April 2025 In Books: What I'm Reading

It was on National Public Radio's list of the best books of 2024, so I've just finished reading The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder by C L Miller and found it a pleasant distraction from a busy week at university. The British author draws on family knowledge of the antiques trade to set up a murder mystery where Freya Lockwood, an ex-antiques expert turned housewife and mother, reluctantly attempts to resolve the death of her former mentor. It was so soothing and likable, despite being literarily a little wobbly on its legs like a baby deer, that I have immediately begun listening to the audiobook of its 2025 sequel, The Antique Hunter's: Death on the Red Sea.

Cover of The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder
via Goodreads

Also on my list:

Kelly Bishop: The Third Gilmore Girl (audiobook memoir, read by the author)

Hampton Sides: The Wide Wide Sea (Captain James Cook biography, hardcover, gift from godfather)

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

Muhammad Abdul Bari: The Rohingya Crisis

March 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In March, I finished the books All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong and Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and felt satisfied with the progress through my to-be-read list. In Leipzig, the book fair took place as well, but this year it took place without me due to my lingering cold and other personal factors.

All Our Ordinary Stories (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

I also 'binged' the 2025 Canada Reads competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channel (YouTube). The friendly and attentive circle of panellists who were drawn from the books, sports, cooking, and television worlds was — as online commentators noted — less bloodthirsty (for lack of a better word) than in previous years.

Teresa Wong's book is from the Canada Reads longlist.

Besides I've read A Two-Spirit Journey — co-authored by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer, it's a memoir of the extremely difficult life of an Indigenous woman born in the province Ontario — which made it onto the shortlist.

Next up on my Canadian, independently published reading list is another shortlisted book: Dandelion, by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

Dandelion (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

A Two-Spirit Journey was not literarily written, some commentators said. But I thought it did have a style. Listening to it in the audiobook version, I did not find it dry either: I pictured scenes, people and times in my mind, and the spiritual world of Ma-Nee Chacaby's grandmother. On the other hand, I too found that reading about the abuse that the author suffered as a child was very heavy. (All I'll say is that I'd never considered the ethical pros and cons of castration in depth before; but this book led me into that train of thought.) But in the end I'm not sure it's a sound literary criterion to tell somebody that their life is so difficult that one doesn't want to read about it.

A Two-Spirit Journey (cover)
University of Manitoba Press

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a lengthy look at United States immigration policy since the early 1900s. The journalist author (New Yorker) interweaves life stories of individual Latin American asylum seekers as case studies, convincingly arguing that US foreign policy missteps exacerbate problems in Latin American countries, resulting then in larger quantities of Latin Americans who flee to the southern US border.

It's stylistically a cross between an Amnesty International report and long-form magazine journalism. It's also a close portrait, in its final chapters, of a Trump administration's modus operandi when there are no 'adults in the room.' 

Where do we go from here, if there is not enough public support for making sure that every asylum seeker is well cared for?
— The Hippocratic Oath probably applies as well to immigration and foreign policy matters as to medicine: First do no harm.
And I think that part of 'doing no harm' means not making refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants scapegoats for socio-economic problems that already would have existed without them.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (cover)
Penguin Press

July 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

Thanks to anaemia, a traffic accident, and a broken glass bottle, I've been (in roughly equal measures) sulking and reading at home.

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
Zeinab Badawi

Cover of Zeinab Badawi:
An African History of Africa
Penguin Books

It's been energetically praised in the British press, and I am also charmed by this book, which I found at a bookshop near the Free University here in Berlin.

BBC World anchor Zeinab Badawi sets aside many of the piles of colonialist histories of (in the earlier chapters of her book) northern African countries, to expose the reading public to snippets of neglected knowledge about former kingdoms, leaders, and citizenries. She draws from modern experts and personal travel in nations like Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea as much as she can, rather than relying on archives only.

It is also an 'alive' field of study: while ancient Egypt's dynasties are well charted, ancient sites of the kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and Adulis and Qohaito in Eritrea, are only partly excavated. There is much left to reveal itself.

Cover of Francisco Coloane: Feuerland
Unionsverlag

Feuerland (Tierra del Fuego (1956))
Francisco Coloane (tr. into German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni)

Like Jorge Luis Borges historical stories/essays, Coloane's collection of tales puts the reader back into the morally ambiguous, colonialist era – this time, in southernmost Chile.

