Book review – Jane Oremosu and Dr Maggie Semple, OBE – “My Little Black Book: A Blacktionary”

I am behind on my NetGalley reading this month but I’m very glad I picked up this one to read; it came out in October but I became aware of and requested it in December and it’s well-done and important. The authors have founded a company called i-cubed which provides race equity transformational programmes and the like to businesses and organisations and have a lot of business background, so it’s to their credit that this book is equally useful to those who work within organisations and individuals like me who do not. Note that this is the second edition, the first having come out in October 2021, so presumably it will be kept up to date – see the website mentioned above, where you can find out more about events and the like.

Jane Oremosu and Dr Maggie Semple, OBE – “My Little Black Book: A Blacktionary: The Pocket Guide to the Language of Race”

(25 December 2023, NetGalley)

… if there is one thing people from all different backgrounds can agree on, it is that it’s difficult to know, to find out, to be sure what is acceptable today and what is not. This guide is a fist step towards clarity, with a focus on Blackness […] The goal of this book is to encourage and enable more peole to become comfortable having uncomfortable conversations in an ever-changing environment. It is also a way to remove the excuse ‘I don’t know how to’. (Introduction)

An A-Z guide to the language around race, with an emphasis on Black people and culture, this is an invaluable guide that will have something new or a learning point for everyone. I try to keep up to date with inclusive language through my reading, shared here, and various expert blogs and websites* I consult for my editing work. But there were certainly new concepts here as well as ones I’ve been aware of but haven’t seen written down in a guide like this. The positive term “Blackism”, linked to Afrocentrism, was new to me and I didn’t know the term for that uncomfortable practice of people who are not Black using images and GIFs of Black people as reactions on social media (“Digital Blackface”). “Global Majority” is covered; I’ve taken to using “Global Majority People / Communities” rather than the disliked “BAME” (Black and Minority Ethnic) to acknowledge the preoponderance of Black and Brown people on our planet, but the book makes the excellent point that majority doesn’t mean power.

The brilliant thing about this book is that it’s supremely practical. Many entries have bullet points showing what you can do, for example the entry on Accent has a list running from “Acknowledge that we all have an accent; include accent bias trainig as part of your organisation’s on-boarding” to “Practise speaking words from a country you are visiting where English is not the first language to get a feel of your accent in another language”. Bias and affinity are covered thoroughly, which does of course have an application to hiring at companies but also might affect how one operates in a volunteer group or religious organisation.

There is no blame attached even to the negative terms, but there is a clear statement of what is acceptable use, and where there are two sides to a term, like “Black excellence” (explaining that it can involve celebrating and uplifting Black people’s achievements but also the pressure on Black people to constantly strive to be considered excellent and the toll on their well-being this imposes). The history of terms is given where they’ve been coined rather than just popping into general use, for example “Back consciousness” orignally being used by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The whole purpose of the book is to help us to be “intentional and alert about our use of language” so we can “avoid perpetuating assumptions and stereotypes” and, especially if they can get the book into a lot of hands, I think it will massively help to achieve that aim. A copy should be sent to every business and organisation in the UK.

*(Inclusive language resources I follow include The Conscious Style Guide, because I know you’re going to ask. Not in direct competition with this book, it includes sexuality, age, ability and disability, appearance, socioeconomic status, etc., in its themes)

Thank you to Penguin Random House for making this book available for me to read via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “My Little Black Book” was published on 5 October 2023.

Birthday incomings

It was my birthday last Sunday and I can’t say it went that well. I had Lovely things planned – a run with my friend Claire first thing, a trip to the Back to Backs Museum in Birmingham and a meal at the Chung Ying Cantonese (where I went for my 18th birthday!) – but then our burglar alarm decided to go peculiar (the bell box battery was running down and it decided to tell the world repeatedly by ringing its own siren) and we spent the night before fitfully awake and fretting and the day getting a Man out with a long ladder to take the batteries out. New unit installed now which apparently won’t do the same when its batteries run down but argh. Anyway, I was fortunate enough to open a lovely set of parcels of books from dear friends (plus, not pictured, a huge box of Jelly Beans from another dear friend, Angela, which I couldn’t wedge into the photo).

