From then on, I demanded that the Dessaintes call me Ratus, much to their dismay! And I began to regularly commit a crime that neither of them would have dreamt of: I read! Worse still, I enjoyed it! Thoroughly. So thoroughly that I worked out how to beat those scoundrels: I would read, and invent stories, and make my own books. I would rise above my station and go places people couldn't imagine me in.

Not a book to read when you are feeling thirsty.

In the midst of a future Cape Town when water is privatised and in short supply. Deidre is drunk, and blaming everyone else for her problems, despite never having worked or even acknowledged the help she *has* been given.

Will the discovery of buried secrets at her old family home change her attitude?

#WomensPrizeLL25

Not for me.

But I liked this Borges quote.

Next up...

Argh, rather tempting.

There's a strong urge to go out there where the shooting is, so it'll all just end instantaneously.

In those moments... I always get a text:

"Summer's still on! Tam-Tam Group boutiques invite you to come in and see their new collection of swimsuits ..."

Those boutiques and I are all in the same city. They see all the same news I do.

I swear to you, my dear Tam-Tam Group: after all this is over, the first thing I'll do is visit you.

Only after dinner would their father loosen up.... he would describe to the eight children sitting before him the monsters whose shadows he glimpsed when he went to the fields at four in the morning - hanged monsters with swollen tongues, giant highway-bandits, creatures who were half woman, half fish. This was the children's favourite time, these stories told by the light of a kerosene lamp, the huge centipedes chasing around the wooden benches.

I'm a sucker for a book about banned books...

"Did it work? "We should build a monument to books", argues the Polish dissident Adam Michnik. ""I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight", he tells the author."

I look over at my sister lying on top of the piano singing 'Graceland'. I don't know if it's the best song to dance to, but V's dancing anyway, slowly, with his arms loosely around Xabi's neck, looking the happiest I've ever seen him. Happier even than when he got a flip phone for Christmas.

🤣🤣

Holidays are here and it's time for a crime spree in St Andrews...

... but only in the special postgraduate areas designed for crying and printing out hundred-page documents...

Everything was going well with the dinner. No one brought up colonisation or euthanasia or the Springbok Tour.

Taken me a while, but getting into this now.
Which is a good job given that bookclub meets by the end of the month!

All those people who go on about how beautiful babies were, their wonderful smell and so on and so forth should have their heads examined. Here she was praying for a few minutes of soul-saving solitude before visitors can banging on her door, and there he was screaming as if somebody had lit a fire under him.

Starting my attempt to read (some of) the books discussed in Barbara Boswell's discussion of black women's writing from South Africa.

This copy came from the US (thankyou biblio.com), but had a sticker on the back saying £3.50. It also looks like someone has very carefully restitched it back together. Love a book with a bit of history!

I'm not talking to them. Or to Putin. In this speech, I'm talking to myself.

"Don't be afraid in love. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to love... Ukraine is such a great joy..."

The cultural attaché from the Embassy of Kazakhstan pulls me aside and says, "Hold on. Hold on out there. We're neutral, of course. But we are aware that we're next. Those people will come to 'protect' our Russian-speakers if you give up. So don't give up! Hold on..."

Loving the crime fiction references in this series...

Great to catch Kaliane Bradley speak about her last book - and hear about the new one too...

When you finish a book and it might as well just have a shelf in your TBR.

I hadn't read anything about this one before picking it up. Surprised to find such a personal memoir of mental health struggles alongside the discussion of the life of an apparently super-resilient early scientist and founding academic.

My enjoyment of the book may well be skewed by agreeing with her assessment of just how damaging the "believe in yourself" / resilient mindset can be, when it denies failure and ignores other people's views.

It's a hard lot being a human... You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success... that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.

Look upon my works, ye mighty...

Stanford after earthquake, 1906.

Finding this book very dangerous for my own bookshelf.

I love this Eiderdown Books series of short art books, exploring the work of women artists.

It is natural that novels about women in this era would focus on the most critical point in a woman's life...the question of marriage. Those who denigrate courtship novels rarely consider....
When a man has that much control over your life and your children's lives, the kind of man you marry can literally be a question of life or death. The history of English courtship novels is a literary history of women's protest against the femme couverte.

At any one time in the UK, around 7,000 people sit on the combined UK Transplant Waiting List. Of these, around 400 die every year while waiting for a transplant." In the US, the statistics are even more sobering. There are over 100,000 men, women and children on the national transplant list, of whom seventeen die every day while waiting.
----
?

Quick break from reading to remind family def. pro-organ donation.

Want to try and win some #womensprize books?

(From the newsletter)

https://womensprizeforfiction.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=779d85dd165eb408...

These arrived yesterday!