Die untergehende Sonne ließ ebenfalls große Goldnuggets am Rand der Horizontpfanne zurück, goldene Kumuluswolken, mit denen die feuerländische Abenddämmerung ihre unablässig wechselnden Phantasmagorien entzündet.

('The setting sun left behind huge gold nuggets at the rim of the horizon's pan, golden cumulus clouds with which the Fuegian dusk was kindling its unceasingly changeful phantasmagorias.') 

The first tale touches on Romanian gold magnate Julius Popper, his mercenary army, and genocide of Ona Indigenous peoples; and the multifarious journeys of Europeans to South America. In inhabiting a men's world, it is rather like Hemingway. But perhaps it is more philosophical.

It's impossible not to picture the landscapes, birds, and animals that Coloane portrays in so much detail, in my mind's eye – no matter how ignorant I was of Patagonia going in.

Coloane experienced popularity abroad in the 1990s, and the Unionsverlag hardcover copy of Feuerland that I am reading was printed during that time.

"Patagonian landscape with single tree before night sky" (1832)
Eduard von Buchan (1800-1876)
Wikimedia Commons

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U

A descendant of a United Nations Secretary-General, raised in the United States but drawn into Burma/Myanmar at various epochs in the 1990s through to the present, Thant Myint-U has written not just a scholarly examination of the country's history.

Cover of Thant Myint-U: The Hidden History of Burma
W. W. Norton

He also gives a journalist's insights into life stories of Burmese people who have fallen prey to external and internal social, political, and economic developments; as well as a diplomat's insights into international and national machinations.

It would be too crude to state without qualification that the path to hell is paved with good intentions: the intentions of a few Burmese governments, of Aung San Suu Kyi, of the U.S. government, of the United Nations, ... But, with more nuance, this phenomenon is at least one leading thread in Burma/Myanmar's recent history.

I'm listening to the audiobook recording.

***

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II (1830)
Thomas Moore, ed.

Inspired by a seminar I'm in about the Greek Revolution of 1821, which had led the English poet to travel to the mainland north of the Peloponnese, I looked up Lord Byron in Google Books. There I found a very "warts and all" compendium of letters, journal extracts, book passages by Byron's partner Teresa Guiccioli, and commentary from Thomas Moore (who had been Byron's friend), published 6 years after Byron died of fever.

"The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi" (1861)
Theodoros Vryzakis (1814-1878)
Wikimedia Commons

...This is more of a rant than a review. I will start by apologizing to the above authors for inadvertently grouping together their works with Byron's. Secondly, because people often feel injured by what they consider 'cancel culture,' I'll emphasize that I don't judge the many readers who appreciate Byron's poems on their own merits.

So:

First of all, this is not news, but: he was not a considerate romantic or sexual partner. He chatters incessantly about his 'conquests' to his male friends in his letters, underlining how little respect he has for these women. In 21st-century terminology: toxic masculinity leaks from every page.

Secondly, Byron keeps lying to himself and others about his intentions:

To give one example, he got rid of his illegitimate daughter Allegra in a convent school.

It was supposedly a good school. But she became 'peculiarly quiet' according to visitors who'd known her before, and she died from a fever there at the age of 5. Claire Clairmont, her mother, was inconsolable.

He had made a big deal in letters to friends about how noble he was, nobler than that atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (who'd by all accounts been kind to Allegra), for wanting his daughter to grow up religiously and 'purely' ... Not that he'd ever put his money where his mouth is, and tried to be properly 'religious' or 'pure' himself.

Thirdly, he's hugely catty about Leigh Hunt, John William Polidori, and others. Part of it can be explained, I suppose, by his being bisexual but not wholly self-accepting.

But the worst passage so far is a letter to Sir Walter Scott, in January 1822:

I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. […] I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest; whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.

I think a few years of imprisonment might have helped, and I certainly hope no one will excuse him on the grounds of being 'misunderstood.'

***

Also reading:

Auf der Reise im Dazwischen (Austria, poetry) by Omar Kir Alanam
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (United States, nonfiction) by Michelle Alexander

April 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

The Leipzig Book Fair ran last weekend, and I'd intended to read Dutch and Flemish books before then. I didn't, much, but picked up music scores from German publishers.

