State of the TBR – December 2023

Well, it has gone down a little compared to last month! I took seven print books off the TBR including a couple of fairly substantial ones, and acquired five more, of which two were review books so don’t join the main run of it. I did not take any of the oldest books off the TBR and I need to address that if I can this month!

I completed 14 books in November (four with reviews to be published, as I did a lot of NonFiction November posts in the month), including seven for NonFiction November and five for Novellas in November. I also successfully ran one of the weeks of Nonfiction November which I thoroughly enjoyed doing, although the admin for it did knock a bit out of my reading time! Of the print books I put in a virtual pile to read at the start of the month, I read and reviewed five. I am part-way through two more (including my current Reading With Emma Read). I got through five out of the six NetGalley books published in November (DNFing one, three to review) and added one for December then read that, too and no older ones, and my NetGalley review percentage is still 93%.

Incomings

I’ve acquired five print books from publishers, The Heath Bookshop (two at an event) and friends this month:

I’ve just realised “How Bad Are Bananas?” came in the October BookCrossing meetup but can’t face redoing the photo, so ignore that one! Alastair Humphreys’ “Local” has the inveterate traveller doing local stuff during lockdown “Stories for Winter and Nights by the Fire” is the winter volume from the British Library Women Writers imprint, and thank you to both publishers for these. I picked up a British Library Crime Classic at Ali’s flat last weekend, “Suddenly at his Residence” by Christianna Brand is set in Kent, my county of origin, so I couldn’t resist picking it up. I went to a wonderful author event hosted by The Heath Bookshop at the local parish church just last night, and bought and had signed Kehinde Andrews’ “The Psychosis of Whiteness” and Derek Owusu’s novel “Losing the Plot” and am very much looking forward to getting to those.

I won just the four NetGalley books this month Good news is I have already got one of them read even though it’s published this month!

I was offered Ela Lee’s “Jaded” (published Feb 2024) by the publisher, apparently a good one for fans of “Queenie”, “The List” and “I May Destroy You” looking at the effect of a sexual assault on a young Black woman’s life and career. Christie Barlow’s “The Library on Love Heart Lane” (December) is another in her series, with a lot of regular characters reappearing, and will be reviewed soon. Michael Meyer’s “A Dirty, Filthy Book” (Feb 2024) uses previously unpublished material to examine Annie Besant’s trial for distributing literature on birth control and Ishi Robinson’s “Sweetness in the Skin” (April 2024) which I was also offered by the publisher, has a young woman desperate to follow her aunt from Jamaica to France, with her mother trying to stop her.

I bought none on Kindle and I DNF’d “Death Checked Out” plus its sequel on NetGalley as didn’t enjoy the worry of reading a modern mystery!

So that was 14 read and 9 coming in in October (of which I have already read one) so I feel I’m going back in the right direction!

Currently reading

Emma and I are almost half-way through Cal Flyn’s “Islands of Abandonment” and are still thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve started the review book “You’re all Talk” and it’s fascinating so far.

Coming up

Coming up this month I have four review books plus I’m going to be reading at least these four for Dean Street December, maybe more if any arrive for Christmas – see my introductory post here.

I have read my one NetGalley book for December so I might delve into my older ones or my general Kindle books once I have finished the above.

With the ones I’m currently reading, that’s one books to finish and eight definitely to read, which is doable, I think.

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How was your November reading? What are you reading this month? Did you do Novellas in November or Nonfiction November and are you taking part in Dean Street December? Have you read or picked up any of my selection?

Book review – Marcia Ann Gillespie, Rosa Johnson Butler and Richard A. Long – “Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration”

Sneaking one last book in for the Novellas in November challenge, hosted by Bookish Beck (links collected here) and Cathy 746 Books, and for Nonfiction November, hosted through November by five of us, this was the next-oldest novella on my TBR. I had made a pile of thirteen novellas to choose from, and managed five of them: I wish I’d read the James Baldwin and will get that read and returned to Ali way before next November. I bought this book in January 2022; I had read Angelou’s autobiographies and put her books of essays on my wish list and Ali bought me them for my birthday, and I must have spotted this one and snapped it up (second-hand).

