Tag: Book Review

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Reading Challenges The Isolation Reads

Read the Rainbow Challenge

Hi! If you are new here, welcome! I am Hannah, a bookworm with a book buying problem. I am also a workaholic and on annual leave during a global pandemic so I’ve decided to jazz up “shopping” my To Be Read pile.

The task: to read at least one red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink (indigo and violet were impossible) book in one week.

I have made my colour distinctions on the basis of the spines of books but you do you on that. Amazingly, I have a surprisingly large selection of material available to me although I have almost double the amount of blue books (17) and half the green books (5) in comparison to the other options. I hope to read a range of genres, geographical locations, and styles of book but I am not imposing any other restrictions.

My goal: one of each colour. At least 10 books read.

In order to make this fun and manageable, I am not going to write “full blogs” about each book but I will update this post with the titles and some details in the following format:

  • Details:
  • Impression [delete as appropriate]: OMG amazing / I really enjoyed! / Yeah, it was good / Eh, it was fine / I would not buy this if I were you / It’s not for me but ….
  • Summarise in five words:

May the odds be ever in my favour!

RED

Onjali Q. Raúf. The Boy at the Back of the Class. London: Orion Children’s Books. 2018
OMG amazing
Brilliant kids challenge refugee crisis

ORANGE

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ. Black Star Nairobi. Brooklyn: Melville House. 2013.
I really enjoyed it.
Compelling, pacy, perilous international thriller.

Johny Pitts. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. London: Penguin Books. 2019
Yeah, it was good.
Social cultural scrapbook with tunes
Geek note: I made a Spotify playlist of songs that are mentioned, are by artists who come up in the book or I really rate. You can find it here.

YELLOW

Amrou Al-Kadhi. Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen. London: Fourth Estate. 2019
I really enjoyed it.
Queerness, family, faith, home, tussling.

GREEN

Alice Oseman. Heartstopper Vol. 3. London: Hodder Children’s Books. 2020
OMG amazing
Pure queer teen emotional intelligence.

BLUE

Mary Jean Chan. Flèche. London: Faber & Faber. 2019
OMG AMAZING
Queer agony fencing with words.

Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage. 2016.
I can’t call it “OMG amazing” because I’m not gushingly enthusiastic: Brilliant and beautiful.
Bittersweet stories of neighbourhood pain

Alice Oseman. Heartstopper Vol. 2. London: Hodder Children’s Books. 2019
OMG amazing
Pure queer teen romance feels.

PURPLE

Marina Benjamin. Insomnia. London: Scribe Books. 2019
It’s not for me, but the insights on insomnia (as lived experience) are legit.
Rambling pretentious sleep-deprived whimsy

PINK

Guy Gunaratne. In Our Mad and Furious City. London: Tinder Press. 2019.
OMG amazing
Brutal London tensions burning hot.

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Books That Changed My Life Do The Reading The Isolation Reads

The Isolation Reads: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

It’s a really strange time and we are all processing #SocialDistancing differently. Friends and colleagues will have noticed my increased presence on Twitter. I am mindlessly checking my email many, many times an hour and perpetuating my underlying anxieties. As a result, I have set myself some digital check out time every day. Sometimes I’m going to spend that time attacking my To Be Read pile. This is a (possibly short) chronicle of what I finish or abandon. Wherever I can, these reviews will be written immediately after finishing the book. These are not measured reflections. They are gut reactions.

Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings [audiobook]. Hachette Audio UK. 2014.

I have really odd relationship with Dr Maya Angelou’s work. I can’t remember not knowing who she is. We had posters with her poem “Still I Rise” on all over my primary school walls. I read excerpts of a lot of her work at uni. I sat on a bench outside my current workplace listening to her read her poems as I hyperventilated before my job interview. But as with many academics, I have only accessed parts of Angelou’s prose when I have needed to rather than appreciating her works in their entirety.

I didn’t know about the controversy about the Caged Bird in American schools or about the content warnings of sexual abuse and accounts of racism that are associated with this book. As a survivor, I found the accounts of Angelou’s PTSD incredibly powerful. I found her way of describing sibling love really touching. I also related strongly to her account of re-finding her voice through reading and through reading aloud. There are so many beautiful passages, so many moments of tension and release, and many laughs in among lots of profound sorrow. I can’t wait to read the next one.