I'm hoping to read (some of) the books mentioned in Barbara Boswell's study of Black South African women's writing.

And one of Walker's essays (about searching for artist biographies) is mentioned in Jane Austen's Bookshelf.
@Lcsmcat

Sticking to the shade for lunchtime reading... 🌞

Books are not static things....

When I'm....rereading. I'm remembering the emotions of the last read. I am remembering my past self. Simultaneously, I'm noticing the emotions of this read. I am marking the outlines of my current self. In that way, reading is not a separate act from the rest of my life. It is central to it.

...there are currently over 60K people alive in Britain... thanks the gift of another person's heart, liver, kidney or lungs...

Well, I wasn't expecting that!
I've only read 3 of these, so 3 more to find.

@squirrelbrain
##WomensPrizeLL25

I lifted @squirrelbrain 's graphic and added stickers for the ones I've read. I've got my fingers crossed for Ministry of Time and The Dream Hotel making the shortlist. Still hoping to read some more of the others: found it harder to get hold of all of them this year.

#WomensPrizeLL25

A character in the bar notices that someone is wearing "Pleaser" shoes.
I had no idea this was a thing.

[On Frances vs "Fanny" Burney] "Let her have her adult name," proclaimed Doody in her 1988 biography....

And yet two major biographies of Burney since Doody's proclamation have named her "Fanny" Burney. The diminutive will not die. It's enough to make one want to call all authors by diminutive nicknames they would never want to be known by. "Chuck Darwin" and "Ernie Hemingway" do have their charm.

An avid reader, Walpole came across an interesting piece of writing titled ‘The Three Princes of Serendip‘, translated into English from an old Persian tale.... How heartwarming it is to know that one of the most inspiring words in the English language has been been created by a writer with the help of a Persian fairy tale, thus connecting East and West....

From Elif Shafak's substack (link in comments)

The new books display at the library has, once again, derailed my reading plans...

Among the details I overheard from my post on the porch...

Boyd Ellison was alive and had told the police everything. A man on a motorcycle had attacked him. A man with a beard attacked him. It was a bearded man with a foreign accent, maybe Dutch or Turkish. It was a hippie on drugs. Boyd was in a coma. Boyd had called out his mother's name. He didn't know who his parents were. He was dead. He was alive. He was alive but just barely. He was dead.

The reflection that meets her in the mirror reminds her of the pandemic of her childhood. Unlike some of her classmates in school she never minded wearing masks: they concealed her bouts of acne, the rage she felt whenever a boy told her she needed to smile more, her impatience with strangers who asked, "So what are you?" She couldn't have known that the skill would come in handy so many years later.

Moving in to this one...

#WomensPrizeLL25 #Fiction

'She was a very strong lady,' Marzenna recalled. 'For her, nothing was impossible.
---
Recommended history of Polish resistance in WW2.

The descriptions of Agent Zo's personal skills reminded me of my gran. Everyone loved her, but not for her small talk!
Personal gripe: one of those "hidden histories" where actually what the author means/ acknowledges is "*English speakers* didn't know about it...".

I usually enjoy books about wandering Berlin, but this one not so much.

A bildungsroman featuring a lot of drugs, bad sex and bad choices, I winced for the protagonist as she made one awful decision after another. Lots of interesting individual elements, but I never felt I really understood where the author was going (and in placed desperately just hoped it would all just Stop!)

#WomensPrizeLL25

As far as possible, the women saved each other.

(Magdeburg camp, 1944)

Loved this first book in a new time-travelling series.

And a map as endpapers. Nice touch!

The new album ‘Between The Covers – 9 Songs For Bibliophiles‘ features 9 songs about books and reading, as the punny title suggests, there are 5 new originals sandwiched between 4 cover version.
The album will be promoted by a solo tour of UK and Europe in May and June, with performances in bookshops, libraries, literary festivals ... (Via the ever fabulous Guy Garvey) https://paularmfield.com/events/upcoming-events/

What did Victorian women do with their time? She hears Elizabeth's voice. You have to be able to make a posset, sew a seam and recite the Lord's Prayer. Can you do any of those things? Whatever your views on praying and sewing, they certainly fill in the time.

Last night, Ali took a book from the shelf...

#Liverpool

I was supposed to be reading women's prize nominees, but instead I fell into this beautiful story about loss, minority communities - and mythical fox-people.

And I loved the footnotes. (Sidenotes?)

I was home neither in Rosenwald nor in Gropiusstadt. And like so many children before me, I became my own exile.

At school, the girls wore padded down jackets and boots I had seen only in equestrian ads. They knew how to ride horses and drank expensive water and used Dr. Hauschka products, which felt so expensive back then, I believed only millionaires could afford them. Longingly, I used a pump of their creams, inhaling that herbal scent.