Category: reading challenge

Sapphic Book Bingo 2022

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Join the Sapphic Book Bingo [Bingo card with boxes arranged in 5x5 grid, each with a heading summarising a particular trope or aspect often found in sapphic books]

I’m about six weeks late with this, but there’s plenty of 2022 still to come, which means that there’s plenty of time still to read books. Plenty of time to take a look at Jae’s Sapphic Book Bingo and mark out a line you might like to fill. There’s still time to fill the whole card, if you’re feeling ambitious.

As ever with Jae’s challenges, there’s a refreshingly wide choice of themes, and my stories fit into quite a few of them. Such as:

  • Speak Its Name is, above all, Lydia’s coming-out story. (It takes her a while to come out even to herself, which was a bit of a challenge when I realised that the whole thing needed to be rewritten and put into her point of view.)
  • It’s also an award-winning book. In fact, it was the first self-published book ever shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Getting shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize means you automatically win a Betty Trask Award. Will I be forever thrilled to have been shortlisted for the same award as Sarah Waters? Oh yes.
  • I have a few short stories available for free. Find The Mermaid at The Lesbian Historic Motif podcast or Prima Donna at A Story Most Queer (both historical fiction, both podcasts). Or sign up for my newsletter to download Yay or Nay (historical fiction again) or In Little Space (a Christmassy short set between Speak Its Name and The Real World).
  • And you can find Daisy’s Yarn in the new IReadIndies anthology Anything But Romance, free until the end of the month. As you might guess, it’s Not a romance as well as being a free book.
  • Are student politics (Speak Its Name) or the intersection between sexual identity and faith (both Speak Its Name and The Real World) out of your comfort zone? There’s another square for you.
  • As for different sexual orientation or gender identity, Lydia is a lesbian (Speak Its Name is her book) and Colette is bisexual (The Real World is hers, and it’s very, very bi). They’re both cis.
  • They’re an established couple by the time we get to The Real World.
  • I think The Real World is probably my author’s pick. I was flicking through it this morning and thinking that it was worth all the anguish after all.

And if you’re going for the trickier Book Unicorn card, either Speak Its Name or The Real World will of course count for Faith. (You might find some other possibilities on my LGBTQ Christian fiction recommendations post, too.)

There are some that I can’t help you with. I’m too young to have written a sapphic classic, though I’ve read plenty (most recently enjoyed Katherine V. Forrest’s Murder At The Nightwood Bar). I am not a POC author (try Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton). Nor am I a newbie (going to have to do some research there). And so forth.

And there are some that are a bit borderline. I’m not sure that I’d count ‘both being rostered to cook baked potatoes’ as a meet-cute, but you might feel differently. (Sadly, my cutest sapphic meet-cute happens in A Spoke in the Wheel, which is not a sapphic book, what with it being narrated by a man and all. But I’ll always have a soft spot for Vicki and Gianna and their background cycling app rivalry meet-cute. Gianna, the silversmith, would be my best shot at an unusual job, too. Oh well.)

If you think one of my books might help you fill a square on your card, you’ll find them, among other places, on Smashwords, where I’m giving a 50% discount to readers playing Sapphic Bingo. Use voucher code TF79U to get the discount.

So that’s it. Have fun. Eyes down.

#TBR20: wrap-up

kathleenjowitt2 Comments

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I finished reading my twentieth book of the year yesterday morning: The Invisible Woman, by Claire Tomalin. Here’s the full list:

1. Lying in Bed – Polly Samson
2. The Thrift Book – India Knight
3. Daughters of Darkness: lesbian vampire stories – ed. Pam Keesey
4. Trumpet – Jackie Kay
5. Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
6. A Poet’s Bazaar: a journey to Greece, Turkey & up the Danube – Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Grace Thornton
7. The Years – Virginia Woolf
8. Malafrena – Ursula K. Le Guin
9. The Scarlet Seed – Edith Pargeter
10. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
11. Stress Family Robinson – Adrian Plass
12. What Remains and other stories – Christa Wolf, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rik Takvorian
13. The Debutante – Kathleen Tessaro
14. Reaching Out – Francisco Jiménez
15. The Two Pound Tram – William Newton
16. Provenance – Ann Leckie
17. The Star of Kazan – Eva Ibbotson
18. Between the Woods and the Water – Patrick Leigh Fermor
19. The Silent Boy – Lois Lowry
20. The Invisible Woman – Claire Tomalin

It’s now April, so I’m almost exactly on time for the #TBR20 challenge. I committed to reading only books I already owned for the first three months of the year, and also for the first twenty books I read.

And I’ve just discovered, going back through Goodreads to put the links in, that I’d forgotten The Ghostly Lover, which should have gone in between Station Eleven and A Poet’s Bazaar. So I could have written this post on Friday instead. Never mind.

It’s an interesting picture, and I’m amused by the distinctly Mittel to Eastern European flavour that’s emerging. The Eva Ibbotson and the Patrick Leigh Fermor were deliberate choices – I was looking for nostalgia for a Europe that no longer exists to be visited even if I had been able to get to it. So were Andersen’s journey and Christa Wolf’s Berlin: they count towards the #EU27 project too. But they echo Le Guin’s Orsinia (which will get its own post, soon), and some of the lesbian vampires too.

