Tag: Emily St. John Mandel

Week-end: South Yorkshire edition

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Looking upwards into a church ceiling where wood and concrete form an eight-pointed star, with the gaps filled with blue, yellow, green and red stained glass

About time I did one of these again…

The good

A trip to Sheffield for the annual Ultreya GB. I missed last year’s, though I hadn’t intended to (in retrospect, my ideas of what would be possible with a small baby were somewhat unrealistic), and it was good to be back. It was quite a different experience: I was very tired (see below) and also I don’t usually spend the event climbing up and down all the available steps in the cathedral. But it all came together for me in the last hymn – a very lively Amazing Grace – with the banners lined up and the baby clapping along in delight.

Some delightful fellow passengers and some railway staff who may in fact have been angels.

The difficult and perplexing

A month’s worth of interrupted sleep has trashed my immune system, the nursery germs have pounced, and I was very wobbly earlier in the week. And I’m not a nice person when I’m ill and tired.

Two hours and forty minutes on a train, each way. The way back was more trying than the way out.

What’s working

Sloggi long pants. Do they make me feel about a hundred and two? Yes, particularly the beige ones. Is it worth it to make bare legs bearable in hot weather? Absolutely. (Yes, I am aware of the Snag ‘chub rub’ shorts. Quite apart from the hideousness of the name, I can’t see that synthetic material next the skin would help in any way, however much I like their tights.)

Reading

Quite a bit! Having read She Who Became The Sun earlier in the summer, I picked up He Who Drowned The World (Shelley Parker-Chan) when it was on offer a few weeks ago. Equally fun (in its extremely dark way); the magical realism has more of an active influence on the plot this time round. I wasn’t convinced it stuck the landing, but the overall experience was sufficiently enjoyable to render that largely irrelevant.

Also on offer recently was Sea of Tranquility (Emily St John Mandel). This was a bit of a disappointment. I read Station Eleven early in 2020 and was very struck by how vivid and alien the post-apocalyptic world was. Sea of Tranquility, by contrast, all seemed extremely twenty-first century in terms of the way that the characters thought and spoke, with the different settings just so much window-dressing. The time travel plot also didn’t work for me; I think the aim was to subvert the usual clichés, but it just felt like a cop-out.

And Kobo also suggested Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks) for 99p, so I decided it was probably time I tried the Culture series.

Yesterday I started One Pair of Feet (Monica Dickens) which is very entertaining so far.

Then today I picked up N or M (Agatha Christie) because it was on the floor. I am less fond of Tommy and Tuppence than I am of most of Christie’s other series detectives, so missed this one on last year’s epic re-read. But I breezed through it and then picked up Postern of Fate to remind myself what happened to the family afterwards.

Writing

Nothing to speak of, though I have been doing a little worldbuilding in my head.

Making

One ridiculously huge baby sock, and now most of one more sensible one. I also converted a little binder into an earring holder (I will try to remember to post pictures of this).

Watching

The Paralympics, on and off. I was pleased to catch Sarah Storey’s umpteenth win, as Channel 4 also showed a decent chunk of the race. (I have found both the BBC and Channel 4 very frustrating in their tendency to show fragments of an event that have a Great British Medal Hope and nothing else. But it’s probably just as well this year, because I’ve had very little telly time.)

Looking at

Ely Photographic Club’s exhibition at Babylon Arts. There were a few pieces there that made me smile, and several that were clearly very technically skilled even if not really my thing. Also, Sheffield cathedral.

Cooking

A very hot vegetable curry: the veg box contained a bag of Padrón peppers, every single one of which was the ‘really quite spicy’ variety, so unsuitable for serving as a main/side dish in the usual way. Not one of my most successful dishes, though I’m pleased with it as a creative response to a problem.

Eating

This year’s fancy Magnum flavours, an impulse buy when they were on offer in Co-op. I’m still not entirely convinced that ice cream and popping candy is a happy combination, but it’s different, I’ll give it that.

Moving

We continue our WalkRuns (being runs that are in fact mostly walks).

Noticing

Loads of dragonflies this year. Or possibly damselflies. They don’t stay still long enough for me to be able to tell the difference.