Marcia Ann Gillespie, Rosa Johnson Butler and Richard A. Long – “Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration”

(8 January 2022)

This book was published as a celebration for Angelou’s 80th birthday, so it’s a happy and positive book and has so many photos and extra bits, as it was written using Angelou’s family archives. We follow her story with quotations from the autobiographies and other pieces and interviews, and the whole is enhanced with photographs with her many friends – I particularly liked the ones with James Baldwin and Decca Mitford, a great friend in later life.

There are also posters, reproductions of manuscripts and book covers and all sorts of other things, which makes it a lovely resource. Oprah Winfrey wrote the Foreword. Angelou’s son, Guy, becomes more prominent, his voice shared, and of course it goes beyond the autobiographies, so we see Guy becoming a father and grandfather, with a very affecting photo of Angelou with her great-granddaughter at the end.

One to keep with the autobiographies and essays, and to treasure.

This was Book 5 for Novellas in November and Book 7 for Nonfiction November.

Nonfiction November Week 5: New to my TBR

It’s the final week of of Nonfiction November – thank you so much to all my co-hosts! I have to say I have really enjoyed being one of the co-hosts, I’ve never done a shared challenge host before and it was lovely to have the group and share progress and plans! I’m so glad we managed to save the month between us, and thank you to all my regular and new readers who joined in!

I’ve also enjoyed doing NonFiction November again as a participant, responding to all the prompts, and I’ve read and reviewed (hopefully; one to come later today) seven nonfiction books.

This week it’s New to my TBR time! I always save it to post at the end of the week because I usually see books on other people’s roundups that I fancy. For me, these books aren’t necessarily going on my TBR right away, but are going on my wishlist. I waited until today to look at everyone else’s Week Fives as there’s always something I’ve missed!

Week 5 (11/27-12/1) New To My TBR:  It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book! (Lisa at Hopewell’s Library of Life)

Books I have added to my Wishlist this November

Well, I seem to have a very small list this year! I’ve so enjoyed reading everyone’s posts but a lot of the exciting books they showcased were already on my wishlist (or I already had; or I’d recommended to them!) So a small list …

Nick Hunt – “Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes” – from Market Garden Reader’s Week 1 post.

Hawon Jung – “Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What it Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide” – from Book’d Out’s Week 1 post.

Paul Wood – “London is a Forest” by Paul Wood – from Halfman Halfbook’s Week 5 post.

And one book I have seen mentioned so many times, I already had it on my wishlist but it’s now top to purchase once I know what books have arrived for Christmas and my birthday:

Debra Dank – “We Come With This Place” – from Whispering Gums’ Weeks 4 & 5 post.

What about last year’s list?

These are the books I added to my wishlist last year:

Terri Janke – “True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous Knowledge and Culture”

Dylan Taylor-Lehman – “Sealand: The True Story of the World’s Most Stubborn Micronation”

Rachel Bertsche – “MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend”

Guillaume Pitron – “Digital Hell” (out in English October 2023)

Mark Gevisser – “The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers”

Well, I was quite restrained last year and only added these to my wishlist, aaaand I haven’t bought any of them yet.

So none purchased or otherwise acquired and none read so far! Ah well! Here’s to next November and a hint to everyone doing it – start making notes for all the weeks as you go through the year – much easier than flailing around trying to remember stuff from the previous 12 months!

Book review – Paul Okalik – “Let’s Move On”

Finally another book read for my Novellas in November challenge, hosted by Bookish Beck (links collected here) and Cathy 746 Books. This was the oldest novella on my TBR and I’m pretty sure I had it on my list for last year, too. I read most of it on bus journeys to and from town for my BookCrossing meetup. I bought it back in December 2021, disappointed I was struggling to get hold of Indigenous Canadian books but then finding this on the dreaded Amazon.

Paul Okalik – “Let’s Move On: Paul Okalik Speaks Out”

(21 December 2021)

This wasn’t the most dynamic book in the world: we get Okalik’s life in his own words (I think interviewed and then ghost-written by Louis McComber), and then a historical context by McComber which outlines Canada’s relationship with its Indigenous peoples and the formation of Nunavut, the first majority-Inuit territory with self-government, as well as the challenges that developed, mainly in trying to find people to run the government when their education and well-being had been suppressed for so long.

Okalik himself had a fairly shaky start in life, forced to attend school in English, but learning his own community’s traditions too, and losing a brother in distressing circumstances. He turned to alcohol and chaos but turned himself around, with the help of strong female family members, and went through law school, then helped with negotiations around the land settlement and setting up of the territory, before serving as its first premier and member of the government for a number of years.