As a person with specific learning difficulties, I advocate for audiobooks a lot. I specifically recommend listening to anything read by Angelou. She has such an expressive but mellow voice. You hear her humour and vivacity but also her pain and fragility. I adore her  recording of her collected poems and I know I will debate about whether to listen to more of her books or to read them. I have copies of the other five autobiographies at my mum’s but in the current circumstances, I may end up using our Audible credits to plough ahead. We will see. I don’t really know what I thought this book would be like but it was even better than I imagined. I am grateful to Dr Maya Angelou for writing it so we can all explore and cherish it.

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Do The Reading The Isolation Reads

The Isolation Reads: Children Of Blood and Bone

It’s a really strange time and we are all processing #SocialDistancing differently. Friends and colleagues will have noticed my increased presence on Twitter. I am mindlessly checking my email many, many times an hour and perpetuating my underlying anxieties. As a result, I have set myself some digital check out time every day. Sometimes I’m going to spend that time attacking my To Be Read pile. This is a (possibly short) chronicle of what I finish or abandon. Wherever I can, these reviews will be written immediately after finishing the book. These are not measured reflections. They are gut reactions.

Tomi Adeyemi. Children of Blood and Bone. London: MacMillan. 2018.

Good lord. When I started this book this morning, I was fairly ambivalent and to be honest, I nearly abandoned it. I wasn’t really caught by the story or the characters until over halfway through. I only persisted because someone I love really enjoyed it and by the end I could see why. I read the last 150 pages in less than an hour.

I wonder if I have read too many dystopian Young Adult (YA) novels because I think Children of Blood and Bone comes most alive in its happiest scenes. It has some pockets of compelling actionbut the dances, laughing, parties, and moments of belonging landed most with me. The book’s most beautiful detail is the slow reveal as Zélie’s hair returns to a natural state while she is coming into her magic. That’s not something I’ve seen in a book like this before.

I read YA and children’s books because I enjoy them but I’m also always scouting for things for my godchildren that incorporate Black and neurodiverse characters. I never saw myself in a book when I was young but I try to surround them with stories featuring people like us as much as possible. I think that Children of Blood and Bone fills a vital gap. I definitely didn’t read a story set in Nigeria when I was young, and truthfully, I was introduced to “African Literature” as a “genre” of book by pretentious white teachers at school: “you must read Things Fall Apart.” What we needed was more books by authors from across the continent and from the diaspora. Stories of all kinds. I am going to buy the audiobook for my oldest godchild right away. He’s just seen Black Panther. He’s slowly watching Avatar: the Last Airbender with his dads. He will LOVE this book.

As for me, I know I will read the next one someday. Unlike Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Paper and Fire, I don’t feel like I need to read the sequel right away (although I totally would if I had it). However, I know I’ll be happy when I do read Children of Virtue and Vengeance. For some unknown reason, I am entirely on Team Inan and I need to know where he ends up.

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The Isolation Reads

The Isolation Reads: At Dusk

It’s a really strange time and we are all processing #SocialDistancing differently. Friends and colleagues will have noticed my increased presence on Twitter. I am mindlessly checking my email many, many times an hour and perpetuating my underlying anxieties. As a result, I have set myself some digital check out time every day. Sometimes I’m going to spend that time attacking my To Be Read pile. This is a (possibly short) chronicle of what I finish or abandon. Wherever I can, these reviews will be written immediately after finishing the book. These are not measured reflections. They are gut reactions.

Hwang Sok-yong. At Dusk. (Trans. Sora Kim- Russell). London: Scribe Publications. 2018.

“Have you read any Han Kang?” said the bookseller at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham when I bought At Dusk earlier in the year. I gushed about how much I love her books and wish we had more of her work in translation and that I keep thinking about learning Korean so that I can read more. “Oh cool. I bought this because I like Han Kang too.”