Margery Sharp’s “Four Gardens” is a 1935 novel through which we follow the life of a woman through the gardens she digs and creates. And Sharp’s “Harlequin House” from 1939 has a set of random characters and their attempts to live and thrive and help one another. Emma also gave me chocolate and the super postbox pencil case. My third Dean Street Press Furrowed Middlebrow book is Stella Gibbons’ “The Woods in Winter”, her last novel, published in 1970 has a village setting and a runaway child. That was from Ali and so was “The Bedside Companion for Book Lovers” which is a marvellous anthology edited by Jane McMorland Hunter which I’m catching up with at the moment so we can read along together. Sian found me Stephen Moss’ “The Accidental Countryside” which islooks at hidden havens for Britain’s wildlife, so fits in with my liking for nature and liminal places. Judith Flanders traces the history of homes, houses, rooms and furniture in “The Making Of Home” which Verity cleverly found for me, and finally Meg picked Dawn Butler MP’s “A Purposeful Life” for me, which fits with a few interests. I also received book tokens from Jen and Laura so feel very booky and lucky, and any guilt has been assuaged by Gill making a donation in my name to the food bank she runs.

We’ve rescheduled the other birthday treats, by the way, so all is rescued. Anyone read any of these books?

Book review – Cal Flyn – “Islands of Abandonment”

Another Emma and Liz Reads book finished (if you want to find them all, click here) and another fairly quick read for us as we started it in October and finished it last Thursday. Bookish Beck kindly sent me this one in October 2022, part of a print incomings that numbered 23 (nine read and reviewed, one passed along) and of the six she sent me then, I’ve now read and reviewed two. This was my suggestion, having seen most of the non-fiction readers and some others I know on the book blogs read and enjoy it, and Emma knew very little about it, although we retain a keen interest in nature books, and we both (especially me) thought it was going to be more grim than it turned out to be.

Cal Flyn – “Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape”

(04 October 2022, from Bookish Beck)

There is no argument that some places are, relatively speaking, far less impacted [by humans] than others. What draws my attention, however, is not the afterglow of pristine nature as it disappears over the horizon, but the narrow band of brightening sky that might indicate a fresh dawn of a new wild as, across the world, ever more land falls into abandonment. (p. 6)

As I mentioned above, we both thought this was going to be a bit grim, but it was actually pretty celebratory and optimistic, though with the knowledge underneath about humans poisoning the landscapes of our planet. Flyn travels around ghost places, no man’s lands, fortress islands and exclusion zones and looks at what happens when nature gets to take over with few or no humans around. We enjoyed the fact that if there’s a fence around somewhere, she’s going to try to get through it, and she meets all sorts of slightly sketchy characters, gets to know them, shows respect and finds out what it’s like living in these places that are the very definition of liminal: she notes that there is a “skeleton cast of misfits and dropouts” in almost every place she visits.

Flyn also gets a good coverage of different environments, rain forests to deserts, and different areas of the world, from Chernobyl to Plymouth, Montserrat, Verdun to Amani in Tanzania. There are some amazing stories here and we particularly liked reading about Nicosia in Cyprus, where the no-man’s-land between the Greek and Turkish areas is a green strip across the island (I pleasingly spotted this on an overview shot in a TV programme recently) and the border of the old East/West Germany, which has been reclaimed as a nature reserve which links up with 40 reserves in 24 countries across Europe in the European Green Belt.

There are interesting surprises, too, such as the mixing of imported and indigenous plants in Tanzania which shouldn’t be good but is giving rise to a new ecosystem that appears to be working. We also loved the beautiful, lyrical descriptions, which gave a new grace to peeling wallpaper and sagging ceilings, broken concrete and invasive ivy. We enjoyed the illustrations but Emma in particular went off searching for more, unsatisfied by the couple per chapter.

Flyn does address environmental degradation and catastrophe head-on in the final sections, but she ends with a note of optimism, that something resilient always seems to spring from destruction. This made it an eye-opening but not particularly depressing read.