He’s not shy in setting out his principles and ethics here, and in calling for more support for those who struggle and more support for language and land rights. It’s also noteworthy that being a member of a minority group himself, he has been vocal in calling for rights for women and people from the LGBTQ community.

The extra information and bibliography are useful for anyone who wishes to go into such matters. It was a bit dry but any book about setting up a government is going to have its less thrilling moments and it did the job of educating and informing, I felt.

This was Book 4 for Novellas in November and Book 6 for Nonfiction November.

Book review – Anna Jones – “Divide”

I spotted this on NetGalley and was intrigued by what I expected to be a sort of cross between the nature and sociology books I enjoy reading – as indeed it was. Jones is a journalist on countryside and farming matters who grew up on a small farm but has lived for years in the city, so she’s well-placed to bridge this divide she identifies, and it’s a very interesting read. I will admit here that I grew up in a countryside village, surrounded by crops and fields of animals, yet it was a commuter village and I didn’t know any farmers.

Anna Jones – “Divide: The Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country”

(NetGalley, 27 October 2023)

In my view, the disconnect can best be described as collective memory loss. We have simply forgotten where we all came from.

Taking themes such as family, food and environment, and starting interestingly talking to people who have returned to farming or started it entirely, Jones’ central point is that the town and the country really do not understand each other and both suffer from misconceptions, people from both communities need to move positions and a middle ground needs to be found.

She draws from both her own lived experience, growing up on a small farm in a family that has generations of farmers, going to live in the city and having her perceptions changed, living with a partner who’s a foodie who doesn’t think where that food is coming from and considering moving back to the countryside. But she also uses her work and research and member of / organisation of various initiatives to give a more rounded and diverse picture, leading to a fascinating and detailed book that includes a wide variety of voices.

Jones looks at what farmers can do to diversify their individual lives so they take time off and how diversity in farming and associated professions, like large animal vets, can be improved and also benefit the industry. The chapter on politics was fascinating, linking small-c conservatism to farming areas but also pointing out her own education in different ways of thinking when in an urban environment; but then also in the food chapter looked, as I said, at the way people in towns have become separated from knowing or thinking about where their food comes from, however foodie they might consider themselves to be.

Everywhere, though, she points out subtleties and people bucking the stereotypes (while also acknowledging people do match them, too, and we can’t ignore that), trying to pull people together to reach an understanding that will eventually help food security and mitigate against climate change.

A deeply felt and passionate book that is well backed up with information and case studies, with a lot of interesting content.

Thank you to Octopus Publishing for approving me to read a copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Divide” was published on 14 September 2023.

This was Book 5 for Nonfiction November.

Nonfiction November Week 4: Worldview Shapers

Can you believe it’s Nonfiction November Week 4 already? Thank you so much to all my co-hosts and to all the people who contributed to my week of Pairings last week!

Week 4 (11/20-11/24) Worldview Shapers: One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone? (Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction the post will go live at 1pm UK time so do pop back then; the linkz is already live here)

I’ve kept this to my books read since the beginning of last November.

Here are some books which have taught me something really new and I suggest people have a look at to do some serious learning and the theme would be social justice.

Chelsea Watego – “Another Day in the Colony“, Anita Heiss (ed.) – “Growing up Aboriginal in Australia“, Claire G. Coleman – “Lies, Damn Lies” These books all educated me on the current lives of people of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander heritage in Australia and their communities’ troubled histories once the colonialists invaded.

Alison Mariella Desir’s “Running While Black” and Gina Yashere’s “Cack-Handed” and Lenny Henry’s “Who Am I Again?” brought home the challenges of being a Black runner (the first one) and a Black person in the British entertainment industry respectively.

Riva Lehrer’s “Golem Girl” gave much-needed insight into lives lived with a disability, activism and attitudes, and Travis Alabanza’s “None of the Above” continued my education in transgender studies.

It’s interesting that all of these are effectively memoirs, however none of them are JUST memoirs, all of them drawing on other people’s experiences and sharing and highlighting histories that have been lost or suppressed over the years. If you want a course of reading in social justice and different kinds of people’s lives, these might be a good place to start (my social justice categories will give you more).

