Things I’ve Read

Amazingly, in a month ending with the start of exams I did read three non-academic things…

Letters to Camondo - Edmund der Waal. I’m one of the few people, I think, not to have read Hare with the Amber Eyes, and I went straight out and bought it after finishing this - and I picked this up because I loved de Waal’s Library of Exile at the BM last year. It is a beautiful little book, in form and content. It’s written as letters to Moïse Camondo, an emigre to Paris who slowly created a museum that became something of a shrine to his son, Nissim, who died in the First World War. He also happened to be Jewish. De Waal writes to him about collecting, identity, belonging, all in the light of the coming Second World War. Somehow he carries it off without becoming mawkish.

Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi. This. Is. Stunning. It’s about Gifty, who is working on a neuroscience PhD at Stanford but really dealing with her brother’s death from an opioid addiction when she was a child. It explores immigration, and depression, and it’s about how faith and science help to make sense of things in different ways, but mostly it’s about how humans deal with grief and trauma. It’s also once of the best depictions of a couple of expressions of Christianity I’ve ever read, and how they can help and hurt people, and I ended up sobbing my tiny heart out at midnight over it.

The Price You Pay - Aiden Truhen. I picked this up when Nick Harkaway, who is a long time fave, revealed that he’d been writing thrillers under a pseudonym. This book is fully insane, gloriously trashy, and very very black, and it knows it and enjoys it. I had a lot of fun with it.

Things I’ve Watched

I have not, really. I started The Underground Railroad, and the first two episodes are amazing but - understandably - intense so I’ve put it aside until after exams.

I mean, I did also watch Eurovision, which is something I only do with other people, and it was a lot of fun. Germany should have got more points.

In the pile for next month

The same as last month, TBH - Torrey Peter’s Detransition, Baby, Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets, plus whatever I fancy because exams will be DONE. Also I want to pick up Chine McDonald’s God is Not A White Man.

A photo from last month

Hello, jab one. Highlight of my year, may the jabs spread as fast and far as the virus.