Mid-Year Reading Review

I saw a bookish blog post which sounded like an interesting review of the half-year so far, and was not quite as challenging to complete as the Six in Six tag. But I refuse to call it the Mid-Year Book Freakout Tag – too American a term for my taste! It is now July rather than June, but I have too much happening at once.

A gorgeous selection of Shirley Jackson covers, courtesy of Simon from Stuck in a Book.

Best Book You’ve Read so Far

This was quite a hard category, because although I’ve read a lot of good books this year, there wasn’t one that completely saw off the competition. I suppose I will stick to tried and tested old favourites like: Shirley Jackson: The Sundial (which is both very funny and sinister, my favourite combination) and the rather depressing Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed

New Release You Haven’t Read Yet but Want To

Tawada Yoko: Scattered All Over the Earth, transl. Margaret Mitsuutani

The reviews for this book are somewhat mixed, but I cannot resist a book about language and cultural identity, and this blurb sounds crazy:

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador.

Biggest Disappointment

This seems a little unkind, as I know it’s considered a classic of Australian literature, but I found Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children really hard going. I also really wanted to like Berlin-set Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel but found it annoyingly self-absorbed.

Biggest Surprise

From opposite ends of the social class in two very different countries: Princess Martha Bibescu showing subtle understanding and political flair in her war-time Political Journals, while Nakagami Kenji portrays the hard and violent life of Japa’s outcasts in The Cape, transl. Eva Zimmerman.

Favourite New Author

From Romania Doina Rusti: The Book of Perilous Dishes, a delightful historical romp; from Italy, Natalia Ginzburg’s essays The Little Virtues

Book That Made You Cry

I don’t usually cry at books, but, as one might expect, The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman does not leave you indifferent, while Gael Faye’s Petit Pays, based on his experiences of civil war in Burundi and Rwanda, show that humans are incapable of learning the lessons of the past.

Book That Made You Happy

This sounds counterintuitive, perhaps even crass, but I found much gentle optimism and encouragement in Josie George‘s remarkable memoir about living with disability A Still Life, while Ways of Walking: Essays edited by Ann de Forest (appropriate name, that) is a lovely collection of essays about all sorts of walking: in urban and rural areas, across forbidden lines, around airports and on ancient pilgrim routes. A collection to dip into and savour!

#SixDegrees July 2022

Apologies for not posting anything on Monday. This week will be a bit tricky; in fact, the next few weeks might be a bit off-schedule too, as I frantically try to cope with a sick cat, some additional work obligations, holiday preparations, and quite a bit of change in holiday plans. However, I could not resist joining in with Kate’s game of bookish links Six Degrees of Separation. This month it starts with Katherine May’s Wintering, a combination of memoir and nature writing which sounds utterly compelling. It is definitely on my TBR list, but no, I haven’t read it yet.

A book in a similar vein is Josie George‘s beautifully written memoir about living as a single mother with a disability A Still Life. The author has the eye of a photographer (you can follow her on Instagram) and the sensibility of a poet, and her loving observations of life in general, as well as the natural and urban world around her, are so inspiring that it’s a book I definitely want on my shelves, to dip into every now and then for encouragement and zest for life.

I did get the title of Josie’s book confused with another recent book, namely Still Life by Sarah Winman (I thought publishers tried to avoid titles that were too similar, or had been used many times before?). I haven’t read it, but I understand that it is set in Tuscany (wonderful, one of my favourite places) and depicts a wartime friendship between an English soldier and an alleged spy.

Books about wartime romances abound (although I understand no romance is involved in Still Life), but one that made me thrill and weep was The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (I also liked the film adaptation, enamoured as I was with Ralph Fiennes, Kristen Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche simultaneously).

A book about a very different kind of patient, namely one who suffers TB of lungs and bones, is … no, not The Magic Mountain, but Romanian writer Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts (Inimi cicratizate). Set in a French seaside resort, with often gruelling descriptions of medical treatments, it is nevertheless a moving description of the will to live, love, encounter and drink one’s fill of beauty. There is also a 2016 film adaptation by director Radu Jude (which I am really keen to see).

A very simple link to my next book: by another author called Max, namely Max Weber and his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. A must-read for any anthropology or sociology student in the second half of the 20th century, I liked the fact that he added the cultural dimension to Marx’s purely dialectic-materialistic examination of the origins of capitalism. I think it still has much to say about the difference between Northern and Southern Europe, for example.

Bit of a titillating cover from Penguin Modern Classics

By way of contrast, a very complicated link to the final book in the chain. Max Weber contracted the Spanish Flu in 1920 and died of related pneumonia complications. My last choice is one of the few books that directly addresses the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20, namely Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, apparently based on the author’s own experience of falling ill with the flu and then recovering from it. The scenes of feverish hallucination are said to be among the best in all of literature.

