Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

I devoured this, it is so readable and odd and lovely. Our protagomist is odd which serves to highlight just how odd a lot of society is. She ends up being very relatable and we root for her and her simple life. Funny and strange.

 

Art, Simon Schama

I thoroughly enjoyed this, the intro looks at art in general but the rest focuses on the life of Caravaggio. Schama is incredibly engaging and Caravaggio's life played out like a Greek tragedy. Schama entwines the story with detailed descriptions of a few of his works and gives us insight, context and drama. Gorgeous.

 

The Eye of Childhood, Short Stories

These were great stories and I loved them, I was expecting some of them to be a little dark, but I was genuinely shocked at how horrible a couple of them were. 

Beautiful World, Where are You, Sally Rooney

There were some things I liked about this, in terms of the characters and their relationships with themselves and each other it was great, nuanced and realistic and intriguing. 

However the story is interspersed with emails between the two main characters, and these I found forced and self absorbed. They seemed like thinly veiled opinions of the author, unconvincing and should have been a series of essays, published apart and made more well rounded. I think they did little to augment the characters, or at least didn't tell us anything that couldn't have been shown, and I found them clunky and distracting. 

Speckled throughout the novel are also vignettes of the landscape, maybe a little on the nose regarding the title, and gave the impression that Rooney was writing with TV in mind.

On the whole I enjoyed the story, but not one of the best.

La Ciudad de las Bestias, Isabel Allende

I read this as a kid and I remember being blown away by the magic of it. It seems so realistic and possible, and then melts into a fantasical world. It was lovely to read it again through the light fog of a second language. The images and impressions I remembered were still there, and it is a gorgeous novel. 

The Summer Book, Tove Jansson

A gorgeous wander though days or episodes of a summer (or multiple summers?) on a remote island off the coast of Finland. A grandmother, her grandaughter and a silent son/father. It is gorgeous, human and funny and deep with unreasonable emotions from both sides. Beautiful. 

 

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

I really like Zadie Smith and have read a lot of articles about and by her, and watched her speak on various topics, but this is the first novel of hers I've read. I thought it was excellent. The way it weaves stories through the different parts and knits them together at the end is very skillful. The novel follows two men, their wives and their children (and meanwhile weaves in the stories of their ancestors) as they navigate Britain. It is a satisfying novel in terms of story but also Smith has so much to say about 'multicultural Britain' and about people in general in terms of experience, fear, beliefs, character, relationships. It is huge.

The Captain and the Enemy, Graham Greene

I alaways forn Graham Greene a bit hit and miss, some of his books I have loved and others I really haven't liked. This one was good, but I thought it lacked something. The narrator is plucked out of boarding school by 'The Captain' and goes to live with The Captain's sort-of partner, to keep her company. As a young man the narrator is re-living his experience from then on and eventually goes to find the Captain. There is some intrigue, but nothing is ever very clear, this is definitely intentional on the part for Greene, but I think some engagement is lost because of it. 

 

A Little History of the World, E.H Gombrich

I'd been wanting to read this for a while and it didn't disappoint. A lovely chatty run-through of the history of the world. Also a bit dated, and Euro-centric, but lovely and informative nevertheless. 

 

I Dreamed of Africa, Kuki Gallman

I devoured this in a few days. It is addictive and beautifully written. There is a shadow over the whole book, you know right from the off that some thing awful will happen, but that only serves to make everything deeper and more poignant. It is dated, there is a sort of colonial undertone to everything, and I was always wondering where they and their friends got their money from. However that doesn't ruin it. The book really is a love letter to Kenya but it also says something very powerful about the author's realtionships, with her family, but also with friends and aquaintances.

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig

I thoroughly enjoyed this. At midnight one night Haig's protagonist finds herself in a huge library, where she can step into any of the lives she might have lived if she had made different choices (stayed in the band, said yes to the coffee date etc) Predictably, through all this, she finds that in each life, there she herself is, she can't ever escape that, but she comes to realise what she does actually want out of life.

 There are a few details I'd change about the book and I think there could have been less time on the big, obvious regrets and more on the little ones, or more on the fall-out of having to leave these other lives when she wasn't totally happy there. However in the end it was a great book, compellingly written and with a nice ending

 

My Life, Marc Chagall

 

I loved this, I knew nothing in about Chagall, neither his art or his life, but found this in a bookshop. What intrigued me, along with the illustrational sketches, was that he had written it as he was about to leave his home of Russia and move to Paris in 1922.

It is written in a melancholic, nostalgic, dream-like tone. Snatches of impressions of incidents, people and old habits are interspersed with more traditionally told memories as Chagall tells the story of his youth and early adulthood. 

The Travelling Cat Chronicles, Hiro Arikawa

This lovely book was a gift from a friend. The protagonist is a cat, once a stray who tells us the story of his meeting and deciding to live with a seemingly fairly lonely, caring young man. One day they set off on a journey visiting the man's old friends. Through these meetings and the ca's commentary we discover the story of the man't life and why he is suddenly trying to re-home his best friend. It is a bit too sweet, but is nicely told and was a good, chilled read. 

A Stranger in Spain, H V Morton

It took me a while to get through his one. It is heavy going, but actually not as heavy as you'd expect from a travel/history book written and first published in the 1950s. Morton takes us around Spain explaining, from a very British point of view, it's history, advantages and flaws. It's funny in places (not necessarily intentionally) vivid and curious. 

Luckenbooth, Jenni Fagan

I loved this story, or series of inter-affected stories. It is very colourful and 'cool' in a sort of sexy, alternative, steam punk and magic sort of way. It's hard to know where it's going at first, but has a satisfying conclusion. 

Fagan tells the story of inhabitants of a tenement building in Edinburgh, over decades. It is told in a few parts, with three connected stories from different years in each part. This is mildly disorientating, but you don't feel like you're missing something, rather that maybe time is not as important as we think. The structure of vignettes allows Fagan to look at different sorts of lives and relationships, and wax lyrical on opinions from writing to landlords and social housing. Darkly colourful and robust. 

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Wolf

Reading Mrs Dalloway nowadays is more escapism that it would have been when it was published for sure. It is a snapshot of a sunny summer day in London in the 1920s, though the narrative is dark in places. It is very clever, the way it weaves in and out of perspectives. It says something of different experiences of the same events, and of life in general; people's opinions of and reactions to one another. It also talks about expectations and realities of life, in a realistic and unsensationalised way. Another one where you can see why it's known.