Before, I'd dropped into a Polish-German bookstore in the Berlin areas of Kreuzberg/Neukölln. The bookshelves were full of books I might want to read and hadn't read yet. NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory and Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, for example. Zimbabwe's Bulawayo I'd heard about on YouTube, and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk's prose was so good when I read an excerpt from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead that it has been on my mental list to read more.

Before that, I'd watched the 4 episodes of the literary Canada Reads 2024 competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's YouTube channel.

Jessica Johns's fantasy-thriller book Bad Cree was available in the Berlin bookshop just after I heard of it on Canada Reads.

Courtesy of ECW Press

But the first Canadian book I want to finish is Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes. So far it is one of the best books that I have read in years.

After those, I hope to read The Future by Catherine Leroux or Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutonji.

***

In multimedia:

MIT's OpenCourseWare programme's self-guided English literature course of study on the medieval epic Beowulf, based on 2023 lectures for undergraduates. MIT has published lecture videos, reading lists, and other useful material on its website and on YouTube. It begins with a crash course in Anglo-Saxon grammar. I highly recommend it.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Roald Dahl's strange short story that left me wondering if it was fact or fiction (but I never tried seeing through a pack of cards, as it felt like too much trouble especially if it would likely only prove that I was gullible) when I was a child, has been adapted into a film by Wes Anderson. Breaking the fourth wall, the film weaves in Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl, the narrator. It is available on Netflix, and has won an Academy Award.

Berlin Reads, 2023: A Short Story by Idza Luhumyo

The International Berlin Literature Festival formally begins on September 6th this year, but 'Berlin liest' is a long running prefatory tradition that my bookseller mother has also celebrated once or twice.

'Berlin reads': People and businesses read aloud a book, for no more than 30 minutes, in public. It's a kind of 'amuse bouche' for the festival itself.

***

There are few restrictions, but the organizers offered a few nudges. Why not read poetry by Dinçer Güçyeter, whose prose and poetry memoir Unser Deutschlandmärchen won the prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in April? Or Palestinian author and current New Yorker Ibtisam Azem, who wrote Das Buch vom Verschwinden as a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories? Salman Rushdie's Victory City is also on the list, in honour of the author who was notoriously attacked last year. Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are well known, Bora Chung's short stories in Der Fluch des Hasen (Cursed Bunny) imaginative works of fiction.

In the end I read the magical realist short story "Five Years Next Sunday." Idza Luhumyo won the Caine Prize for African Writing for it, in 2022. You can read it as well on the Prize's website.

It's short, but full of imagery, and the metaphors are so complex that I wasn't able to disentangle them fully. (If they are all metaphors; some things you can probably also understand literally, like acquaintances rudely pawing the protagonist's hair.) Pili, the main character, is being emotionally bled dry by the family (parents and teenaged brothers) and new friends around her. On one level she sees through their motivations, on another level she doggedly takes their purported affection at face value. At the same time, I think, Pili is scrambling for a chance to escape and to chase her own daydreams.

She keeps looking outside, reporting on the gathering of the clouds, the darkening of the day, the flight of the birds. “Rain is coming,” she whispers.

April, May & June 2022 In Books: What I've Been Reading

As always, I've been reading older books, although Akwaeke Emezi, Kacen Callender and Elizabeth Acevedo have all published new works in May that I'm looking forward to reading.

Thanks to colleagues clubbing together to buy me a gift certificate, I now also have Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

In paper form I finished reading the five tales by Nikolai Gogol. In the end, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, maybe also Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt, and The Overcoat were my favourites: the scene-painting, the emotions, and even the discomfort of seeing the social inequalities and imperfections that must have been full-blown tragedies in everyday reality.

*

Vaguely I remembered reading Lebanese Australian journalist Rania Abouzeid's posts on Twitter during the early years of the Arab Spring. A decade later, it turns out that she wrote at least two books about her experiences: living in Syria with middle-class families, and interviewing protesters and militants across an impressive spectrum.

Sisters of the War (2020) focuses intimately on the lives of two girls and their families: one, from a pro-Assad, Alawite family — the other, from a revolutionary family. Perhaps it is written more for a younger audience, and the intention to draw attention to our shared humanity breathes through every page. I listened to an audiobook that helpfully offered the proper Arabic pronunciations.

Cover of Sisters of the War (Scholastic Publishing)

No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (2018) follows adult Syrians as they negotiate their path amongst various anti-Assad groups, culminating in being either witnesses to or also perpetrators of intense violence and in one case even sympathy with Isis. Abouzeid makes an unusual decision not to speak about rape, except when an al-Nusra militant alleges that Alawite prisons perpetrate it against women. While Sisters of the War also proves if proof were needed that she thinks the women's perspective is just as important, the book is guided largely by masculine points of view.

