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. 

The Girl with the Louding Voice, Abi Daré

A novel with a really distinctive voice, it is written in the dialect and vividly from the point of view of our heroine, a young girl from a small Nigerian town. We find Adunni a year or so after her mother's death and follow her as she tries to escape towards an education. I enjoyed the novel, but it also bothered me. I couldn't help thinking it was a sort of fantasy. It shows 'real life' and hardship (I'm not sure whether it could be seen as poverty porn) and a determined girl with the idea that with an education all will be well. 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K Dick

A cultural great, I had images and an atmosphere in my head that I was expecting to find, in the end it was quite different from what I had imagined. Less cool, affected sci-fi, more thoughtful, quiet thriller. 

We find ourselves in a world where a large proportion of the population have left earth and live with human-idential android slaves. In some off-world colonies androids rebel and come to earth to live in hiding. We essentially follow a police contractor as he tries to find and 'retire' androids masquerading as humans. Meanwhile we get a look into his world, the way of life and his hopes and worries. 

It as similar themes to Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, but less clear, there are lots of different ideas swimming around; categorisation of people, slavery, animal/human/sentient life. It's a thriller with a lot to unpack, I guess that's why it's part of the cultural consciousness.

Spring, Ali Smith

 This was brilliant, genuinely unlike anything I have ever read. Part dream-like and then unexpectedly connected to the modern world. Intrigued to see how it will fit with the other 3 in the series.

The Things We've Seen, Agustín Fernández Mallo

From reading the blurb was really excited to read this, it's described as 'a mind-bending novel for our disjointed times' The novel itself is both disjointed and connects and refers to itself repeatedly. It feels trapped inside the format of a book, like it should cover a whole room with the reader able to draw lines connecting the various threads and thoughts which are continuously picked up and dropped. 

It's somewhat self obsessed and egotistical, both the the narrator and the book itself in a way. It feels like walking through someone's thoughts while they are asleep, seeing their dreams and the associations they spark. It's sometimes confusing and hard to follow, but I think that is the effect the writer was going for. 

These two pictures were from when I received the book from a friend, after carrying it about for weeks it now has a lovely scrubbed white patina. 

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag

I loved this, it was fascinating and very applicable to so much we see in art and media. 

Regarding the Pain of Others is centred on the representation of suffering in photography primarily, but also painting and cinema. Sontag questions why these images exist, what they try to achieve, what they do achieve and the act of creating and looking at them. It is really readable and understandable and verbalises a lot of the discomfort and questions I think we have all sensed when presented with images of the pain of others, whatever the cause.