Tag: monthly round-up

Reading Summary Feb 2023

It’s been a busy month, although it started with a delicious little respite in my old ‘stomping ground’ on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. I have 17 books listed on Goodreads for the past month, although two of them were abandoned at the 40% mark. Seven of the books fitted into my #FrenchFebruary personal reading challenge – and in fact, all of them ended up being French from France, as the only Swiss author I attempted (Joel Dicker) ended up being one of the abandoned books. Eleven of the books were written by women writers (and none of them were in the DNF category), 12 were written in another language. Three I read for (Corylus) ‘work’, one was non-fiction, one will be reviewed for #ReadIreland in March, two were Book Club reads (Blood Sugar for the Virtual Crime Book Club, Embers for London Reads the World), and seven can be approximately put into the crime fiction category (although two of those I did not finish). Six of the books I read were from independent publishers, although I didn’t review all of them for the #ReadIndies challenge.

Please ignore Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, which shouldn’t be in this screenshot, because I read it in January (and have already largely forgotten).

Here’s a quick recap of the books I reviewed (most of which also fell into the #ReadIndies category)

My favourite reads this month were probably Romain Gary and Violette Leduc, but Audrey Magee’s The Colony was very, very good as well. I’m still not quite sure about Embers by Márai Sándor – on the one hand, I interpret it as a beautiful example of self-delusion, yearning for a mythical past which never existed and the damage caused by bearing pointless grudges (and I can see historical/political parallels in that). It reminded me a lot of Browning’s My Last Duchess. On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that Márai intended it to be read in this way: he may have actually shared some of Henrik’s beliefs and regrets for the old order. Anyway, I intend to review it together with two other novels about old mansions that I am currently reading.

I watched a few TV series this month: Wednesday with my younger son (which was entertaining enough, but rather predictable and forgettable), Borgen (watched Season 4 with oil in Greenland, then rewatched the first season, which reminded me why I stopped watching it back in 2013, because it was getting a little too close to the problems in my own marriage, despite my distinct lack of prime ministerial qualities and being considerably less busy than Birgitte Nyborg). It was quite eye-opening watching the documentary Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World, with many political and social details which were either before my time or which I had forgotten.

For most of February, I barely watched any films, but then my older son came back for the last week and we more than made up for it. I thought Tár and Whiplash complemented each other well in their portrayal of bullying behaviour, problematic geniuses and the idea that art has to come from a place of suffering (it takes great pressure to create a diamond etc.). I can never resist films about artists and creators – and they also worked together well with the novel about ballet (and a lot else) that I read by Meg Abbott: The Turnout, which I really enjoyed. Claire Denis’ Beau Travail is a fascinating rare example of toxic masculinity but also the beauty of the male body perceived by the female gaze – with a breathtaking performance by the always watchable and enigmatic Denis Lavant. I also saw Barry Lyndon (one of my older son’s favourite films) in the cinema at the BFI, which is a very different experience from seeing it on a TV screen.

I don’t want to praise either myself or him, but I just wanted to say how delightful it is to have a grown-up child with whom you can spend a lovely day in London, having lunch in Chinatown, discussing drugs, political philosophy and film music while walking down to the Embankment, trawling the second-hand book stands on the South Bank, going to the Poetry Library mini-exhibition on clothes of women poets, watching Barry Lyndon at the BFI and then reading on the train on the way home in companionable silence.

March is going to be Nordic Reading Month for me, with a fairly broad definition of Nordic: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Canada. Of course, if I can fit any more into the #ReadIreland tag, I will, but it promises to be an extremely busy and tiring month at work.

January 2023 Summary

Hasn’t this been the longest month ever? Cold, dark, busy at work, but not quite as miserable as the months preceding it because at least we have all been healthy. I’ve mostly snuggled in my burrow and read – even more than usual, now that I’ve decided not to worry about reviewing every book. 18 books this month, of which 7 fit with the January in Japan challenge (although one of the seven was not written by a Japanese author, but was a non-fiction book about the Japanese criminal world). Nine books in translation, three non-fiction books, ten by women writers, four that could fit under the crime fiction label. A good mix that I can live with.

Here are the books that I have reviewed this month (I am putting the Japanese author names in the Japanese order – surname first):

And here are very brief thoughts on the others I read:

Charlie Higson: Whatever Gets You Through the Night – entertaining, madcap, quick read, made for the screen – as so many current thriller books seem to be. This one is perhaps slightly funnier and slyer than most, fits a bit into the Knives Out/Glass Onion universe.

Percival Everett: The Trees – this one I regret not reviewing properly, as it is a quite unforgettable, excoriating view of the South of the United States and its history of lynching. By taking an almost absurd premise and bringing in lots of fierce humour, it brings this dark story to a wider audience. A surprising novel, with moments of true poignancy, although perhaps a few too many repetitive descriptions of crime scenes (deliberate, no doubt, and I can understand why).