She uses the book to bust myths about the Syrian Arab Spring, and finds the leading threads in the entanglements of different revolutionary groups, al-Qaeda, the Turkish government, foreign intelligence agencies, etc. knowledgeably. (I was following the news at the time and recently rediscovered a diagram I'd drawn of which group or party was linked with which other group or party.)

The food scarcity, cut-off water supplies, self-interested diplomacy, disappearances, technological makeshifts, and bombing of residential areas, in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; the torture and other abuses that Abouzeid describes in Syrian government prisons that will not have ended with the war; and the legacy that Syrians today still carry —these many open ends and tragic parallels make No Turning Back and Sisters of the War still feel urgent years later.

No Turning Back [W. W. Norton & Company]

***

Public Service Announcement: I'd like to take the opportunity to link to the resources at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. They take a modern approach, founded in mental health best practices and a care for the wellbeing of any journalist, source, and assistant, to understanding, acknowledging, and counteracting the risks of war reporting. On a personal note, I've cribbed some of the ideas here to help cope with work stress unrelated to war.

***

Tilly and the Crazy Eights is a fictional novel that addresses another traumatic history — colonial and post-colonial treatment by Canadian government authorities of Indigenous people. 

Monique Gray Smith had already written about Tilly, the youngest of the core cast of characters and a registered nurse who is tasked with caring for her elderly cohort, in another book that I haven't read. In this sequel, she introduces a knitting circle of elderly Indigenous ladies. They decide to travel to the southern United States in a bus, and to try to address something in their own 'bucket lists' — lists of things they would like to have done before they die.

Along their journey they carry their nightmares. For example: often sexually abused in Canadian residential (boarding) schools, many of the elder characters were forced to repress their own language, and taught that their cultural traditions were inferior and wrong. A few older and younger characters are trying to mend broken relationships; one older character has also survived cancer, and another is living with diabetes. In one case, an elder is personally affected by one of the thousands of unresolved murders and disappearances of First Nations women that are rarely prosecuted in Canadian courts.

I appreciated that the author included an Indigenous woman who came out as a lesbian during the feminist Second Wave in urban Canada, a perspective which one doesn't read about that often and is well (if sparingly) presented here.

Gray Smith guides the plot perceptibly with magical realism and other devices to the conclusions that she wants. I'd argue that a firefly that zooms in during a crisis moment like a B2 bomber, is not really a fair analogue to the coincidences and talismans that we sometimes look for as guideposts in life, for example. Some of the humour is maybe a little corny — realistic for the cast of characters, and yet I did feel the urge from time to time to stick a fork in my eye.

But I loved the genuine warmth in Tilly and the Crazy Eights.

The road trip itself — a writing challenge to the greatest literary genius and the 'merest plodder' alike — is well executed. Gray Smith gives tastes of the scenery and locations at just the real pace and depth of highwayside observation, not weighing down the book with pedantic exposition about historical, geographical or cultural minutiae.

Cover of Tilly and the Crazy Eights (Second Story Press)

***

Lastly, I read Efrén Divided, by Ernesto Cisneros, and some of The Ghost Squad, by Claribel Ortega. The first book — which explores the effects of American immigration law enforcement in the 2010s on Latino-American families from a teenage boy's perspective — especially is wonderful and a 'tear-jerker', not necessarily just for tween and teenage readers. The publication year of The Ghost Squad is a little unfairly positioned chronologically, between the Harry Potter books, which also deal with magic, and were published before Ortega's book, and the film Encanto, which also deals with magic, and was released after Ortega's book. If you're interested in imaginary young people doing fun magic for good causes, I recommend Encanto.

Around the World in 32 Countries: South Korea

Official languages:

• Korean (Pyojuneo)
• Korean Sign Language

Capital City: Seoul

Surface Area: 100,363 km² (smaller than North Korea, larger than Taiwan)

Currency: Korean Republic won

Driving side: right

Main trading partners: China, United States, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan

Sources: "South Korea" [Wikipedia] and "Economy of South Korea" [Ibid]

***

As a twenty-something I spent hours watching the entirety of the Korean romance drama television series Goong (Princess Hours), and one of my siblings was a fan of Coffee Prince. So the South Korean cultural output I've been exposed to was generally cheerful.