As we seem to find so regularly, aurochs (and, indeed, Heck Cattle and Knepp Farm) popped up in the chapter on an empty Scottish island where the cattle have reverted to a wilder way. I personally had some great (appropriate) Bookish Beck Serendipity Moments with this book; at one point, I ended up with two cow skulls within 12 hours in this book and Alastair Humphreys’ “Local” (to be reviewed) and volcanic extinction events happening, even mention of Tambora, in both this and that one, too. The section about the Salton Sea in California reminded me of the Aral Sea in Chris Aslan’s “Unravelling the Silk Road“, read in November, and of course that sea was mentioned here, too.

Our next book is Hunter Davies’ “London Parks” which I gave Em recently and have ordered from the Bookshop. We didn’t want to do another full-nature one and our next non-nature was what is I’m sure an absolutely super book about Clause 28 which we will read in the fullness of time: we have stuff going on in our lives at the moment, both of us, and fancied something easy and gentle. We’ll start that next week …

Book review – Rob Drummond – “You’re All Talk”

I read this book in December but was sent it by the publisher to write a review for Shiny New Books, so had to submit that and wait for it to come out first. Here’s the different review I offer sometimes when I do that, with my more personal reaction to it emphasised. I have a background in studying sociolinguistics and then remaining interested in it, which gave me a slightly expert view on it, but I thought it was excellent and certainly learned a lot, too. My more professional (allegedly!), less personal, review on Shiny New Books is here.

Rob Drummond – “You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak”

(November 2023, from the publisher)

This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language, specifically English, in creating all the different version of us that we employ in our day-to-day lives … The way we speak can provide a lot of clues about us – where we live or where we’re from, our social class, possibly even our jobs, and maybe more. (p. 4)

Rob Drummond is a professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and is particularly interested in accents and more generally the relationship between our selves and how we speak.

Drummond starts the book with an explanation of accents and a short and accessible history of English. We then broadly look at accents and class / race / gender / sexuality; discrimination; and language change.

This is a book that is firmly underpinned by a call for social justice – of all kinds. There’s discussion of intersectionality, i.e. the joint effects that our race, class, gender, etc. will have had on societal expectations of us and the way we speak, and there is a whole chapter on prejudice and discrimination around accents. Drummond makes a very good point here on the somewhat famous g-dropping criticism around football commentator Alex Scott, criticised roundly for doing something that posh white men talking about huntin’, shootin’ and fishing’ have done happily for centuries. He’s also clear that when people complain about “not understanding” people’s accents whose English is a second or additional language, it’s “a listener issue rather than a speaker issue” and often a way of, as he puts it, “laundering other prejudices into a socially acceptable format” (p. 127).

As part of the discussion on style-shifting and code-switching, which is associated with the above points, there are a fascinating few paragraphs about how people who learn a second or additional language out of necessity (after moving countries) will retain particular pronunciations that are non-standard so indicate their background, consciously, rather than striving for an exact match to the new country’s language and accent, in order to demonstrate their first language identity and the identities that come with that. He also criticises official policy that demands all residents speak English while not providing language courses and acknowledging how hard it is to learn another language. Aboriginal and other Indigenous languages and their role in the countries that include Indigenous communities are also included in this chapter; I appreciated the wide range of the book in this respect.  

I really liked the little personal and family anecdotes that are included in the book. I really enjoyed the discussion of covert prestige, which is where a less officially prestigious accent, such as Cockney, becomes a more appropriate accentual code than one’s own received pronunciation voice. It was very amusing to read that Drummond, like me and Matthew, resort to a Lahhhndun accent when conversing with people who mend things in our house, even while they usually have Bolton (in his case) or Birmingham (in ours) accents ourselves, to try to raise our acceptability and proximity to usefulness around the house!

There’s a suitably lively discussion of language change and the inevitable dire warnings about this. Drummond pleasingly discusses the gay slang language, Polari, referencing work done on the language by Paul Baker (who I have met and whose book on Polari I own!). Here he’s still careful to check for privilege, pointing out that the adoption of Black youth cultural language as having its own prestige by the majority group looking rather like cultural appropriation of language features marginalised groups have used to amplify their own voices: he shares another writer’s, Imani Benberry’s, advice that if you feel the need to adopt African American Vernacular English from time to time then you should also support Black lives and communities in “loud and consistent ways”. In the postscript he continues the social justice theme, asking readers to at least see how attitudes to language and accents can promote inequalities.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though I knew (or knew of) a fair bit of the content already. I had a smile at a couple of in-jokes: I loved his question “How many conversations actually include a discussion of bread rolls, or sport shoes, or small alleyways between houses?” (p. 11) as those are key terms that allow people to be identified by region of origin, but of course that is also true.