Robert Thorogood: Death Comes to Marlow – my son goes to school in Marlow, so I go there nearly every day and I can see a big splash being made with this book in the local bookshop. I’m always going to read a book set in a place I know well, although I was disconcerted to discover that I know the real vicar’s wife (the mother of one of my son’s best friends) and she is nothing like the one featured in the book. Although I appreciated having three middle-aged women investigators, I couldn’t help feeling that their quirks are being exaggerated for comic effect, that the secondary characters are rather one-dimensional, so all the book really has going for it is the puzzle element. Of course I will continue to read this series, even if I complain about it, simply because of its familiar location.

Elin Cullhed: Euphoria, transl. Jennifer Hayashida – just like I will always read something about Sylvia Plath. This novel is a fictional account of the last difficult year of Sylvia’s life, sticking quite closely to the known facts and trying to combine elements of Sylvia’s real voice from the letters and diaries with a speculation of what must have really been going on in her mind. I am familiar with this kind of fictional recreation of an artistic life from France, where this is a much more common type of literature, but I am not sure what it adds to our knowledge of Plath. Instead, I see this more as the universal portrait of a marriage and a clash of two very strong and creative personalities, two tremendous artistic egos, particularly at a time when it seemed harder to accept equality within married couples.

He loved me as a motif. He loved the picture of me. He loved the type. The American, the emotional one, the poet. He loved my high demands (and hated them). He loved having a thinking wife. He loved having a wife. He loved that I was thinking and grinding my own thoughts, then there was nothing left of them later in teh writing. He loved that I tried by failed. That I got up and was stabbed, like a goat. That I was not who I wanted to be. He loved my imperfections, and I stood in the middle of it and tried to be perfect.

Fiona Spargo-Mabbs: Talking the Tough Stuff with Teens – trying to educate myself and not talk too much, yet encourage a rather silent teenager to open up. An encouraging, non-judgemental book, with many real-life examples.

Bec Evans & Chris Smith: Written – I’ve been following the authors on their Prolifiko website and subscribing to their newsletters, and this is a book about finding the writing routines and habits that work for you, instead of slavishly imitating others. Encouraging, friendly, with lots of good exercises and suggestions for further exploration.

Sara Gran: The Book of the Most Precious Substance – impossible to categorise this book, no wonder the author struggled to get it published and so created her own publishing house for it. It is not as chilling as Come Closer, but you can see elements of anger and grief here too, as well as the quirkiness and humour of the Claire DeWitt crime series. Although touted as a sex magic book (and it certainly contains elements of eroticism and supernatural), it probably won’t fully satisfy fantasy or erotica fans. I like the underlying ‘normalness’ of it, which keeps it somewhat grounded even when we are off travelling in a world of unimaginable luxury. Basically, it is a story of grief, of clinging to a sense of injustice, of the wisdom (and ability) to move on, and the hunger for power and money.

The trick isn’t to protect yourself. It’s to accept life. Not push it away when it gets messy.

The past is over and done. You have no choice but to live with it. There’s no getting over, there’s no making up for. But there;s a chance to see and create something new. That’s the only chance…

…a wall I’d built around something too broken to trust the world with it. But that wall had never kept me safe. It only locked me in with my pain, leaving it to fester and spoil. I’d locked out all hope, all pleasure, and now, with a force like th eocean, the wall had crumbled, and my protection had gone.

Antoine Wilson: Mouth to Mouth – a story within a story, with a supposedly neutral account of the wild tale told by an acquaintance. Another novel about the hunger for power and money, full of self-justification. Quite clever but nor terribly memorable. On the plane to Switzerland I read another book like it translated from French (not featured above, as I will present it as part of my personal French February reading initiative).

I read Balzac’s Lost Illusions for the winter long read for London Reads the World Book Club, and will review it of course during my French February. I still haven’t seen the film, which apparently is only available to stream in Canada. However, I have watched (and rewatched) quite a few good films this month – more than usual by my standards, partly because my older son the film buff was around for 9 days at the start of the month.

I really enjoyed rewatching My Neighbour Totoro for the nth time (especially after seeing the very innovative, delightful staging of it at the Barbican) and the beautiful, warm Portrait of a Lady on Fire, although I was perhaps somewhat less mesmerised by The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction this time round. I was moved by the Korean film Memories of Murder but even more so by the very recent Aftersun (which cut a little too close to home, so there were floods of tears). Stellar performances by Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio.

By the way, I’ve had some friends asking who is hosting the #FrenchFebruary initiative – and the answer is no one, I just created this personal challenge for myself because I like alliteration and reading French language books. But if you would like to join in and read some books from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Quebec, French-speaking Africa etc. then please do! The more the merrier! Always happy to expand my understanding in this area.