While there is a stillness in At Dusk, which I associate with the sections of introspection in Kang’s books, Hwang Sok-yong incorporates less abstract and visceral elements in his writing. For some reason, I really thought that this book was going to be a thriller about the architecture and building lobbies in Korea but it definitely isn’t. You follow alternating narrators across a lifetime of experience in Korea’s shifting social environments. You spend the book thinking you understand the connections between them but you finally understand that you don’t. The twist in the relationships is clever. The revelations about one of the families involved are brutal and sad. At times, I felt like I was reading a novelised version of West Side Story (1956) with street gangs running around, and at others, like I was glimpsing into an understated domestic drama like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s awesome films Still Walking (2008) or Our Little Sister (2015).

I loved how filmic and peaceful Sok-young’s writing style felt. It meant that where there was violence or a heart-breaking revelation, I was caught oddly unawares. None of the characters in the story are content and their lives are gently turbulent but I felt like I was watching the story unfold through a barrier that deadened some of the noise. It’s a really clever writing style. It’s subtle and oddly soothing in a unnerving way because you have a delayed reaction to some of the tragedies as you unfold. That said, some of the sections of the architect Park Minwoo’s “rags to riches” story are quite dull and I found myself skimming in places rather than savouring every word.

Overall, I will definitely check out other books by Hwang Sok-yong and I really need to get some good books on South Korean history because apparently I love books by Korean authors about life in Korea!

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The Isolation Reads

The Isolation Reads: Disclaimer

It’s a really strange time and we are all processing #SocialDistancing differently. Friends and colleagues will have noticed my increased presence on Twitter. I am mindlessly checking my email many, many times an hour and perpetuating my underlying anxieties. As a result, I have set myself some digital check out time every day. Sometimes I’m going to spend that time attacking my To Be Read pile. This is a (possibly short) chronicle of what I finish or abandon. Wherever I can, these reviews will be written immediately after finishing the book. These are not measured reflections. They are gut reactions.

Renee Knight. Disclaimer. London: Black Swan. 2015

It is very strange to have a window on a past version of yourself. Before going through a series of life-altering traumas, I used to read thrillers all the time but I generally find them too triggering nowadays. Reading Disclaimer took me back to being a teenager where I lived for the next Kay Scarpetta novel and would not have turned a hair reading a story like this.

My mother bought me Disclaimer about a week after it came out in 2015. We were in a Waterstones on Oxford Street. The salesperson pushed the book really convincingly and Mum felt they deserved the sale. I have carried it around five homes since then. The story follows the interactions between Catherine, a middle-class documentary film maker and a mysterious man, who sends her a copy of a novel that is based on events that actually happened to Catherine. We eventually discover the circumstances of a mysterious death and how it affected Catherine’s home life. It’s an “easy” and compelling read. A classic zeitgeist page turner. There’s a solid plot twist fairly close to the end.

I have a first print of the novel and a little bit of online research suggests that there are a few editing errors. For example, the story jumps between time periods and in a couple of places, chapters are titled with the wrong time period. Overall, I figured out most of what was happening in advance although The Plot Twist (discussed in the spoiler zone below) came as surprise. As I’ve come to realise now I am not immersed in reading every thriller I can get my hands on, there is a lot of glossing over of terrible characterisation and incidental appalling plot information. We spend most of the book horrified by the manipulative actions of one of the two protagonists and their backstory, then all that information is sort of left alone when it’s convenient to move the story on. If you love an airport thriller, I’d check it out. Otherwise, I think there are better versions of this story out there.

This paragraph contains SIGNIFICANT spoilers:
Content note: sexual assault, drug abuse, and suicide.

I have one big concern about this book, which would make me hesitate to casually recommend it to anyone I didn’t know well. Eventually, we learn that the dead man raped Catherine and she has repressed what happened. The most bittersweet but true to life detail of the novel is the acknowledgement that Catherine’s husband is ultimately unfazed that she has been raped when he previously ostracised her for having an affair. He rebuilds their relationship but shows no distress about what she has been through. The assault is introduced clunkily but there is also a fairly refreshing conversation where Catherine reveals the rape to the dead man’s father and he believes her immediately. There is no question of credibility in Catherine’s story, which is very unusual in novels of this kind and I applaud that. However, the “solution” to the father’s earlier revenge plot against Catherine, when he learns what has happened, is for him to die by suicide as a “premeditated atonement”. This final twist is extremely jarring, especially in the context that we know he has stalked one of his former pupils and has gone to extreme lengths to harm Catherine and her family. He a cocaine overdose in her son. He visits him in ICU having reached out to her husband “in distress” about Catherine’s behaviour. Then, it’s all forgotten because he decides to set fire to his house. There is no shame in suicide but there is a problem with using suicide as a form of redemption or as suitable social atonement.

