Happy Easter Monday, folks! As is traditional I have spent my weekend mostly reading. I also did some library reorganising for added bookish activity. It’s been a good long weekend. March has been…wet. I’m starting to miss taking the dog on long, fun expeditions – much as I like the four parks near our house. I really hope we get a few dry days soon. On the plus side our front garden is full of daffodils, tulips and pansies. Books read The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi In this novel, Kirabo is raised in a rural Ugandan village by her grandparents. When, aged 12, she begins to expe ..read more

I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age novel. Throw in some feminism and inspiration from folklore, and I am guaranteed to pick it up. Hence my interest in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. With a story set in Uganda from 1934 to 1983 it also covers territory I’ve learned a little about in the last couple of years but from a very different perspective. Kirabo is raised by her grandparents in a small village in the Bugerere region of Uganda. Her family owns a lot of land and is near a good village school, which means their house is always full of cousins sent to live with them. On the b ..read more

Unusually, I didn’t just stumble across my most recent K-drama, it was recommended by a friend. Marry My Husband (tvN 2024) is brand new to Amazon Prime and it’s a typical K-drama blend of genres. In this case, it’s a mix of saccharine romance, light sci-fi, crime thriller and workplace drama. As is often the case, it’s impossible to explain the overall premise of this series without completely spoiling the plot of the first episode, so I will do my best and then give a big fat spoiler warning before I get into it. When we meet Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) she is an ordinary woman in her earl ..read more

We started the month on holiday in Paris, then spent the rest of it hiding from the miserable rain and wind back home in Bristol. On the plus side I’ve read some excellent books and watched most of a fun new K-drama series called Marry My Husband. Happy St David’s Day and here’s to spring coming soon. Books read The Thing About Lemons by Tasha HarrisonWhile on holiday in Paris I treated myself to a few new books. This was a fun light read, a YA novel about a British teen who visits her grandfather in France. Ori has made a big mistake that messed up her romantic prospects and most of her frie ..read more

I’ve never read The Odyssey, but for my degree I had to study James Joyce’s Ulysses, which involved a couple of lectures detailing how it follows the structure of Homer’s classic. I’ve intended ever since to give The Odyssey a go but 20 years have passed now. I suspect the closest I will come is modern reworks, including those that tell just part of the story. And the best I’ve read so far is Ithaca by Claire North. Strictly, you could argue this isn’t so much a retelling as filling in the gaps. Penelope is the star of the story, while her absent husband Odysseus is the background character of ..read more

This was a great month for reading, a mixed month in other respects. I mean, it started with my birthday and is ending with a holiday in Paris so it’s certainly not a bad month. I’ve also watched some excellent films this month, including Poor Things at the cinema. It is honestly so dark and strange, I would only recommend it if you have a high tolerance for weird. But if that’s you, I hope you love it like I did. We’ve come to Paris for the massive Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which is impressive. But Rothko is really Tim’s thing so in return I made him go to the cata ..read more

The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is beautiful, thoughtful, original, packed with ideas that generate discussion. And yet I found it a bit too ponderous to love it. Miri’s wife Leah has “come back different” after a deep sea research mission that overran by months. Leah seems weakened and barely eats, sleeps or speaks. She sips on salt water and soaks for long hours in the bath. Her skin takes on a strange hue, almost translucent. Miri spends her days worrying and trying to get hold of the research centre behind the mission to find out what happened but they are proving madde ..read more

I am not a big fan of the novel-within-a-novel device. Invariably I find the secondary narrative either too dull or too abstract to keep my attention, and my interest is only held by the primary story. I found it a little odd, then, that the opposite happened with The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. Ella Rubinstein is a very average, middle-class white American housewife. Now that her three children are almost fully grown she’s got her first job in two decades, reading manuscripts for a literary agency. Her first manuscript is Sweet Blasphemy by A Z Zahara, a historical novel about the rea ..read more

As I mentioned in my December reading round-up last week, 2023 was an odd year for me. I feel more in need of the arbitrary fresh start of a new year than I can remember for a very long time. However, “odd” doesn’t mean all bad, and among my highlights were some truly great books. According to Storygraph I read 81 books and gave 5 of them the maximum rating of 5 (though the ratings are a gut reaction when I finish the book and don’t always match which books I’m still enthusing about months later). My most-read genres were literary, contemporary, LGBTQIA+ and classics – so no surprises there ..read more

A ..read more