Reading Summary Nov 2022

Although at times I felt like I wouldn’t be able to read anything at all this month, and although I was also engaged in the epic chunkster that is Solenoid, I did actually have a reasonably good and varied reading month. 10 books, of which five fit in the German Literature Month category and two in the Novella in November category. I even managed to review all four German-language books I read – including the biography of the woman who is fast becoming my favourite Austrian writer. Seven books by foreign authors, one collection of short stories (which tends to be a rarity), two non-fiction titles (again, a bit unusual for me, one of them a biography). Only three crime fiction titles, of which one was a translation from German.

My favourite this month was probably the Marlen Haushofer novella The Loft (Die Mansarde). The most escapist was The Peacock by Isabel Bogdan.

I had also planned to attend several literary and theatrical events this month: Iceland Noir, a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, several trips to the cinema, a RADA performance, an online performance of Shakespeare by cues only, a musical at Sonning Mill. In the end, I only managed to see two of our Icelandic Corylus authors in an online discussion with Dr Noir for Barnet Libraries on the very first day of November, plus the rather forgettable One Piece Red anime film and a disappointing Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (muddled storytelling, some lovely cinematography) in the cinema.

Reading plans for the final month of the year? I usually like books set in snowy landscapes for December, but this year I will stick to whatever suits my mood while finishing some of the chunksters I had planned: volumes 2 and 3 of Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias, Tessa Hadley’s The Past. Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time. A few lighter reads will no doubt make their way there as well, as I need to forget the rather gloomy second half of this year and turn with renewed optimism to face the New Year.

Reading and Watching Summary June 2022

Reading

I was not expecting to read that many books for my French in June attempt, partly because I am a much slower reader in French, and partly because I knew it was going to be a pretty busy time. However, two of the nine French books I read were in English (although I read one of them in parallel with the French edition), which helped, and most of them were quite slim, which helped even more. Here are the French authors I read (their books also fulfilled my #20Books of Summer challenge), with links to the reviews:

Five men and four women writers, but I may read a few more women for #WomeninTranslation month in August. And a triumph of no less than nine books of the eleven French titles I had selected for the #20Books of Summer challenge.

In addition to the French authors, I also read:

  • Joseph Knox: True Crime Story for our Virtual Crime Club, which I thought was very cleverly constructed and different from run-of-the-mill stories about girls who disappeared
  • Tirzah Garwood: Long Live Great Bardfield, which made me wonder just how much women artists have had to put their own career second in order to further their husband’s career (Eric Ravilious in this case)
  • Hilma Wolitzer: Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, a collection of short stories about women’s roles as wives and mothers, dating mostly from the 1960-80s, although there are a couple more recent ones (one written after the death of her husband from Covid was particularly moving). Written with deadpan and occasionally surreal humour, borrowed from the library after listening to the author on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast.
  • Maud Cairnes: Strange Journey, a body switch story between a middle-class housewife and an aristocratic society lady, with surprisingly sharp observations about class differences and assumptions for the time it was written (1930s)
  • Oscar Wilde: De Profundis – I had read this before, but gained so much additional insight from the Backlisted episode with Stephen Fry as a guest, that I wanted to experience it once more.

Films

You can see that my older son came home twice during this period (for a week or so each time), because I watched quite a lot of films with him around. During his exams, he went on a bit of a Disney/Pixar binge, so we watched The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Emperor’s New Groove and The Aristocats. We also watched films by directors that my son tends to admire: Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – I still don’t get the point of the Manson gang reference), Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch – the ultimate Anderson self-indulgence), Georges Franju (Eyes without a Face – creepy but not as atmospheric as M, for example), while I got to pick Almodovar (Volver) on my birthday. By myself, I watched the problematic but fun Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the Shakespearean Iranian tragedy of Chess of the Wind, and the surprisingly minimalist Korean drama The Woman Who Ran.

I went to the cinema with a friend to watch Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which made us laugh and feel good, and sigh over Daryl McCormack. It felt like a play for two people, and we agreed that Nancy (played so well by Emma Thompson) didn’t seem like the kind of person we would like as a friend in real life.

Literary Events

I attended two real-life events this month. First, the Oxford Translation Day at St Anne’s College, where I got to meet so many lovely translators, do a workshop with Jen Calleja whom I greatly admire, and hear translators talk about their translation motivation and practices. The publisher panel (represented by Heloise Press, Paper Republic and Praspar Press) made me feel better about the teething problems of Corylus – small, independent publishing of translated fiction is clearly a money-pit. As one of the panellists put it: ‘You pay for everything but you’re the last to see any money back, or everyone gets paid except for the publishers.’

The second live event was a play by a very talented young actor/writer/director from Romania (who is now living in the UK) Ioana Goga. The play was called Love (to) Bits and was performed at Baron’s Court Theatre, a small venue in the basement of the Curtains Up pub in West London. It is a highly relatable examination of love, what it is, what it could be, and where it often fails, played with aplomb and great gusto by the three young performers, Ioana Goga, Tomas Howser and Beatrice Bowden. Here is a thoughtful review of it and do check out the energetic talent of their company Eye Opening Productions.