Thank you to Scribe for sending me a copy of this book to review for Shiny New Books, which of course I also did.

Book review – Derek Owusu – “Losing the Plot”

A bit of a different kind of review today – I bought this book at an event with Derek Owusu and Kehinde Andrews in conversation run by The Heath Bookshop, and then I spotted it on my friend Paula’s Facebook page as something she was planning to read for her book group this month. A plan was formulated and we both started reading the book last Saturday, with me finishing it that afternoon and Paula a few days later. And then we had what turned out to be a very interesting conversation, which I summarise here after a quick description of the book and my initial thoughts on it. [edited to add: please also note the discussion and Mr Owusu’s response, which I felt it only fair to include].

Derek Owusu – “Losing the Plot”

(30 November 2023, The Heath Bookshop author event)

Son, she calls, before he closes the door. He prefers son to any other calling, loves the drop of tone through those three letters, sounding stretched but comfortable in their balance, a name he’s proud of, a lustrous designation so small but brilliant, a reaction of love touching his entire body when his mother summons him with such a small word capable of palpitating all the air around him.

He forgets annoyance, every anger an act when love struggled to escape.

Yes, Mum.

Make sure you off your light. Last night I had to come and close it for you. You know it’s only me paying electricity, if you like try and pay.

Night, Mum. (p. 114)

Summary and my reaction

In this poetic novella, Owusu shows a fictional version of his mother’s journey to the UK from Ghana, her life here with her two children, eventually a single mum to them. Laid out like biblical commentary, we have his reactions and comments in the margins, sort-of explaining translations from the Twi language, interacting with the text, still in a fictional form.

He covers a wide range of issues: I struggled to understand some passages but let myself float through them, feeling my experience of confusion was something like the confusion of being in a different country with a different language experienced by the main character. There’s a telling point where the son tries to tell the mum she’s experiencing depression when he’s a mid-teen, and is given short shrift, echoing other texts I’ve read about Global Majority communities’ attitudes to mental health.

As well as a note on translations being impossible, we also find an Epilogue which purports to be a discussion between Owusu and his mum to find out details of her life for his book, which she refuses to engage with – at the author event I attended, he discussed this with obvious fondness, amusement and respect, which is important for our discussion below.

Paula’s review

I probably wouldn’t have picked this up, but I saw it in the library and chose it to fit the January theme of Own Voices for the online Nerdy Up North Bookclub.

The author is Ghanaian, and the book is his imaginary vision of his mother’s journey from Ghana to England, and her life as an immigrant. It is very different to anything else I have read recently. As I was reading it, I was glad that I picked it up, even though I wasn’t exactly enjoying the reading, and even though I thought I was only really understanding about 50% of the content.

It is written in a poetic style, giving impressions of scenes rather than detailed descriptions. The text contains many many side notes, some of which are revealing, and others of which were just as opaque as the main body of the text. The text also contains a lot of the Twi language (which I expected to be explained, if not directly translated, in the side notes, but it was not).

And then I finally got to the epilogue, which is an interview between the author and his mum, and discovered that his mum was very explicit in saying that she did not want to discuss her past and did not want the author to make her past or any of her story into a book! I am deeply disturbed that the author has so little respect for his mum that he went ahead and wrote this book anyway, despite her refusing consent. I am even more disturbed that there was no moral or ethical code for the publishers that prevented the publication of the book. I am deeply angry that I have been pulled into the exploitation of a woman of colour, who already has so much of society stacked up against her.

Paula and I discuss the book

Paula explicity asked me for my thoughts on having attended the book event and heard Owusu discuss it in person. My first reaction to that was to put my “reader response theory” hat on and say it shouldn’t be down to going to an author event to understand a book and not be angry! I took that hat right off, though, as I tweeted Owusu to ask him if the Epilogue was fictional (I really didn’t know at this point) or factual (he does say in the book it’s “factless”). I mentioned that he seemed amused and respectful and that it chimed with narratives I’ve read before about first-generation immigrants not wanting to dwell on their experiences and wanting to just look forward, while their children and grandchildren wanted details. I remembered “Maame” in this, where nothing was discussed until it suddenly was.

