal

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Midnight LibraryThe Midnight Library
by Matt Haig

This novel was selected by my work book club, and it was a classic example of my having loved a book until I started to talk about it with other people, at which point I found many flaws. I love Matt Haig and his style is very readable, so I think I probably did notice some of this book’s problems while I read, but skimmed over them. And I would still recommend this book, just with a little commentary about my reservations.

The problems begin with the premise itself. Nora is having a terrible day and as midnight approaches, she attempts suicide. But instead of leading her to death or a hospital bed, she finds herself in a magical library where every book represents a version of her life. The librarian tells her that she can try on these variants of her life to see if any of them fits her better than the life she just tried to leave. If she isn’t happy there, she will return to the library.

The librarian explains that these lives are based on decisions that Nora made, so she can’t choose a life where someone else’s decision was different, only those where she opted for something else. To help guide her choices, Nora is given a book of regrets. She has many regrets, but if she can undo all those decisions will it make her life a happier one?

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A brief rain shower, sweeping swiftly across the valley, gently moistening the parched leaves

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The Harmony Silk FactoryThe Harmony Silk Factory
by Tash Aw

This novel seemed to have all the right elements for me to love it, but I’m not sure I even liked it. I see a lot of Goodreads reviewers have called it 2/3 a good novel and I can see their point, but I think it fails long before the final section that others disliked.

Set in Malaysia, with its key events taking place in the 1940s, this is ostensibly the story of Jonny Lim, a poor country boy turned wealthy textile merchant, but his story is told through the lens of three narrators who all think they knew him far better than their accounts suggest is true. Was Jonny a Communist leader, a gangster, a murderer, a traitor? His son Jasper thinks so, but his account appears to be the least reliable of all.

Jasper is the first narrator. Following his father’s death, he is trying to piece together Jonny’s life from a combination of official documents, his own memories, rumours and a generous dose of his own imagination. His unreliability is so thickly laid on that I found it tedious rather than mysterious. There is some satisfaction to be had from seeing some of the events later through another perspective and finding a version of the truth that rings truer, but a lot of what Jasper covers is never revisited, so it can only ever be pure speculation.

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The spiteful snake that slithers out of her tongue to hurt her mother

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Girl Woman OtherGirl, Woman, Other
by Bernardine Evaristo

This novel is funny, smart and encompasses so much through the specifics of its 12 narrators.

It starts and ends with Amma, a playwright who, after years of struggling to make ends meet while making gay, feminist art, is finally on the brink of success. Subsequent narrators include her daughter, mother and closest friends, as well as people who seem to be unconnected at first. We’re given a potted history of each person along with some degree of meeting them “now”, learning how they are connected to Amma and her premiere.

Evaristo’s style is engaging; sometimes funny and sometimes serious; issues-driven without sacrificing storytelling. What is most immediately noticeable is that it is written in fragments not sentences, which seemed like it might be challenging, but I loved it. It gives the novel a quality similar to natural conversation but more elegant.

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It’s hard to resign ourselves to making money out of those we love

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To Leave With the ReindeerTo Leave With the Reindeer
by Olivia Rosenthal
translated from French by Sophie Lewis

I quite like books that are strange and hard to categorise, but I found this a little too weird, or at least too minimal in actual story. It’s certainly ambitious and I’m sure will have its fans.

A second-person narrative describes a woman from early childhood, trying to break free from her mother’s stronghold. One winter she fantasises that after Christmas she will leave with the reindeer, to wherever it is that they go after they have assisted Santa with his work. She desperately wants a pet, a wish that is never fulfilled. When she grows older this becomes a desire to work with animals. Her romantic relationships flounder until she figures out how to complete her separation from her mother.

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K-drama review: Itaewon Class

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Itaewon Class poster
In Itaewon Class Park Saeroyi is a warmhearted man filled with revenge. He’s complicated.

This was a good series, leaning into some K-drama cliches while thoroughly confronting others. I chose it after only getting halfway through another K-drama (Record of Youth) before I had to give up on it for being homophobic (I also wasn’t especially gripped, possibly because I find its star Park Bo-gum wooden in everything). In response to that, I looked up a list of K-dramas with good LGBTQ representation.

Itaewon Class (2020 Showbox/JTBC/Netflix) takes a couple of episodes to get going, because it is heavily loaded with backstory. We meet Park Saeroyi (played by Park Seo-joon) on his first day at a new high school, where he stands up to the school bully only to find himself expelled for the trouble. The bully turns out to be Jang Geun-won (Ahn Bo-hyun), the oldest son of millionaire CEO Jang Dae-hee (Yoo Jae-myung) of Jangga Group, Korea’s largest food corporation. By coincidence Saeroyi’s father works for Jangga Group and his job is now under threat.