In the garden

Ripe apples. I’ve pruned all the apple trees bar one. The next job is to take out the dead box (or was it privet?) bushes that got eaten by beetles last year.

Appreciating

Cursillo. It’s totally bonkers, but there is space in there for people to be Christians and also themselves, and that is something I was missing for a long time and something for which I continue to be grateful.

And, needless to say, every night when I get to sleep before midnight and get to wake up after six.

Acquisitions

I found a little makers’ cooperative shop in Sheffield and picked up a fabric patch (to join the several I have still to sew on), a sticker, and a pair of teal stud earrings.

Line of the week

Monica Dickens, weighing up her options:

The Land Army? One saw oneself picking apples in a shady hat, or silhouetted against the skyline with a couple of plough horses, but a second look showed one tugging mangel-wurzels out of the frozen ground at five o’clock on a bitter February morning.

This coming week

The emerging routine is slightly disrupted by a committee meeting, and then at the weekend there’s an exciting sea voyage. And that’s the last excursion for a little while, and that’s probably just as well. I might even update this blog more.

December Reflections 20: best book of 2020

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Trumpet - Jackie Kay Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff Between The Woods And The Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor The Gospel Of Eve - Rachel Mann i Madam, Will You Talk? - Mary Stewart The Real World - Kathleen Jowitt My Year In Small Drawings - Matilda Tristram

I’ve read a lot this year, and taken a lot of pleasure in reading. I’ve enjoyed many books. Even after excluding rereads, I had a lot left to choose from, and I think I’d present this photo more as a representative sample than any sort of top picks.

These aren’t in any particular order, though the top three were all begun and finished before the pandemic really hit the UK. I have a particularly vivid memory of standing on the platform on Cambridge station some time in February, overhearing two men discussing what was going on in China, before I boarded my train and went back to Station Eleven (Emily St John Mandel). It’s one of the least depressing post-apocalyptic books I’ve ever read, and I was glad to have read it going in: it made the first national lockdown seem tame by comparison.

Trumpet (Jackie Kay) follows the family and friends of a trans man who’s outed after his death: a really good book with a convincing (and often infuriating) array of voices.

Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin) gets points for having not one but two scenes including a proper Paris bus; but it also made me think a lot about relationships, and about what impossible expectations people can place on each other.

Had someone warned me that The Way I Live Now (Meg Rosoff) takes place in World War Three, I would probably not have picked it up. It made for a heavy afternoon, given the circumstances. But it’s so good that I can’t regret it: it has the eccentric, matter-of-fact quality of I Capture The Castle followed up with the devastation of the war narrative.

I read a lot of travel writing early on in lockdown, particularly older work, finding it refreshing to move in time as well as in space. Patrick Leigh Fermor gets the slot here, for the lovely luminous character of his writing.

I was in three book groups/readalongs at one point. One folded after the first book, and I’ve got behind on reading for both of the other two, but it was an absolute joy to read Madam, Will You Talk? (Mary Stewart) with perceptive and witty people on the internet. I even bought a dress because of it.

I’m generally behind everyone else in getting round to reading new releases, and several books that I thought might have been published this year actually date back to 2018 or 2019. But 2020 books that I enjoyed in 2020 included the first two of the Will Darling Adventures (K J Charles) and, particularly, The Gospel of Eve (Rachel Mann), which was a dark, twisty, theological college romp.

I only published one book this year, so obviously The Real World must be simultaneously my best and my worst book of 2020. Actually I think it’s probably the best book I’ve ever written.

Technically a book, although not one to be read as such: My Year in Small Drawings (Matilda Tristram). I’ve had enormous fun with this. There’s something very liberating about allowing yourself to not be very good at something.

Not pictured, because not a book, are any of the issues of hidden europe that I’ve read this year. Not pictured, because I haven’t finished it, is Women and Angels, a Virago anthology of women’s spirituality. Not pictured, because I never read it all in one go, is any of the poetry. Not pictured are the books I bought but haven’t yet got around to. My reading brain has been more or less shot recently; I’ve mostly been watching the skiing instead. Nor have I been doing much writing, apart from this blogging, obviously. I hope to catch up with all of this over the Christmas break and in 2021.

#TBR20: wrap-up

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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…