So, I asked Owusu, “Discussing with a friend who has also read it: is the Epilogue part of the fiction or absolutely true? Sorry if ridiculous question!” and he replied, almost immediately, “Hey! Thanks for reading. But yeah, the epilogue is part of the fiction. It’s mainly there to help understand and add to the ‘ellusive’ nature of everything you read before it.” I was more happy with that, although glad Paula had raised the issue: she made the completely fair point, “It doesn’t really take away the feeling of shock, that I’m still getting over,” and later on she was still considering it a misstep because of the way it was presented like the Sources in a book that cover the non-fiction background to a fictional book, on which, again, I completely see her point. A few days later, Paula said this: “After a few days of reflection, I am still not comfortable with the casual exploitation of his mum’s life experiences. I would be much happier if there was something, even a single sentence at the very end of the book, that confirmed that his mum had indeed given full consent for her story to be told in this way. As it is, I still don’t have an answer to that question, and that still makes me very uncomfortable.”

[Edited to add:]

Mr Owusu responded to my sharing of this review, reiterating in a Tweet:

Thanks for reading and this write up. Just to clarify quickly, the entire book is fictional. Nothing in it happened to or has anything to do with my mother. I don’t know anything about her life, so could not ‘exploit’ it. She’s just the inspiration for my writing it.

with Paula’s response: “I’m delighted to hear it! I just wish the text of that tweet had appeared somewhere in the actual book”.

[End of edit]

Paula and I agreed on being absolutely fine with the Twi bits, however untranslated, and agreed it’s our job to look those bits up if we choose to, and any cultural artefacts we were unfamiliar with. We also agreed on how editing must retain the author’s voice and get that across (editing was also discussed at the book event). And we were both glad that we’d had this interesting and robust conversation (via Facebook Messenger) and were impressed at Owusu answering my question so quickly.

I showed Paula my planned text for this review and she had full editorial / veto rights over what I published.

This was Book 5 in my 2024 TBR project – just 136 to go!

Book review – Jeff Horowitz – “Quick Strength for Runners”

I don’t think I actually acknowledged this when I bought it – I had to get it from an Online Retailer I don’t usually buy from as it was showing with a long lead time on Bookshop.org which I know from experience will end up with a cancelled order and will also be tricky for the bookshop to order in directly. So there it is, probably the only new book bought from there in 2023. I bought the book because a runner whose blog I follow both highlighted it and confirmed it had been useful to her. Did I keep a note of who? No, I did not. So if it was you, please comment with a link to your piece about it!

As for my running, after an issue that was waiting to be an injury in January 2023 and two bouts of Covid and another health issue (also now resolved) just for me last year, my running suffered and I had comeback after comeback but I’m feeling better and stronger now and have got myself up to a 5 mile run/walk and almost 10 miles per week. I hope I can maintain that now.

Jeff Horowitz – “Quick Strength for Runners: 8 Weeks to a Better Runner’s Body”

(21 December 2023)

It’s important for runners to do strength training especially as we get older, to prevent injury and help us to stay strong. Maintaining bone density is important in women travelling through and beyond menopause (hello!) and so I was intrigued by my friend’s review and then by the simple structure of the book.

Please note: I have read through all the text, studied the exercises and leafed through the first few weeks’ sessions, but I haven’t put these into use yet. I will come back and update you all when I’ve done my 8 weeks.

I was a bit put off by the inclusion of proper push-ups in the exercises section and relieved when the actual sessions said you can do kneeling ones, as I haven’t been able to do a proper one for a while. I am a bit worried about my form but they’re all standard exercises so I should be able to look them up if I’m worried. The routines look fairly straightforward and the basic versions only need a mat, some weights and a Swiss ball, all of which I have.

Watch this space!

This was Book 4 in my 2024 TBR project – just 137 to go!

Book reviews – Three “Three Investigators” Mysteries

I’m not doing amazingly well with my TBR 2024 project, however I have read an “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators” mystery from my pile at the end of the TBR every week this year so far. I thought I’d review them in threes as they’re quite slight.