I also ran two Romanian poetry translation workshops for the Stephen Spender Trust in a primary school in Slough – and absolutely loved working with the children. I had forgotten what fun it can be working with that age group (and how tiring).

Online, I attended a session on the recent publication of a comic book Madgermanes, about Mozambican workers who had previously been contracted out to East Germany. It was a conversation between Birgit Weyhe, a German comic book artist, and her translator and publisher Katy Derbyshire at V&Q Books.

The final events I attended were on Sunday 26th of June, two brief snippets from the ambitiously hybrid Kendal Poetry Festival – kudos to the organisers for offering both remote and in-person options, which I know from experience is double the work and the cost.

Books, Films, Events: Summary for May 2022

Quite a fun month of reading: 16 books, eight of them were in the ‘expats writing’ category, and three were preparatory reading for my French in June challenge. Two were for my book clubs (Good as Dead for the Virtual Crime Book Club, Love in the Big City for London Reads the World). The remaining three were just random fun reads from the library. I knew it was going to be a month with few books in other languages (only four, and all French), as the theme was Anglo expats.

So here are the links to the longer reviews and/or one line comments.

Can I draw any conclusions from this multitude of expat accounts? Virtually all of them had a distinctive tone – equal parts arch and blasé. This worked best when the authors or narrators showed an actual interest in the place and ‘the natives’, rather than use them merely as backdrop for personal drama. I can see how an external observer (supposedly impartial, although not always so) can bring a different perspective to things, but remain unconvinced that these stories might have been better told by the locals. The exceptions are Christopher Isherwood (who is ferocious about the expats and the English as well) and Kirsty Bell, although I did enjoy the fun Berlinski and Rush were having with dismantling dearly held anthropological beliefs and discourse.

I will be reviewing the three French books in June, so here are the rest of the bunch:

  • Susan Walter: Good as Dead – ethical dilemma, Hollywood ending, fun but forgettable
  • Joanna Cannon: A Tidy Ending – in-depth character study and great sleight of hand
  • Sang Young Park: Love in the Big City, transl. Anton Hur – raucous, energetic, poignant, sad, funny and sweet
  • Gillian McAllister: Wrong Time, Wrong Place – great initial idea, but such banal and bland prose
  • Emily Itami: Fault Lines – wasn’t sure about this at first, but now think it fits really well with one of my French books, so will review in tandem with that

Events

My social calendar is starting to fill up, although I try not to go more than once a week into London.

Exhibition Louise Bourgeois

Sixth anniversary of Royal Borough Writers, the writing group to which I belong – a real lifeline when I returned from Geneva, feeling bereft without a writing group; at first sceptical whether it would be entirely helpful, since I was the only one writing poetry or crime fiction, but it has been the most supportive and fun community, and has contributed significantly to my mental balance during lockdown, when we met online

Out of the Wings Theatre in Translation Spring Kindlings meeting – such a great community of translators and theatre fans, combining readings and discussions of what we would like to see in the future (hint: more festivals and communities of translated plays)

Society of Authors New Members lunch – so excited to meet poet Joelle Taylor, winner of the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, whom I had previously only known and admired via an online masterclass. Also got to meet Yvonne Bailey-Smith, whose book The Day I Fell Off My Island deserves to be known on its own merit, rather than by the fact that the author is Zadie Smith’s mother.

International Booker Shortlist Readings – it was a bit ambitious to have readings and a brief Q&A with all of the authors and translators in just 1.5 hours, some of them couldn’t make it so were on video, and I do wish the questions had been less obvious, more imaginative – nevertheless, it was wonderful to hear from them all, a really strong shortlist this year. I had already ordered the winner, but haven’t read it yet.

Pandemic Fiction – you can’t go wrong with the two Sarah queens of contemporary literature: Sarah Hall and Sarah Moss, plus I feel very close to Oana Aristide, with whom I share the Romanian and Greek connection (also, slightly, the Swedish one). Their ‘pandemic’ novels were all written at different stages of Covid. Oana had finished writing her novel and was editing (so incorporated some of the obsession with handwashing and disinfecting, which she hadn’t predicted). Sarah Hall started Burntcoat on the first day of the first lockdown, as a way of making sense of the whole situation and coping with uncertainty – filling in the gaps with fiction helped. Sarah Moss started hers in November 2020, when the initial sense of solidarity and helpfulness was falling apart. I especially loved the quote: ‘Readers or publishers tell us it is too soon for pandemic novels – but who’s going to tell us when it is time? Real life is a mess, there is not narrative structure to it, so fiction gives us maps to navigate the chaos and unfairness of it all.’

Films

Only seven films watched (online) this month, all rather living up to my reputation as a lover of grim, cheerless or brutal stuff (as one of my friends claims – she refuses to go to any more films with me unless she picks them). However, I think most of them also have that dark humour which really resonates with me (and which I hope I have in my writing). The only one I found so depressing that I couldn’t watch it to the end was Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, but I thought his earlier Reprise was funny, satirical and knowing.