Book review – Fuchsia Dunlop – “Invitation to a Banquet”

Another book read for Nonfiction November (link to my main post this year as I’m helping to host). I read about it on the Daisybutter blog and requested it from NetGalley: I won it in October and was meant to read it then but it got away from me – and I won it after it had been published in August. Some solid holiday reading got me almost caught up though so should be on track soon.

Fuchsia Dunlop – “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food”

(06 October 2023, NetGalley)

Just as Chinese cooks have always asked ‘How can I make this edible?’ they have also asked, ‘And what else can I do with this?’ They applied this practice of culinary interrogation to all the parts of a pig, the hard yellow soybean and practically every other ingredient, animal and vegetable.

It initially felt a bit disappointing that this wasn’t an “own voices” book, i.e. Dunlop is solidly White British and her introduction to Chinese food was, like for many of us, sweet and sour pork balls from the local takeaway. However, she has studied Chinese cookery at a Chinese cookery school, is fluent in at least one language and now runs tasting tours, having spent three decades loving this cuisine, writing cookery books, etc. So if anyone non-Chinese is eligible to write this, it’s probably her. She also gives her mentors and predecessors their dues, whether that’s the restaurateur she works with who has set up a farm to provide traditional food ingredients, previous writers or the legions of people who settled in the West and did what they could to adapt their food to local tastes.

The book is structured around different meals or ingredients, or groups (like noodles) which allows an in-depth look a an area, food technique, farming tradition, history or all of those. I did have to speed through the “mouthfeel” section which included all sorts of textures this pretty-well-vegetarian European woman is not too keen on. She also addresses the issues around the idea that the Chinese will eat anything out of poverty or muckiness and explains it as above, and she talks about the taste for “exotic” products which she partook in earlier and now knows isn’t right, and the way people are working to make alternative versions.

A very detailed book which has a panoply of information; I was struck by various bits of information about different parts of Chinese cuisine we never see here, though I had in fact heard about some of them through the book on the Silk Road I read recently. She includes lists of cooking techniques and different tastes, and has notes, a bibliography and an index, so a good resource.

Thank you to Allen Lane for choosing me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Invitation to a Banquet” was published on 31 August 2023.

This was Book 4 for Nonfiction November.

Nonfiction November Week 3: Book Pairings – The Starter Post

It’s my turn to host a week of NonFiction November – how exciting! Here’s my prompt and my own response, with info below on how to link yours.

Week 3: (November 13-17) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like! You can feel free to use books you’ve read any time in this last year or whenever.

As I’m running this week (hooray) do pop a link to this post in yours and add your post to the Inlinks at the bottom which should hopefully work … If you have trouble, pop your link in a comment.

Trans and non-binary lives

Earlier in the year, I read Travis Alabanza’s “None of the Above” and Imogen Binnie’s “Nevada” and was so struck by their similarities that I decided to draft a blog post for this week of NonFiction November! Then, when it was time to pick a week, I knew which one I wanted to do. A quote from my review of “None of the Above” covers the links between these two books:

Being trans and thinking about gender take an enormous amount of both protagonists’ time and energy. The horrific reactions of cisgendered people to someone who presents as neither male nor female and the threat that people perceive in “a man in a dress” (Travis’ description of how they are seen), even though a) Travis is orientated towards men in their sexuality and b) the most threatening person to a woman is a cis heterosexual man, which seems to need repeating over and over again, or even the greater support they receive from bystanders when insulted on the street if they seem to conform to the gender binary. Alabanza also practises what they call “zooming out” and later name as dissociation, which is what Maria in the novel also does when things become too much. And there’s discussion about the process of transition, about how not everyone who wants chemical and surgical transition can afford to do so, and about how not everyone wants that in the first place.

British Chinese lives

These two books, read more recently, offered a view of Chinese English lives in the 1980s (ish) through a straight memoir, “Takeaway“, and a novel based on memoir (autofiction), “Chinglish“. Both of them explore what it was like to grow up the only person of Chinese heritage in the area, the embarrassment of living above and working in a takeaway, the abuse and racism the families experienced, and even almost-identical scenes of an enraged older male family member chasing off a potential thief while wielding a machete. I’d also mention here “Invitation to a Banquet” (review and thus link to come) which is a history of Chinese food and mentions the novel “Sour Sweet” by Timothy Mo, which I read pre-blog.