Just to clarify on the numbering, I have got most of the earlier ones in one form or another (see my wishlist) but I’ve read quite a few of them already, which I must have done as I got them, as I have skipped a few then have these then skip more. I probably reviewed the earlier ones on here at some point.

Robert Arthur – “The Mystery of the Green Ghost” (No 4)

(28 January 2019 – From Sian)

These three books all have an introduction “by” Alfred Hitchcock: at some point the association withers away. Also it’s worth noting that “Robert Arthur” was a series of different authors, as often happens with series. Anyway in this one, Jupiter, Bob and Pete find ghostly screams coming from an abandoned house, and then embark on an adventure full of massive racism against the Chinese community of California – it’s also not great on Mexican winery workers, either. Lots of stereotypes including stereotyped speech, mystical robes and strange beliefs, and the fact that the Chinese community doesn’t like to interact much with the White community (maybe because historically they had experienced much Othering and racism and only been allowed to work in certain jobs, etc.!) makes for uncomfortable reading nowadays of course: the book was first published in 1965. There’s amusement in the inclusion of a police chief who thinks he’s seen a ghost but can’t admit it, which is why three teenage boys are allowed to investigate. Runaway horses and a scary set of mineshafts increase the excitement factor and it all comes clear in the end.

Robert Arthur – “The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure” (No 5)

(22 November 2012, Barnardos charity shop)

In this one, Hitchcock asks the boys to help a friend of his who is being plagued by gnomes. Off they go to her house, situated between a disused theatre and a bank, and what do we find but some pretty rough ableism as, and this is not really a spoiler given that there’s always a logical reason for the happenings in these books, we have a group of People of Short Stature who, again, all band together, live in a house together, engage in crime and resist the police and all look the same (marvellous). They are at least resourceful and clever, even though they do not have much agency and are run by a criminal gang. This is the book where Jupiter is slightly tempted by the criminal lifestyle, which I don’t think happens again in the series.

Robert Arthur – “The Mystery of the Silver Spider” (No 8)

(22 November 2012, Barnardos charity shop)

There is no racism or abelism in this one although it’s a bit weird about Europe in places. The boys meet the prince of a made-up tiny country who insists they come and visit for his coronation. Then they’re recruited as spies (of course they are) and there’s a complicated plot about a group of dissidents who are trying to protect the prince from his uncle, the regent, who wants to retain power. It’s quite cleverly done and I think the only one to go off to Europe, though I might be wrong. There’s also some clever literary foreshadowing going on as the boys observe a cricket struggling in a spider’s web shortly before … well, one, two or all of them captured at some point in every book … This was a gripping one and the shortest of the three at 126 pages. It also has an afterword “from” Hitchcock then is the only one of these 1970s Armada reprints of the 1960s originals to have this end page:

It’s funny to see the Three Investigators mentioned alongside the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew as in my experience they are much less well-known than those two, and I had to look up the Lone Piners, then discovered they were from the Malcolm Saville Lone Pine series which I’m pretty sure I also read! Racism and ableism notwithstanding, these are competent and exciting books and I do like the combination of athletic skill with deductive reasoning and good old-fashioned research.

These were Books 1-3 in my 2024 TBR project – just 138 to go!

I’ve not disappeared!

I’m aware that not only am I horribly behind with reading everyone else’s blog posts, I haven’t posted myself for nine days. What’s happened to my TBR project? Where have I gone?

Well, I can reassure you (not that anyone will have noticed my absence!) that I have read two Three Investigators Mysteries from my TBR, but I’m going to review them in fours at the end of each month (and oh dear, I need to talk about what I’ll be kind and call stereotypes, much thinking to be done there before reviewing!), and I’m currently reading a book about strength training for runners.

I had no book reviews hanging over from last year to fill in the gap this year, although I’ll soon have a Shiny New Books review out and then I’ll share my more personal review of the same book here.

In the meantime, I’m working my way through these three lovelies (above). The Jan Morris biography by Paul Clements is excellent but very thorough and old-school, treating the books, their critical reaction, etc., and so it’s taking a while to work through. I heartily recommend that everyone immediately gets hold of a copy of Alastair Humphreys’ “Local” which is a marvellous book about exploring his local map, and “Human Origins” by Sarah Wild is proving fascinating, too. But I need to finish them all and review them for Shiny and then I will talk a bit about them on here.