Quite a lot of illness haunting today’s choices, not just because the starting point was about depression and family illnesses, but perhaps subconsciously also because of my worries about my sweet Zoe. Let’s hope next month will be considerably more cheery.

Incoming Books and Their Sources (6)

I thought I had the perfect excuse for justifying the vast amount of books that recently joined my household: it’s two months’ worth of incomings. But actually, it’s more like 6 weeks. Time to hit the pause button, I think, especially with the cost of everything going up so much and me contemplating a more part-time role (i.e. lower pay) so that I have more time to write, translate and promote Corylus. In the meantime, however, it’s been inspiration (or greed) galore. And, if I’m honest, book addiction is my way of escaping from all the anxiety that the current news cycle provokes in me.

From blogs and podcasts

I’m naming the culprits here (my daily walks while listening to podcasts are proving terribly injurious to my bank balance):

• Backlisted Pod: for O Caledonia (mentioned in passing) and Stephen Sondheim (a full episode)
• Slightly Foxed for Red Comet (full episode with biographer), although I vowed I had enough books about and by Sylvia Plath
• Late to It for Hilma Wolitzer (although not this particular book) and Kirsty Gunn’s Infidelities
• Book reviews by favourite bloggers such as Jacqui and Susana (who read it in the original Portuguese of course) and in Asymptote Journal for Empty Wardrobes
• Dorian Stuber and his guest Niccie Panetta for the 2021 books of the year round-up which included Blue Remembered Hills and Olga Zilbergourg for mentioning The Man Between about legendary translator Michael Henry Heim.

Sent by the publisher

Someone at Penguin Classics heard my boisterous declarations of love for Mishima’s work, for which I am profoundly grateful. Meanwhile, Clare O’Dea is a Switzerland-based expat writer whom I briefly encountered at Geneva Writers Group and she asked her publisher to send me this fictional account of the very recent (1959) Swiss referendum about women’s suffrage. Finally, I’d been a keen reader of Daniel Hahn’s diary of translating Damiela Elit’s Never Did the Fire for Charco Press, and commented on some of his blog posts, so was kindly sent a copy of the final diary published in book form.

Book clubs and discussions with friends

I have several books of poetry and prose by my friend and fellow Romanian writer who writes in English, Carmen Bugan, but realised that I did not have this collected version of her poems. I had been covetously eyeing Hannah Lowe’s The Kids and finally got the nudge to buy it after it won the Costa Award. I can’t remember exactly whom I had a conversation with on Twitter about the Bloomsbury Group, but I thought it was high time I read Angelica Garnett’s memoir, which puts them all in a less golden light. Meander Spiral Explode has been recommended to me for its exploration of the writing craft for those who are no longer content with the Three Act or linear structure. Finally, for our London Reads the World Book Club in March, we will be reading a Romanian book at last and it’s one of my favourite writers, Mihail Sebastian. I thought it might be helpful to have the English translation to hand, rather than rely solely on the Romanian version I have, and I might end up having OPINIONS about the translation.

From the library

I’ve heard so many good things about this memoir of living with disability A Still Life, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize, and I’ve been on the waiting list for it at the library for ages. When I finally went to pick up my reservation, I came across this collection of short stories by Dostoevsky and I’ve never been able to ignore anything by him, even when he infuriates me.

Spontaneous purchases

I happened to be in the lovely Marlow Bookshop in real life, and was intrigued about Gail Simmons’ journey across the Chiltern Hills, which recreates Robert Louis Stevenson’s three-day journey across the same landscape nearly 150 years earlier. With HS2 speed railway threatening to destroy this landscape forever, it’s an attempt to capture a place and time before it disappears. I also picked up a British Library anthology there, because crime fiction and books are an irresistible combination. The quest to diversity my bookcase continues with the academic study of London as a migrant city, a science-fiction take on office life by Chinese American author Ling Ma, and two crime novels by Adam Macqueen introducing Tommy Wildeblood, rent boy turned sleuth, against a backdrop of London’s recent history (1970s-80s).

Catnip topics

Communist dictatorships in the former East Bloc countries and the United Nations (or other international organisations) are very triggering for me: in other words, as soon as I see or hear something about these topics, my online buying finger gets activated. The Stasi Poetry Circle is the true story of an attempt to set up a ‘propaganda poetry writing group’ in the German Democratic Republic. As for Romain Gary’s book: as I mentioned in the blog post about Frank Moorhouse’s book, it is a satire about the United Nations (thank you, Emma, for first drawing my attention to it), which Gary initially published under a pseudonym. I managed to find it second-hand on a French website and it got here relatively quickly.

An afterthought

Last, but not least, an online conversation with the same Emma as above, following her brilliant review of the Marseille Trilogy reminded me how much I love Jean-Claude Izzo and how difficult his books are to find over here. But lo and behold, a quick online search produced these two at reasonable prices. They’re both set mainly in Marseille too.