I watched no less than three films about enigmatic women – La Collectionneuse, Morvern Callar and Zero Fucks Given – well, enigmatic if you are a man trying to ‘explain’ these women or appropriate their thoughts and feelings. Haydee in the first of these films is simply a young woman out to enjoy herself and not giving a damn about anyone else’s opinion, but the two others are grieving in their own inimitable way. Virtuoso performances!

Le Weekend seemed to me more vicious than heartwarming, despite its ‘happy ending’, but I liked the Bande A Part references (might try to learn the dance myself). The last film was a pastiche of a genre mash-up of Gothic horror, erotica, Hitchcock thriller The Love Witch – profoundly silly but wonderfully cheering on a lonely evening.

Reading Summary April 2022

I know it’s a bit early to summarise the month, but since I only post on Mondays and Wednesdays (and the more pictorial Friday Funs), this is my last chance to summarise the month before we embark upon May. As such, I have not quite finished two of the books I feature on my list (Nostalgia and the escapist Georgette Heyer) but expect to do so by the weekend. I also intend to review in more detail the two surrealist pieces of literature (Ehin and Urmuz) on Monday 2nd of May, when we will be discussing the Estonian book at our London Reads the World Book Club.

Eighteen books. Bit of a record reading month in terms of quantity, partly because I had so much time off – on holiday until the 11th, then university closure around Easter – and partly because I was racing through some rereads for translation funding applications for Corylus. 12 of those books were in Romanian, and I’ve already written about some of them. I have already expressed some of my dissatisfaction with the translation of Nostalgia and my mixed feelings about Jhumpa Lahiri’s memoir of learning Italian.

There were two non-Romanian books that I read for book clubs – the highly unusual supernatural crime novel The Dying Squad by Adam Simcox and the even more unusual vignettes/short stories by Estonian author Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere. I alternated my serious reads with two escapist, nearly-but-not-quite romance books from the library: Clare Chambers’ The Editor’s Wife (entertaining if rather predictable) and one of Heyer’s Regency novels The Reluctant Widow (which seems more of a crime caper than a romance, a bit of a colour by numbers effort from the author, but one of the few of her books available at the library).

My reading plans for the next few months are:

Anglos Abroad in May – American and English writers who have set their books in other countries, whether it’s fiction or a memoir, depicting some sort of culture clash – and quite a few of them will be about Berlin.

June: French literature – for no other reason than remembering how much I adored these verses by Rimbaud and the lime trees on the promenade.

On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans

On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade.
Les tilleuls sentent bon dans les bons soirs de juin !

July – Spanish Lit Month – and I intend to focus on Latin America mostly

August – Women in Translation Month – not that I don’t love reading women in translation all year round.

Monthly Summary October 2021

This is the month where my abstract anger at the lack of any Covid mitigations in schools in England actually had something concrete to rant against: my son caught Covid from a classmate, I caught it from him, and both of us found out about it from Track’n’Trace long after we had tested positive. Yet, according to the ‘legal requirements’, I could have gone to work in London on the day my son tested positive (because I tested negative) and infected all of my colleagues at work that day, plus an old friend I was supposed to meet at LRB Bookshop/Cafe (plus people working or shopping there), plus the people around me attending the theatre performance I had tickets for that night. Luckily, I ignored government guidelines and self-isolated from the start.

Reading

Although for a few days I thought I might never be able to concentrate enough to read properly ever again, I did in fact finish an extraordinarily large number of books this month. Probably because I struggled to do anything else. 15 books, of which: only 4 by women writers (my lowest ever proportion, I believe!), 9 in translation or foreign language (of which five in Romanian, which was my country focus this month), 7 labelled as crime fiction, one biography, two books for Book Clubs – Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons and Roxanne Bouchard’s We Were the Salt of the Sea (trans. David Warriner). I also had a record number of historical fiction books this month – or else books written at a time that may almost be labelled historical (8).

Once again, I haven’t quite reviewed all that I’ve read (with the excellent excuse of not feeling quite well enough to do so), but I have written about:

  • David Peace’s Tokyo Redux and compared it to a Golden Age crime novel
  • For the 1976 Club, I was captivated by Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude
  • I had great fun with Antti Tuomainen’s latest, a not quite cosy Polish crime fiction writing duo and a biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard
  • I discovered a promising volume of short stories by Bogdan Suceava
  • Absolutely adored the irrepressible energy and fun of Ioana Parvulescu
  • And I could not stop myself writing about a childhood favourite of mine, the Romanian classic La Medeleni by Ionel Teodoreanu: Part 1 and Part 2

I was intrigued by the premise of Radu Pavel Gheo’s Good Night, Children, which was a blend of childhood reminiscing, the challenges of emigration and then the shock of returning to your home country after a long time away, plus a knowing nod towards satire and supernatural elements like Bulgakov. However, the book just couldn’t make up its mind if it was comic or tragic, tried to fit too much in, and ended up not going being enough in any of its categories.