My reading experience of South Korean books, during my literary journey around the world, has turned out by chance to be rather strikingly grim in contrast.

*

Mount Halla, in South Korea
Photo ca. 2005, photographer unknown. (Gnu Public License)
via Wikipedia

One Spoon on This Earth, I've already mentioned in this blog before.

In this novel (published in 1999 by a Korean writer who made it part-autobiographical), a man who was born on Jeju Island in the mid-20th century mirrors his horrific experiences of growing up in the shadow of World War II. Starvation, house burnings, massacres, and more gruesome incidents crowd the pages, in chapters that act as vignettes.

The vignettes 'photograph' a bookish, introverted young boy who survives into teenagerhood despite the violence in his neighbourhood, the starvation and disease, that threaten him and his big multigenerational family. He himself is sickly, less socially adept than some of his peers, and haunted by his resentful relationship with his often-absent father.

At the same time he loves his natural environment, except where mountain slopes are the haunted field of a massacre or the oceanside reminds him of a drowned friend, and a few of his experiences with childhood playmates.

The author, Hyun Ki-young, published a story "Aunt Suni" in the 1970s, which was also about the Jeju massacre. It was so politically fraught even decades after the events it described that, according to his Wikipedia biography, "shortly after its release in 1978, Hyun was arrested and tortured for three days by the South Korean authorities"

"Jeju citizens awaiting execution in May 1948."
Public domain (South Korean law), via Wikipedia

One shock to a North American or European reader may be that the 'democratization' of South Korea post-World-War-II was not the squeaky clean transition one might have learned of in a history class: Syngman Rhee was a deadly leader and it was not only North Korean leaders who cracked down on civilians in revenge for political and armed opposition in the post-war period.

Two passages I copied into my notes embody the author's endurance and deadpan humour:

Since I survived a politically dangerous and volatile period when living and dying was purely determined by chance, perhaps my fate isn’t so bad after all.

and

Entering an elementary school meant having a new set of family. In other words, it was like having an even stricter father and even more selfish brothers and sisters.

***

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 takes up the early 2000s. It has more of a hardened dystopian quality, although the events it tells are of ordinary life and not wild flights of fantasy or brutal wartime events.

The book was a bestseller, published in Korea in 2016 and a hit not just there but also in Japan, Taiwan and other countries. But there was also a wave of antagonism in reaction to it. Perhaps it hit a nerve because statistically South Korea is surprisingly unequal in its treatment of genders. Over 90% of the population mention in polls that they want a power balance between the sexes, so it is not necessarily intentional.

An interview from 2020 with the American media outlet National Public Radio summarizes how and why the author chose her theme:

Author Cho Nam-Joo wrote the book inside of three months. She says she never expected it to take off — and she didn't even know if she could get a book deal. "I just wanted this book to be in the bookshelves, in bookstores and the library as evidence of how women in this era, the 2010s, lived, thought and made efforts," Cho says through an interpreter.

In the book, Kim Jiyoung's life looks regular; she is an everywoman, married with a child, family around her, cooking and tending the household. But she begins to slip into irregular outbursts of apparent psychosis.

Original cover of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Minumsa publishing house
via Wikipedia

Cho Nam-Joo sketches an unhealthy reality for Korean women, finding madness that underlies not her titular character's own psyche but rather her titular character's world. ("[S]he wanted women to know they're not alone," says NPR)..

A pattern of (semi-)benevolent and at rare times outright malevolent repression underlies her everyday life. It gives rise to malaise: Kim Jiyoung is not the only one who notices that something is wrong. But it simmers away insidiously instead of looking like an outright cause for reform or outrage.

Sexism makes Kim Jiyoung's family life in childhood tilted in favour of some siblings, her academic environment limited, her career doomed, a walk in the streets fraught with discomfort, and her marriage annihilating.

When she does express unhappiness about the invisible limits that hedge her every day, she is met with 'gaslighting' and her protest sinks away into oblivion. People who don't bear the brunt of the system, or have decided not to fight, are too comfortable with the way things are. The echo of George Orwell's year 1984 in the title is surely not unintentional.

(I read the book a while ago, so please excuse any inaccuracies.)