The Jang family’s abuse of power does not end there. Saeroyi’s father is killed in a hit and run in which a Jang is implicated, but the police turn a blind eye. When Saeroyi realises who is to blame he takes justice into his own hands, and winds up with a prison sentence for assault.

So when we next meet him he is a high-school dropout with a prison record and a need for revenge. He visits his old friend and first love Oh Soo-ah (Kwon Na-Ra) in her new home in the Seoul district of Itaewon, which he is instantly attracted to. It’s depicted as youthful, international, LGBTQ-friendly and buzzing with a party atmosphere. But before he can build a life here, he has a 10-year plan to earn enough money to implement his father’s dream of opening a pub.

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I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes

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The Memory PoliceThe Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa
translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder

This was chosen by my work book club and I would have loved to join that discussion, but sadly I was in a reading slump and didn’t finish the book in time. It’s a high-concept dystopia but it’s still very readable.

On the island, things disappear. En masse. And their disappearance is policed. Residents wake up knowing that something has to go that day – hats or bells or stamps, for instance. They destroy the items under the watchful eye of the Memory Police and their memory of the thing quickly fades, so that if the word is spoken it no longer has any meaning.

So far so strange, eerie even, but the scary part is that some people remember – and the Memory Police are hunting them down, taking them away.

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K-drama review: Two Cops

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In Two Cops, Jo Jung-suk (left), Lee Hye-ri and Kim Seon-ho form a love triangle with a difference.

The last few K-dramas I watched didn’t really hold my attention, but this one was a big success. Two Cops (MBC 2017–2018) is a crime-solving, body-swapping (sort of) action romantic comedy drama with supernatural elements thrown in for good measure.

Cha Dong-tak (Jo Jong-suk, probably my favourite Korean actor, who I loved in Don’t Dare to Dream and Oh My Ghost) is a Seoul detective in the violent crimes unit. He’s a little rough around the edges, a skilled martial artist and hyper-focused on solving the murder of his former partner, despite attempts from his superiors to get him to concentrate on current cases instead.

One suspect in this case is Gong Su-chang (Kim Seon-ho), a smooth-talking small-time crook. When circumstances conspire to land Su-chang in a coma, his spirit is left roaming the world and has the ability to possess Detective Cha’s body. But a medium tells him he has to find a way to resolve his unfinished business within 49 days or he will die. He has to find a way to work with the detective despite their very different personalities and careers.

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She had once been threadbare, with seven lives to weave from darkness

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Betty Shabazz book coverBetty Shabazz: a Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X
by Russell J Rickford

A late-night read on my Kindle while trying to get the dog to sleep, I was starting to feel bad about how long it was taking me to read this autobiography until I saw on Goodreads that it’s over 600 pages. In fairness Dr Betty Shabazz lived a full and fascinating life that deserves every one of those pages. She was so much more than Mrs Malcolm X, though of course that marriage made her famous and opened the door for her to be an activist and ambassador.

Rickford says in his introduction that he will concentrate on Betty’s life before and after Malcolm, but inevitably their seven years of marriage form a lot of the narrative and at times this veers into being yet another Malcolm X or Nation of Islam biography. He also refers to her as “the widow” a lot, which somewhat undermines his stated mission to depict her as more than that role. Not that it was easy role to hold.

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She is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude

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Underground Railroad book coverThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead

Not that I ever doubted it, but this book is excellent. It depicts many details of the awfulness of slavery while also being a highly readable adventure narrative. Please forgive the short review – this book deserves more analysis but it’s now a while since I read it and I just want to share my praise for it before I forget even more.

Cora is a slave in Georgia. She is an outcast of sorts among the slaves on the plantation, tarred by her mother’s reputation of madness and her own fierce protection of the tiny garden her mother left her. On the verge of adulthood, new threats raise their ugly head and an offer is made: does she want to attempt an escape with recently arrived slave Caesar? Her journey across America, making use of an underground railroad that is an actual railway underground, is astonishing, terrifying, entertaining and upsetting.

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Recent(ish) reads in brief

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Since mid-June, when we made the decision to reserve a dog from a litter that had just been born, that decision has pretty much dominated our lives. We dug out the dog training books we’d bought 10 years ago just after we moved into this house – which we chose in part for its doggy-suitable garden and layout – and bought a few more books on the subject, just to be safe. While my non-doggy-reading didn’t dry up completely, my ability to write thoughtful, detailed reviews of books afterward certainly did.

That said, I have continued to make some notes and highlight/bookmark some passages as I read, so I do have a little more to say about most of the books I’ve read than the single-paragraph synopses I write for my monthly reading round-ups. And I even found that trying to write brief reviews of a handful of recent reads led me to write full-sized reviews of a few of them, so look out for those in the coming week.

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