The other book that disappointed me was Magpie by Elizabeth Day: the publishers probably did the book a disservice by labelling it as a psychological thriller with an unforeseeable twist, because I did foresee the twist quite early on, and even the final denouement (although my expectation was that it would be even darker). Some of the characters were quite flat or clicheed, and the most interesting aspect of the book, the lengths people are prepared to go to have a child of their own, rather got buried under all of the attempts to make the book palatable to a wider audience.

One book that I found very intriguing and that I do want to review was Admiring Silence by the newly-crowned Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, about a man who comes to England as a refugee, builds a life here without every quite feeling he belongs but upon returning to visit his family back home in Tanzania (Zanzibar to be precise), discovers that he no longer fits there either.

Other Activities

Speaking of the refugee experience, I saw the very powerful and yet somehow sweet and wholesome film about asylum-seekers waiting for their status to be clarified, Limbo by British director Ben Sharrock. There is a lot of humour and close observation of infuriating but also poignant absurdities that alleviate the frankly quite hopeless and tragic situation. I was comparing it on Twitter to the other film about economic migrants that I saw recently Oleg, which was much bleaker, a much more violent, dog eats dog world, while here there is a certain solidarity and friendship between the characters which makes it ultimately ever so slightly hopeful. And the music! Music really occupies a prime spot here, in many different versions.

That was one of the few films I watched this month (other than anime, Squid Game and a rewatch of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with my younger son). I have been too listless to engage with anything more challenging than Strictly Come Dancing or the Great British Bake Off, both of which I completely ignored last year.

I have switched to a new (16 month) diary and so had a chance to tally all of my submissions to literary journals or competitions and see what I’ve done with my writing thus far this year: I have submitted 37 times, had 21 rejections, seven acceptances. So by the end of 2021, I will clearly have beaten my previous record in each of the categories. It may not feel like a huge number compared to others, but I am trying to keep it manageable and protect myself from too much disappointment.

I’ve also had the pleasure of attending one of the best short masterclasses I’ve ever heard, run by Lucy Caldwell for Arvon. I listened to the recording again after the class was over and have learnt so much about voice and the use of tenses – fundamental elements, which you think you already know by now, and yet… there was so much still to discover. I was pleased to hear just a week or two after this class that Lucy Caldwell won the BBC National Short Story Award this year.

I also attended another Arvon class (in collaboration with ClassFestival) on Poetry and the Body with Joelle Taylor, which sparked some new ways of looking at my body and how to use it in my poetry (or even prose), and also made me eager to explore spoken word poetry more (as I was planning to do before Covid struck).

Plans for November

My holiday plans for October were thwarted, but here’s hoping that my third attempt at a proper holiday this year will finally come to fruition in November! I have managed to change the dates for my stay at the Westwood Centre, so I hope I will be fit enough to drive all the way there and, once there, go on plenty of walks to admire the landscape, read lots and write something. (I had an ambitious writing plan before, but I will be happy with whatever I can get this time.)

In terms of reading, I’ll be tackling some German novellas, although I use both terms rather loosely. I have a selection to choose from, let’s see how much of it I manage to go through: Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Journey Home, Marlen Haushofer’s We Kill Stella, Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations, Friedrich Glauser’s The Spoke, Jonas Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring and Katharina Volckmer’s The Appointment.

September Reading and Watching Summary

September used to be a rather lovely month in my calendar, as I always enjoyed the still warm but not excessively hot days and the return to school fervour. But for the past two years, it has not been a happy occasion. School in Covid times has proved an anxious and challenging enterprise, while both last year and this year, September brought rather devastating personal losses: the death of Barney (our gentleman cat) in 2020 and of my dear friend Csaba in 2021.

Reading

So I have been once again mostly in search of easy, comforting reading, and the two books I was reading for two different book clubs were not quite hitting the spot. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, which I read for the Virtual Crime Book Club, is rather gruelling in its subject matter, a car crash you can foresee but not quite stop. Meanwhile, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees, which I read for London Reads the World Book Club (although unfortunately, I had to pull out of the meeting at short notice) is about life in the ‘grey zone’ between two warring factions in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. Although there is nothing too graphic or horrible in the novel, there is an unsettling, ever-present underlying rumble of threat of death, torture, fighting.

So it was with a real sense of relief that I turned to a rather uncharacteristic read for me: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, which I understand was originally intended to be a four-book series, but then had a fifth volume added to it much later. This went down so well (as you’ll have seen from my recent review) that I have now embarked upon the Romanian equivalent of the nostalgic family saga: the Medeleni trilogy (often published as four volumes, because the last book is very long). This one takes place just before and after the First World War, rather than the Second, and was written much closer in time to the events described in the book (he wrote the entire series in record time 1925-27). Yet it too describes a vanished world in minute and loving detail. I am tempted to continue rereading all the volumes and to write a thorough review and comparison.

