I suppose four of six I'd liked/wanted isn't bad?

The Enright and Grenville are good reads but not my favourites of their work - wondered if they were carried by their other books / body of work rather than this book? IDK 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

#womensprize #shortlist #nopleasingsomepeople

Who is going to come to save us?

Book on the beach! (Well, next to the beach. And I wasn't stopping.)

It was a daily brutality roulette.

Map (detail) from https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/sri_lanka_map.htm

Long week, large hot chocolate, new library book

Please don't look for me. I looked for them everywhere. Of course I did. My brothers. And also Κ.

Now for some crime...

My shortlist of favourites (subject to picking up the last 4!)
#WomensPrize #Longlist2024

Nearly there with my women's prize longlist reading.

I won't finish them all, but have enjoyed the reading so far.
(I had read two before the longlist was announced, so not shown here.)

#WomensPrize #Longlist2024

Oh Sailor, I thought, the little size of you. This is what it feels like when everything goes wrong, and by your own hand. When you are caught, cornered, the one to blame, when you discover something in your nature that you did not know was there and which you do not like. Confusion, shame, resentment, regret: it's my area. Don't panic. Sit tight. I can help you with this.

'Hello,' I replied but didn't know what to add nor how to pitch it because she was three and I hadn't gotten to that page in childrearing yet. 'We're not supposed to praise little girls for their looks any more,' I told my friend, 'but for their brains, and my God but your daughter is clever. Such clever hair, such clever eyes.' She really was a beauty, that child.

'Gets it from her mother, obviously.'

I ducked around a corner. Look, Mama's going round the bend! I wanted to tell you, but oh, oh. What struck me as the starkest contradiction of all was that, having navigated this much of life the volatility of youth, of love and loss, the agony and the ecstasy - the closest I had come to losing my mind was during the period known as settling down.

Sad little book of poems about a child forcibly emigrated to Canada over 100 years ago.

I had listened to him on the other side of that door snoring away in the box room, those snug, contented snores I used to find endearing, the two of us tucked up together in the same bed on a cold night, except we were no longer in the same room. And soon we would no longer be under the same roof, nor even under the same stars. I could not get my head around it: how could my husband sleep under the circumstances?

Almost made me nostalgic for a snowy day.

What a line. (Anne Olivier Popham)

New to me! (From Wifedom)

‘Listen to this for a thank-you note,‘ she tells Lettice, finding Wells‘s letter. “Why do you attack me in this way? Is it some perverted jealousy or some insane political machinations. Read my early works you shit.”‘ Lettice chuckles.
‘Poor man,‘ she says. ‘Probably thinks you were trying to kill him.‘
‘Yes,‘ Eileen says. ‘Death by plum cake.‘

These anxieties of authenticity exist because when words go inside a reader, they make magic. They fizz and pop and conjure. They change minds. Your words may cast a spell on the reader but they cannot be felt to be a con-artist's trick, for then the reader will feel de- frauded. All the reader wants is for the avatar sitting behind the table to match their inner picture.

Owen was also a benefactor... Money from his music royalties... was being funneled into teamwork research, both in raw games like football and in VR gaming. But it had been Charyssa, a savvy media mogul and entertainment icon in her own right, who had noticed Owen's interests and decided to recruit him to her dream of a unified Earth.

"That's perfect, that is," Kanoa muttered to himself. "A former beauty queen who really wants world peace."

I do think I would have benefited at the time from some representation of a similar experience, though, whether in a book or a film, or even something small like a poem. Something for the company, just so I could feel I was walking down a path already trodden by other women, that I was not the first to cut my way through that wilderness.

Finally! I have the hard copy to read.

Beauties of all shapes and sizes. Pleasures to suit every taste. And as long as you keep your head down and your arse up, you've a roof over your head. Just remember to stay in Mrs Fiddes's good books. And she takes a daily note, I can tell you. Now come, let me pour you a whisky and I'll tell you a tale that's taller than these high tenements...

When she'd turned around George was at the door, hands on hips, waiting for his answer. She saw then that to him she belonged here with the animals and the house and the garden.

'Spain is a good idea,' she'd said, reaching the back step. 'I'm sure we could be useful.'

He'd looked startled. 'But I'll be at the front. There'd be nothing for you to do.'

I've put my photo of a Stockholm tram in a 1920s filter, which almost fits this super noir crime fiction (set in the 1930s, but there was no 1930s filter...)

Took my book to Liverpool City library. Such a wonderful place.

The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say "Yes" in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.

I do like a pie chart. 2024 books so far.

Photo taken before this mini egg also disappeared...
-----
They were good storytellers, after all. They used so many different stories to woo us.

For Soori, it was the promise of her father's release: they said all she needed to do was to work at a Senninbari factory in Japan for two years to free her father.... For Nami, it was education.... For Jayoung, the bait was caramel....
For me, it was an eye.

#EasterReading

Bit of a deal right now...

#WomensPrizeNF

Early each morning I went for a walk. It was my chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures, observing day by day the arrival of a new season: the magnolias putting out their petals and so poignantly soon, as it seemed to me every year, but never more so than the spring of 2020- shedding their petals. The cherry blossoms, even lovelier-loveliest, agreed but likewise short-lived.