I know that many of the most successful books of this genre exploit sexual assault and abusive relationships (of all kinds) for sensation but this way of linking them up felt especially unsavoury.

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I Need To Talk About This The Isolation Reads

The Isolation Reads: The Mirror & The Light

It’s a really strange time and we are all processing #SocialDistancing differently. Friends and colleagues will have noticed my increased presence on Twitter. I am mindlessly checking my email many, many times an hour and perpetuating my underlying anxieties. As a result, I have set myself some digital check out time every day. Sometimes I’m going to spend that time attacking my To Be Read pile. This is a (possibly short) chronicle of what I finish or abandon. Wherever I can, these reviews will be written immediately after finishing the book. These are not measured reflections. They are gut reactions.

Hilary Mantel. The Mirror & the Light. London: 4th Estate. 2020.

There are spoilers in this blog if you don’t have a rough grasp of the history of Thomas Cromwell, who was a Tudor politician that served Henry VIII. You have been advised.

Well, damn. I wrote a post about being a dyslexic reader and tackling long books, triggered by beginning The Mirror & The Light, which comes in at 875 pages. I think this ranks as one of my most taxing reads. It’s like spontaneously choosing to go on a really long run after a significant break. You want to do it and you know you are going to be happy afterwards even though you will hurt and your body is going to rebel. Your nose is going to run and your lungs are going to burn. If you read The Mirror & The Light in hardback form, your arm is going to hurt, your eyes are going to get tired, and if your neurodivergence is like mine, you are going to fight for every word, especially in the “dreams” and flashbacks, which I am giving you permission to skim.

What I love about these books is how vivid the characters are, even though you are given relatively little descriptive information about them. The Mirror & the Light has more laughs in it than the two before it but Mantel slowly builds a sense of foreboding throughout the book. We experience Cromwell get flustered and wrongfooted and doubt the signs even as more people tell him to mind the fall that is coming to him. Deliciously, Mantel slowly removes most of the characters that bring Cromwell comfort as we edge closer to the end of the book. Suddenly, Richard Cromwell (his son) is just a name and not a person. Suddenly, you’ve forgotten the name of Cromwell’s irascible cook. It’s delightful. Mantel also expands her style of dialogue when we come to the interrogations of Cromwell so it’s like being in a play or really great film. Think 12 Angry Men with ruffs. Sumptuous. My stomach still hurts from reading the final pages as we proceed to Cromwell’s execution. I could feel myself getting a tension headache as I read. What a feat this novel is.

With all three of Wolf Hall books, I find Mantel writes an appealing first chapter and then the novel moves forward really very slowly. It duly accelerates around the midway point until you feel like you are hurtling through the action to some dramatic punctuation at the end. If you make it to the middle, it pays off but I do think you have to want to finish these books. You have to care about “the Tudors”. (Note: I recently ran a session on Six: The Musical [concept musical/pop concert sing-off between the six wives of Henry VIII] and many people in the room were unfamiliar with Anne of Cleves. Assuming knowledge is assuming privilege. Don’t be that person.) I became very attached to Cromwell, Christophe, Rafe Sadler, Anne Boleyn (don’t @ me), Hans Holbein, and Cromwell’s painting of the Queen of Sheba, but I also feel like you experience a narrative sag when you read any of them.

If you have reading challenges and enjoy audiobooks, I would really recommend starting these volumes in recorded form. I borrowed my audiobooks from Sheffield Libraries and that’s the only way that made it through Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (the first two books in this trilogy). All three are like aural histories of a the life and career of the politician. You live out Thomas Cromwell’s experiences with him and therefore they lend themselves to narration.

I need to lie down now but I am very grateful for this book. I wanted to give it three stars on Goodreads. But I won’t.