Some of those are books I wanted to get read so that I could get them out of the house: six of them have now moved on via BookCrossing. Two were books that I’d started reading in 2019 (Provenance was my bedtime book, so I was only reading a few pages at a time; Malafrena my lunchtime one.) There are a couple of shorter books for school aged children which I read to hurry things along: Reaching Out was fairly dull, but The Silent Boy did some clever things with the form.

I’d been putting off The Two Pound Tram in case something awful happened to the tram (it did, but it wasn’t Death by Newbery Medal territory). Giovanni’s Room was something I’d been meaning to read for ages. I picked up The Years when I was packing to move and didn’t seal that box until I’d finished it. Inevitably, I suppose, some of these were things I might have read sooner if I’d known how much I’d like them, and some of them were things that I could just as well have done without.

And now I’m off to buy three books for three different book clubs or readalongs. (Madam, Will You Talk, The Flat Share, and An Experiment in Love.) I’m behind the curve on all of them, but I’m sure I’ll be able to catch up. Actually, I think I might have read the Hilary Mantel before. I certainly don’t own a copy, though…

A Poet’s Bazaar (Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Grace Thornton) #EU27project

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On Friday I thought that I really ought to get going on the EU27 project before Article 50 became irrevocable and the wheels were set in motion for leaving the EU. This was one of (I think) two options that I had readily available, and as a narrative of a European travelling in Europe it seemed particularly appropriate in itself.

This book covers Andersen’s journey south from Copenhagen, via Germany, Italy, Malta and Greece, to Turkey, and back again up the Danube, in the early 1840s. It’s very much a travel narrative, but we don’t forget about Andersen the teller of fairy tales. Occasionally a particular landmark results in a self-contained story embedded within the text; sometimes Andersen remarks that some experience might prompt a story; most often it’s his lovely lucid style that reminds us that this man knew how to tell a story.

Sometimes his experiences felt very familiar to me, and I was pleased when he reached Pressburg (Bratislava in my time) and his boat moored in a stretch of the Danube that I’ve looked out over. And this, though it’s from the very earliest days of rail travel, captures exactly what I like about travelling by train:

Just look out! The nearest fields go by in an arrow-swift stream, grass and plants run into each other – one has the feeling of standing outside the globe and watching it turn. It hurts one’s eyes to look for too long in the same direction; but if you look somewhat farther away, other things do not move any quicker than we see them move when we are driving at a good pace, and farther out on the horizon everything seems to stand still – one has a view and impression of the whole district.

This is precisely how one should travel through flat country. It is as though towns lie close together, now one, now another! The ordinary travellers on the by-roads seem to be stationary. Horses in front of carts lift their feet but seem to put them down again in the same place – and so we have gone by them.

Replace that horse and cart with a car, and that’s still what a train journey feels like. At other times, it’s evident how much things have changed – not least when Andersen talks to some of his fellow travellers about the most famous Dane in history. They agree this is Tycho Brahe; nowadays, of course, it would be Andersen himself. On the practical level, Andersen’s journey is hampered by ten days of quarantine, and in certain places on the Danube his boat has to be pulled upstream by teams of men on the shore. Earlier in the journey, he learns that there’s considerable unrest in Rumelia (now part of Romania), there are rumours that the couriers of the post from Belgrade to Constantinople have been murdered, and he wonders whether to cancel the Danube leg altogether. I got a distinct sense of a Europe that has always been in turmoil at one or more of its edges.

There are inevitably a few ‘man of his time’ moments, including a particularly eyebrow-raising visit to the slave market in Constantinople. Leaving those aside, however, it’s a very enjoyable read, and makes me think that I’d enjoy swapping travellers’ tales with Hans Christian Andersen.

This counts for Denmark in the #EU27project. And it’s my sixth book of the year/in the TBR20.

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2020 reading challenges – a bit behind the times

kathleenjowitt5 Comments

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Having – somewhat to my surprise – filled an entire bingo card on the Indie Challenge last year, I had a vague idea of quitting while I was ahead, and not doing any reading challenges this year. Then I was messing around on Twitter and found a couple that looked a) interesting and b) manageable.

  1. The #EU27 project. This involves reading one book from each of the 27 EU countries that aren’t the UK. I’m late to the party on this one, as it began when Article 50 was triggered, and here we are over two years later. I’m going to miss being part of the European Union, and I rather like the idea of this challenge as a way to remain connected with the rest of Europe in at least a small way. I will write up books from this challenge on this blog. The majority will be translations: my French is good enough to read Jules Verne in the original, if not Colette (mind you, I get bogged down in Colette in English, too) but I don’t think I can say the same for my smattering of German and Spanish, let alone my opera fan Italian – and that’s as far as my languages go.
  2. #TBR20, which involves making one’s first twenty reads of the year books which one already possesses, and which appears to be a descendant of the TBR Dare (which involved reading only books that one already possessed for the first three months of the year). Since I’m likely moving house in March, this seems like a useful discipline, and I’m going to go for both goals: the first twenty and the first three months. I won’t be reporting back on these unless they also count towards #EU27.

The other thing I’m trying to do is use Goodreads and LibraryThing more. I don’t do star ratings, which in my experience are pretty much meaningless, but I will be posting text reviews. We’ll see how it goes…

#EU27project

Denmark: A Poet’s Bazaar (Hans Christian Andersen)

Germany: What Remains (Christa Wolf)

Italy: The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)

Ireland: Landing (Emma Donoghue)

Spain: Nada (Carmen Laforet)