Things I have read. 

My desire to read - and ability to focus - has risen and fallen a lot over the last month. I had a strong non-fiction phase in the middle for some reason. 

The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel. Many smart and interesting words have already been spilt over this one… I enjoyed it, but not as much as the first two. It’s hard to tell, though, whether that’s largely because of the book or because I was reading it in the first two weeks of coronavirus lockdown. It did feel more unwieldy than the first two, and I wonder if Mantel, as much as Cromwell, was wrestling with how to handle events and the somewhat repetitive shenanigans of the Tudor Court. The ending, though, is really well done. 

I then went into non-fiction mode. I read Lamorna Ash’s wonderful new book about Newlyn and it’s fishing life, ‘Dark, Salt, Clear’, which somehow captured a sense of both the reality and the wonder of life in Cornwall and hit my love for the place and feeling that I can’t live there again, yet, well. I then went to Orkney with Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun and enjoyed some more conflicting feelings about place and possibilities. And then I spent some time in the garden, with Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden, which is just a lovely meditation on gardens in life and culture. 

I moved back into fiction with Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League, a baseball-adjacent novel that I wanted to like more than I did, but that has stayed with me none the less. I don’t think the form of the novel (interconnected stories) helps the story connect emotionally, ultimately - but I really like how it depicts the grimmer side of life adjacent to Major League Baseball. 

I’ve also read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and Tyrant Memory by Horacio Castellanos Moya, one about South Korea, the other about El Salvador - and both massively enjoyable to read, if quite different to me in many ways. Both read more like histories or biography/autobiography in a lot of ways, and are compelling depictions of the things they want to talk about (patriarchy / the complexity of overthrowing authoritarian systems). 

Things I have watched 

I have watched absolutely nothing new: despite all my good intentions of trying the trial periods of things like Mubi, Marquee TV, and BFI player, I’ve repeatedly returned to old friends. 

I had a Cary Grant period, with The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby, and a Keanu Reeves phase, with Speed and The Matrix, as well as rewatching The Martian (so entertaining, with the Project Elrond scene a nerd’s delight) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

A Recommendation of Some Kind 

It’s an even year, so it’s a BBC Young Musician of the Year year, and it returns with the keyboard final on 3rd of May. It’s always a delight to watch ridiculously talented teens play some wonderful music and feel a bit better about the state of things. 

In the pile for May

I’m starting to put things in boxes, so I’m trying to identify books I think I’ll want to keep and read them before putting them in storage. Then the rest of summer is for trying to read things I think I’ll probably want to pass on. I’m starting with Patrick Laurie’s Native, about farming in Galloway.

A photo from the last month