See you soon! (ish) and hope everyone’s having a lovely 2024 so far. What’s the SECOND book you’ve started?

Book review – Kiran Sidhu – “I Can Hear the Cuckoo”

I requested this book from NetGalley after seeing it on Paul Halfman Halfbook’s blog post about upcoming books – one of his other commenters mentioned they were going to look them up on NG and I followed suit and ended up with a couple. This was actually published in May 2023 but publishers’ catalogues often cover long periods. Anyway, I don’t normally read bereavement memoirs, which is what I think this would be counted as, as I was more attracted by the subtitle, “Life in the Wilds of Wales” and the author’s name, which indicated some kind of South Asian heritage. I also didn’t notice it was one of those NetGalley books that’s only available through the Shelf app, which makes for a less smooth reading experience: more on that later.

Kiran Sidhu – “I Can Hear the Cuckoo: Life in the Wilds of Wales”

(2 Jan 2024, NetGalley)

Reading this book on my tablet through the NetGalley shelf app was a slightly tricky job, as it came out in double-spread pages in an odd font, with the next page accessed by swiping downwards, so you had to go left – right – down diagonally to the left – right, etc., and there were a lot of short chapters which meant there might be a blank left-hand page, getting you flustered. You can also only bookmark a page (in this case, sometimes it came out as a double page) rather than highlighting text, making it difficult to remember what exact bits you want to mention in your review. Anyway, reader, I did manage.

This is a memoir of the move Sidhu and her husband Simon made to a small village in Wales a couple of years after the death of her mother (Sidhu was 40, her mother 62) and subsequent family fall-out. Fleeing their city life in London, they adapt to what they at first think is quiet and isolation, but they soon find they can hear all the sounds of nature and see their neighbours across the fields, knowing their routines as well as their own. They’re helped to settle in by the people from the B’n’B they stay in on their first visit, people with their own family troubles, and they get to know other residents and incomers, including the farmer, Wilf, with whom Sidhu has profound conversations that often make them both weep.

Sidhu doesn’t mention her Indian heritage much, apart from musing on how Indian women are often put upon wherever they are, and that she was uncomfortable with the assumption she did or should have children when she went to visit relatives there. She notes it’s odd to be a Brown woman in a rural Welsh setting, but also notes that everyone’s different there and you are compelled into companionship with people with whom you have little in common; also, everything has been there for centuries and is infinite so that pales into insignificance. There was an interesting bit about how her dual heritage made her more flexible and able to accept multiple perspectives.

As the year turns, they settle in and see how a different life can be lived. Although it seems like her horizons are smaller, there is so much more detail and texture, and she mulls over this and what is often called “chosen family” which she finds here as well as the kindness of strangers she has met along her way, who she thinks of at particular times of the year. Healing happens, and acceptance that the expected ways are not always the best ones, especially around Christmas, the time her mother passed away, which now is the most painful season. Some sad animal stuff happens, but it’s not gratuitous or told in detail. There’s a pleasing map of the valley in the front of the book.

So although this was more of a bereavement memoir than I expected and might be difficult to read if you’re losing someone (or comforting, as she finds her way through) there was a lot of value in it for me.

Thank you to Octopus Publishing for choosing me to read this book in return for an honest review. “I Can Hear the Cuckoo” was published on 11 April 2003. It hasn’t had much reviewing on NetGalley yet and deserves to pick up a few more readers.

State of the TBR – January 2024

It’s got big compared to last month! However, I have had a lot of acquisitions even before the Christmas ones (see here for my interim print incomings) I took five print books off the TBR and acquired eighteen more, although I did read two of them during the month. I took just the one oldest book off the TBR and read that – this situation is going to change very soon: see my report of my new reading challenge for 2024 below!

I completed 12 books in December (one with a review to be published as I’m reviewing it for Shiny New Books), including five for Dean Street December (see the round-up post for that here, as it was a challenge I ran). I am part-way through two more (including my current Reading With Emma Read). I had already read my one NetGalley book for December so I read an October one but acquired a million more, and my NetGalley review percentage is still 92% which is the good thing about having read loads already.