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What fiction and nonfiction can you pair up? Please add your post to the Link Party below if you can, and link back to this post in yours, or if you don’t have a blog, tell me in the comments!

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Book review – Lucille Clifton – “Generations: A Memoir”

Another book which covers two challenges this month – Nonfiction November (link to my main post this year as I’m helping to host) and Novellas in November, hosted by Bookish Beck (links collected here) and Cathy 746 Books. I acquired this book in December 2021 in one of the very kind packages of books Bookish Beck has shared with me over the years (and I’ve now read or given up on four of the five books from that parcel!), so it’s nice to circle round and include it in her challenge.

Lucille Clifton – “Generations: A Memoir”

(11 December 2021, Bookish Beck)

She and I were in the first car and she turned to me when it came and took my arm. Lucille and Lucille. She was an old woman, an old soldier. I took her hand as we stepped into the car. I too was straight and quiet. Mammy Ca’line’s great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter. Dahomey women. We rode to the church in silence. (p. 61)

With an introduction by Tracy K. Smith, presumably because it’s a New York Review of Books reprint of this work originally published in 1976, which places it within histories of American people, this small and complex book, which circles back around its themes in the way memory in a family does, describes the lives and heritages of the author’s family, going back to her great-great-grandmother, Caroline, who was born a free woman in Dahomey in 1822 and died a free woman in America in 1910 but was an enslaved person from when she was eight.

The author Lucille’s father has just died and she travels to his house where she re-encounters her two half-sisters and goes over their family history, one that echoes so many in Black American history, with children torn from their mothers, Black husbands and White husbands and a strand of strong independence and pride in their African roots. Interwoven with Walt Whitman quotes and including reproductions of faded old photographs, it’s a mesmerising and poetic piece, perhaps best read in one sitting, as I did.

This was Book 2 for Novellas in November and Book 3 for Nonfiction November.

Book review – Chris Aslan – “Unravelling The Silk Road”

A book from NetGalley I should have read last month but can now at least read for Nonfiction November (link to my main post this year as I’m helping to host). I was attracted to this one because the description said it was a mix of the history of central Asia and the author’s own experiences. Which it was, but I have to say it was a bit of a grimmer read than I was expecting.

Chris Aslan – “Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia”

(22 June 2023, NetGalley)

If I’d known during my student trip along the Silk Road that I would return to live in these countries and get gored by a yak, swim illegally to Afghanistan and back, unsuccessfully smuggle gems, share a cage with a snow leopard, weep with survivors of ethnic cleansing and get expelled from two countries, I’d have been as surprised at that as the fact that I’d develop a passion for 19th-century Central Asian embroidery.

First of all, and refreshingly, Aslan is not your traditional White male travel writer, all misery and looking down at tourists and purist and thinking he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Aslan gives a wamr, honest and self-deprecating account of his own times in Central Asia, interrogating his younger self’s opinions and reactions and pointing out where they are lacking. He talks a lot about the different initiatives he helped to set up to aid women and textile workers to revive different techniques and make a living but makes sure it’s clear it’s not all his work and to appreciate the people who did the work on the ground. He’s also obviously an expert on the region and a lover of its textiles and this shines through. I really liked the first person narrative as a result.

The history side of things does need to be told. Aslan is really good at explaining wide shifts and cultural travels – for example the way that bright Indian chintz motifs were copied by teh British, then copied by the Russians and sold in brighter versions in Turkestan, then being copied and adapted for a million middle-class women by Laura Ashley. The way the Wool, Silk and Cotton Roads have brought misery to the long-term nomadic inhabitants of the -stans that make up Central Asia is told really well and clearly, both old disputes and sweeping colonialism and more recent disputes whipped up between different ethnic groups cohabiting uneasily in lands with borders created in the main by Soviet Russia without a thought about who lived there and who might try to escape there. This made for unremittingly grim and sad reading – which is fine, of course, and it’s necessary to record this, but it’s not your travel memoir with a bit of history thrown in.

Aslan does a fine job of writing a bit of a different book to how it was portrayed, and clearly has a deep love for the region and its people and a deep respect for and impetus to help those people and especially craftspeople.

Thank you to Icon Books for choosing me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Unravelling the Silk Road” was published on 17 October 2023.

This was Book 2 for Nonfiction November.