I think if this hadnt been a #WomensPrize #longlist I would have given up on this one. I find fiction around psychosis and post-partum depression very hard to read, and then add in magical realism that I often find tricky to navigate / make sense of. Glad I stuck with it though, as the resolution of the final section was hopeful as well as bleakly realist. Great to see another new author getting attention via the longlist.

"This bloody film is just a gang of people lounging around on a park bench talking, going on and on nonstop," Robert yelled..... It's Friday night, for Christ's sake! What we need is a car chase or two, a few murders and a dollop of sex."
Pohjanen chuckled.
"I apologize," said Mella. "I got drunk one night and he made me pregnant."

The lives of Dolly and her forebears all stand on the taking of land, but the family stories I drew on for this book are silent about that truth. They also record no awareness of the enduring sorrow all the taking meant and means for First Nations people. As Dolly's granddaughter, I want to acknowledge that silence and that sorrow. I've told one story here, but standing beside it is another.

As far as she could see, being Catholic or Protestant wasn't such a big thing. Church was just what you did once a week. You said the prayers and you sang the hymns and then afterwards you stood outside the church having a good old gasbag. The C of Es like the Maunders stood outside their church and the RCs like the Murphys stood outside theirs, and then for the rest of the week you were just all in together.

I better get reading - I've not finished any of the NF shortlist!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/27/womens-prize-for-nonfiction-shortl...

How does he know the perfect time and way to leave conversations? Maybe that's what wealth affords. I imagine him learning all the perfect social cues in some private school classroom from a teacher with their PhD in psychology at the same time I was learning how to cook Hamburger Helper from the back of the box because Ma was pulling another double shift at the smoke shop.

What a great book! Dystopia all the way...
(This photo is completely inappropriate)

Never mind espionage; even to get a job as a dock worker was beyond his powers. He was an office clerk who cowered from rats. He couldn't even buy his own black-market goods! Murder, blackmail, suicide - he hadn't the foggiest conception what these words really meant. It made her conscious, as she'd never been before, that thoughtcrime was nothing to do with crime.

"Excuse me. Gene Wilder is the only Willy Wonka we acknowledge in this family. He never lied about being an Indian so he could wear a goddamn dead crow on his head for a movie. And a shit movie at that. Tonto, my ass."

"Who's Gene Wilder?" Dana asks.

... all his talk of abolishing the Party was the purest vanity. 'If there is any hope, it must lie in the proles'- all that meant was that Winston wanted the proles to do his fighting for him. People like the Meltons were expected to risk their skins, so that Winston Smith might be free to say that the Party hadn't invented the aeroplane.

#Endpapers #BBisWatchingYou

That was the first moment I really felt the difference between us and the worlds we inhabited. On Six Nations, we'd introduce ourselves by saying who we were related to, then spend the next five minutes trying to place how our relatives knew one another, or if we were relatives ourselves if you went far back enough. Each person a walking history book, a branch waiting to find more family trees to graft onto.

Coming of age story of two Ghanaian girls, one academic high flyer who leaves for the US, and the cousin she leaves behind.

Until half way through, I felt like I'd been here before. And then the second narrator stepped in. I knew I was hooked as I wasn't having to watch the % at the bottom of the page...

#WomensPrize2024 #Longlist #Ghana

Some days we went to Osu and joined the crowds to ... window-shop. When we tired, we stopped for food, always paid for by Akorfa, at one of the fast-food restaurants, and sometimes her friends joined us. And how those friends of hers looked at themselves! As if only their eyes had opened in this world and the rest of us could not see where we were going. Showing off with their ready-made dresses, sri sri sri English, mobile phones, and long hair.

I recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know.

#FirstLine

I love a memoir, and the memoir bits were great. Thoughtful reflection on what it's like to grow up gay in a working-class community in a small French town, and the things lost along the way to becoming a Parisian writer/ academic.

But for me, a little bit of Sartre, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty quoting goes a Long Way.

There's no doubt that we can include Madness and Civilization in that part of our library that includes books that "call to us,” as Patrick Chamoiseau puts it, books that make up a "library of feelings" and help us to overcome the effects of domination within our own selves.

Lovely article about kids reading There There in the classroom - and Tommy Orange visiting.

A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/books/tommy-orange-there-there-wandering-star...

To use an insult is to cite the past. It only has meaning because it has been used by so many earlier speakers: a dizzying word that rises from the depths of time immemorial, as one of Genet's verses puts it.

Yet, for those at whom it is aimed, it also represents a projection into the future: the dreadful presentiment that such words, and the violence they carry, will accompany you for the rest of your days.

Or there was the time when, after I had made mention of Simone de Beauvoir, this same ultra-Catholic professor, an extremely powerful presence in the philosophy department, interrupted me and curtly interjected: "You seem to be unaware that Mademoiselle de Beauvoir treated her own mother disrespectfully.".... "Mademoiselle"! I laughed for months each time I thought of this way of referring to her.