Incomings

As well as the interim incomings, discussed here,

My lovely BookCrossing not so secret santa Julia gave me three lovely books as well as chocolate and a lovely cloth bag. I opened A. S. Byatt’s short stories, “Elementals”; Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George’s “This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books” is a big booklist of a book with lots of enticing titles listed; and Scot Jurek’s “North” is his book about running the Appalachian Trail. Emma treated me to two Dean Street Press Furrowed Middlebrow reissues: Ursula Orange’s “Begin Again” and “Tom Tiddler’s Ground” and Ali bought me two Persephone books, Madeline Linford’s “Out of the Window” and Sian James’ “One Afternoon”.

I went on a terrible NetGalley spree in December, not helped by a couple of emails containing Read Now books (that you don’t even have to request)!

I was offered Julie Shackman’s “The Bookshop by the Loch” (published January) by the publisher and can never resist a light novel set in a bookshop, this one in Scotland; Shauna Robinson’s “The Secret Book Club” (Jan) is set in a weird American bookshop that only allows certain books to be sold. Ryan Hopkins’ “52 Weeks of Wellbeing” and Kayla Ihrig’s “How to be a Digital Nomad” (both Jan and fairly self-explanatory) were Read Now books I spotted on NetGalley emails. Kiran Sidhu’s “I Can Hear the Cuckoo: Life in the Wilds of Wales” (May 2023, I think) and Matt Gaw’s “In All Weathers: A Journey Through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice and Everything In Between” (March, I know) I spotted on Halfman Halfbook’s list of upcoming books; another commenter said they’d looked for some on NetGalley and I did too – oops). “Real Americans” by Rachel Khong (April) is a multigenerational look at the American Dream from the perspective of a family who move there from China; “Dominoes” by Phoebe McIntosh (March) has the fascinating premise of a Black girl going out with a White boy and discovering the horror behind their shared surname. Jane Oremosu and Dr Maggie Semple have put together “My Little Black Book: A Blacktionary” (5 Oct 2023) to guide readers through the language of race. Finally, everyone is going to be talking about “Fourteen Days” (Feb), a pandemic-times Decameron written by a whole host of different writers, from Atwood to Grisham, although NetGalley readers so far have given it 3/5 stars on average.

I fell prey to 99p Kindle book sales on Amazon in December:

I did want Reverend Richard Coles’ second novel and was turned down for it by NetGalley having read the first from there, so picked up “A Death in the Parish”. I loved Fern Brady on the Taskmaster series before last and “Strong Female Character” is her memoir about being a neurodivergent woman. Trevor Horn’s memoir, “From ABC to ZTT: Adventures in Modern Recording” was necessary, it seemed, and I have been seeing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” mentioned so much so that book about Indigenous science and wisdom popped into my Kindle, too.

So that was 12 read and 32 coming in in December (of which I have already read two) but it’s not good, is it!

Currently reading

Emma and I are have only a few chapters left of Cal Flyn’s “Islands of Abandonment” and are still thoroughly enjoying it. I’m reading Paul Clements’ biography of Jan Morris, “Life From Both Sides” and am about to start whichever NetGalley book is oldest on my Kindle.

Coming up and my 2024 reading challenge

Coming up this month I need to finish my review books then it’s TBR challenge time! I have created a page for it here but basically I’m going to try to read my whole print TBR as of end December 2023 during 2024 – that’s 142 books. [edited to add: I have so many lovely books and it’s horrible to see them sitting there and not getting around to reading them. This will change.] These in the photo are the oldest ones on the shelf though I will try to read a Three Investigators book a week for a while at least. Wish me luck! I will also use these to fulfil any challenges I do but as usual won’t buy new books for those. Not sure if I have any for Dewithon or Reading Ireland; I have some for Aus Reading Month, Novellas and Nonfiction in November, Dean Street December and of course 20 Books of Summer!

I also have the million NetGalley books published in January:

Some of these you’ve heard about above, I’m excited about Kiley Reid’s new novel, “Come and Get it” and “Not the End of the World” gives hope for the planet, apparently.

With the ones I’m currently reading, that’s two book to finish and nineteen or so to read, which is unlikely to happen, I feel!

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How was your December reading? What are you reading this month? Are you planning any book challenges for the year? Have you read or picked up any of my selection?