Watching

I’ve been in the mood for less dark and gruesome films as well, so there have been quite a few with deadpan humour and slightly surreal experiences, such as the Icelandic film about an escalation of neighbourly conflict Under the Tree, or the challenges of young love on holiday in All Hands on Deck (filmed in my beloved Rhone-Alpes), the irresistible Lea Seydoux and Tahar Rahim doing their best to seem utterly unglamorous in the tale of life of nuclear plant workers in Grand Central, the impressive Japanese animation Akira, which looks as fresh as if it had been created yesterday, not back in 1988, and my first acquaintance with a Hal Hartley film, with its fantastic and slightly ridiculous dialogue, Amateur. I also had a tender moment with Ghibli Studios’ Whisper of the Heart but failed to impress the boys with Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

Whimsical scene from Whisper of the Heart

Going Out

Although I have missed theatres and live music performances so, so much, I am less and less comfortable about going out, because it appears that all social distancing or other safety measures have been dropped, and people are closely packed together in public transport or at cultural venues. I ventured to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Classic FM Live concert with my older son (who is now nearly as keen on classical music as I am), as our last ‘treat’ before he went off to university. I assumed it would be a good experience, as they sent several emails beforehand about the Covid-secure measures they were taking, that they recommended wearing masks and that we would have to bring either a proof of vaccination or negative test to be allowed into the venue. Imagine my surprise and discontent when I discovered that nobody checked us at all at the entrance, that no one worse a facemask in the auditorium, and that there were huge queues of people jostling into each other at very close quarters both for the toilets and the bar. It felt like hypochondria, but I felt quite unwell for several days after this, and actually had to do a PCR test to make sure I hadn’t fallen ill.

Translation and Other Literary Pursuits

Since I wasn’t quite ready to go out, I brought the events to me – fortunately, there are still lots of literary and other events being livestreamed. I attended a workshop on writing for the theatre run by the Young People’s London Poet Laureate Cecilia Knapp, based around her play Losing the Night, which was going to be performed and toured starting in March 2020. I also attended several of the Noirwich events: David Peace talking about the final volume in his Tokyo trilogy, Megan Abbott speaking about the current enthusiasm for true crime shows, as well as Maryla Szymiczkowa – the pen name of charismatic Polish crime writing duo, Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczynski and their translator Antonia Lloyd Jones, about their semi-cosy feminist historical crime fiction set in late 19th century Krakow. I have recently resubscribed to the Asymptote Book Club and attended a Q&A with the author and translator of the August book club title, Jonas Eika’s After the Sun, transl. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg.

I also had the novel experience of being interviewed together with Romanian author Bogdan Hrib about the recently published novel Resilience by Dr Noir (aka Jacky Collins). I don’t think I am cut out for being filmed on Zoom, as I move around too much, nod and smile inappropriately and constantly, but it was great fun having to think carefully about the work of translation and to justify some of the choices I made.

I’m also very excited about another translation-related work I will be involved in this year. The Stephen Spender Trust is a champion of multilingual poetry and storytelling, and they run an annual programme for creative translations in schools. I will be working together with a primary school to encourage children to have a go at translating seasonal and other poems from Romanian. I briefly worked as a language teacher in primary school and also helped out regularly at my sons’ schools when they were small, so it will be lovely to go back into that environment and feed children’s curiosity about other cultures before they grow too old or jaded to care.

Last but not least, as part of the events surrounding International Translation Day (30th of September, the Feast of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, because he translated the Bible into Latin, although this particular event took place on the 28th), I had the pleasure of seeing one of my fellow ‘classmates’ from the BCLT Summer School, Sebastián Gutiérrez, among the three translators talking about the power of theatre and translation for exploring identity and equality.

August and #20BooksofSummer Summary

I did really well with my August reading – perhaps a combination of less busy period at work and the boys spending the second half of August in Greece. So I did no cooking and the bare minimum of cleaning or gardening, and instead just read a lot and watched films.

So this month I read no less than 14 books, of which the majority (eight) were for #WITMonth, and seven of them also fell into the original #20BooksofSummer plan. Eleven of the books were by women writers, four were crime or crime-adjacent genres and three were non-fiction (this last is probably a record for me, as I tend to read very little non-fiction).

In case you missed any of the #WITMonth review posts, here they are again:

In addition to the #WITMonth reading, I also read and reviewed Stamboul Train by Graham Greene and a memoir of Eton College.

However, it was very disappointing to realise that although I did get to read all of my 20 Books of Summer (with a couple of last-minute swaps), all of them on Kindle (which I still see as very much a second-rate kind of reading experience) in an effort to bring down my formidable TBR amount on Netgalley… my feedback ratio has only gone up two percentage points – from 53% to 55%. So I would say it was definitely not worth it! I also made it more difficult on myself by sticking to a different theme each month: the latest releases for June, the oldest on my Netgalley pile for July, and Women in Translation for August.

This strictly regimented approach over the past three months had me very nearly losing my pleasure of reading. There were two books I abandoned, which is still a rare occurrence for me. Throughout this predominantly Kindly experience (22 out of the total of 34 books read since the start of June), I had to alternate with some physical books, either from my own bookshelves, or more frequently random ones picked up from the library, to ease my restlessness and mounting rebellion.

Therefore, September will be a month of rest and relaxation, reading whatever I please, at whim. If the library books I fancied when seeing them on the shelves there fail to grip my imagination once I get home, I will return them unread, without a guilty conscience. My beautiful new edition of the Cazalet Chronicles is winking at me from the bookshelf in the hallway, so I might plunge into that. But am I ready for six books in a row? There are a couple of books I want to read (in the original languages) for Corylus purposes, but other than that, I’ll be free to roam…

Well, I say that, but I will be reading Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees for the London Reads the World Book Club (@LdnReadstheWorld on Twitter) and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River for the Virtual Crime Book Club run by @RebeccaJBradley, plus I want to read a lighter book set in Durham, as if in preparation for my older son going there to university… etc etc. Or, as the French would call it, et patati et patata!

June Summary

June is typically a joyous month in my household: two birthdays and a nameday, as well as Midsummer Day to celebrate; summer plans to be hatched; end of school and exams beckoning. This year has been slightly different. The boys have been on holiday but the older one has started a summer job, while the younger one has had induction days for Sixth Form College (partly online) and homework assignments, while I have been busier than ever at work. The weather has been rather changeable, making me almost want to switch the heating back on. Nevertheless, we had a once-in-a-lifetime birthday treat of high tea at Oakley Court Hotel, where the Rocky Horror Picture Show was filmed.

We were lucky with the weather, too: it was the one day of the week when there was no rain or gusty wind.

Reading:

I have read six of my 20 Books of Summer, and a total of 10 books this month. June has been the month of the most recent acquisitions on my Kindle, so the 20 Books of Summer choices are recent releases and include a Japanese thriller and a satire about social media, two books with tenuous links to Romania and two books that capture the millenial experience in Britain in the past few years. I also read a few bonus books linked to these: Mamie Luger by Benoit Philippon, which is certainly unlike anything else I have read before, a chilling story about a child murderer and rehabilitation by Fiona Cummins: When I was Ten, and Lucy Caldwell’s second collection of short stories. For the Virtual Crime Book Club, I had a good time reading Tom Bradby’s Secret Service, which had the interesting (and not all that implausible nowadays) premise that the future PM of the United Kingdom might be a Russian agent.

Films and TV:

Although most of the month has been given over to football watching with my older son – I remember bonding with my father over sports and enjoy doing so with him, even if I am not normally a huge football fan – I have also managed to watch some films and TV series.

The Outsiders was the kind of film I would have loved to watch in my teens and it was fun to see all of the child actors who then went on to become household names, but it was a little too sentimental for my taste (said the person who cries every time she watches West Side Story).

Sound of Metal was a tour de force of acting by Riz Ahmed and the first half was particularly interesting in his denial and fight against identifying with the deaf community, but the film then lost its way a little in the second half.

Billy Liar was every bit as funny, irreverant and poignant as I remembered it, with Tom Courtenay doing an excellent job of appearing at once infuriating and vulnerable.

It was the first time I watched Nightcrawler and I was chilled not just by the subject matter but by the charmingly psychopathic way in which Jake Gyllenhaal spouts inspirational slogans from self-help books – he is capitalism personified, the shameless go-getter we’ve been told the world (or is that just America?) needs.

Days of the Bagnold Summer was rather sweet and very relatable: a single mother having to spend the summer with her grumpy teenager, who had wanted to go and visit his remarried father in Florida. There was nothing grandiose or startling about the film, just a tender and very realistic observation of the mother/son relationship, which I am naturally rather partial to.

If you like sinister, not fully explainable TV series, then I can really recommend the Icelandic quasi-supernatural thriller Katla on Netflix. It has echoes of the French series The Returned, mixed with small-town Icelandic village feel of a Ragnar Jonasson novel The Katla volcano near the South Iceland settlement of Vik has been spewing ash for over a year and most of the inhabitants have been evacuated, but there are some foolhardy people who are staying on there. Then suddenly some strange clones or dead people reappear from underneath the glacier and turns their lives upside down. I found this far better paced and not as far-fetched or graphic as Fortitude. The characters are a lot more relatable and well acted throughout, although they might not have the big names of Fortitude. And the landscapes are just beautifully photographed throughout. You should also know that one of the writers on the show is none other than Icelandic writer Lilja Sigurðardóttir. I’m not a box set binging kind of person, but I watched all eight episodes in just 2-3 days (alongside the football matches).