So in the end Kim Jiyoung, despite her middle-class income, her education, and the lack of crime or violence in her environment, has very few genuine means.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 tells part of the truth of being a woman as I haven't read anyone else tell it — certainly not only relevant to South Korea. Thank goodness, it is only a part of the truth.

"Gender inequality in South Korea" [Wikipedia]
"Hoju" [Wikipedia]
"Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" [Goodreads]
"Kim Ji-young, Born 1982: Feminist film reignites tensions in South Korea" [BBC News Korean], by Hyung Eun Kim (October 23, 2019)
"South Korean Bestseller 'Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982' Gives Public Voice To Private Pain" [National Public Radio], by Elise Hu, with Se Eun Gong, Dasl Yoon, and Petra Mayer. (April 19, 2020)

***

Lastly, a Canadian missionary, educator and translator, James Scarth Gale, published an English-language edition of Korean fairy tales by Im Pang and Yi Yuk, in 1913. The Koreans' tales are set in a time frame roughly equivalent to the Early Medieval period through the European Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Each tale tells of old times and practices, in a landscape of animals, hermits with incredible powers, mysterious wanderers, aristocrats, goblins, mountains, and wilder regions of the afterlife.

The tales also sketch a great bureaucracy, Confucian religion, and imperial armies that fictionally adumbrate the bygone empires. The plots do not insist that life must be fair; but the characters in them sometimes find that 'what comes around, goes around.'

*

The Old Woman Who Became a Goblin

There was a Confucian scholar once who lived in the southern part of Seoul. It is said that he went out for a walk one day while his wife remained alone at home.

When he was absent there came by begging an old woman who looked like a Buddhist priestess, for while very old her face was not wrinkled. The scholar's wife asked her if she knew how to sew. She said she did, and so the wife made this proposition, "If you will stay and work for me I'll give you your breakfast and your supper, and you'll not have to beg anywhere; will you agree?"

She replied, "Oh, thank you so much, I'll be delighted."

The scholar's wife, well satisfied with her bargain, took her in and set her to picking cotton, and making and spinning thread. In one day she did more than eight ordinary women, and yet had, seemingly, plenty of time to spare. The wife, delighted above measure, treated her to a great feast. After five or six days, however, the feeling of delight and the desire to treat her liberally and well wore off somewhat, so that the old woman grew angry and said "I am tired of living alone, and so I want your husband for my partner." This being refused, she went off in a rage, but came back in a little accompanied by a decrepit old man who looked like a Buddhist beggar.

These two came boldly into the room and took possession, cleared out the things that were in the ancient tablet-box on the wall-shelf, and both disappeared into it, so that they were not seen at all, but only their voices heard. According to the whim that took them they now ordered eatables and other things. When the scholar's wife failed in the least particular to please them, they sent plague and sickness after her, so that her children fell sick and died. Relatives on hearing of this came to see, but they also caught the plague, fell ill and died. Little by little no one dared come near the place, and it became known at last that the wife was held as a prisoner by these two goblin creatures. For a time smoke was seen by the townsfolk coming out of the chimney daily, and they knew that the wife still lived, but after five or six days the smoke ceased, and they knew then that the woman's end had come. No one dared even to make inquiry.

Translated from a tale by Im Bang, or Pang, (1640-~1722), son of a provincial governor, scholar.

Im Pang rose in the political ranks, but in 1721 (already an elderly man) he fell from grace. He was banished a year later when he was involved in 'disturbances.' He died in exile.

*

Changdeokgung (Palace)
Photo ca. 2014, by unknown photographer
(License: CC-BY-2.0-KR )
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Pang, Im and Yi Ryuk. Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Fairies, James Scarth Gale, transl. (London: J.M. Dent, 1913) via Archive.org

December 2021 in Books: What I'm Reading

THIS MORNING I read "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes" (1922) from The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. Published reluctantly when the author-and-illustrator was losing her eyesight, she gently rewrites famous rhymes like "This Little Piggy."

"We have a little garden"
Illustration of Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
by Beatrix Potter

She also illustrates a poem from her friend Louie Choyce:

We love our little garden
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.

[Tip: You can find the entire book on Wikisource. ]

***

Turning to adult literature of the 21st century:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett felt like a page-turner after a while. Set in the 1950s through 1990s, if I remember correctly, it follows two twin women who were born in the segregation-era United States.

I enjoyed the back and forth between the different generations of Vignes women.

My only gripe? At times I wished I were reading James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or another 20th century author instead; sometimes a 21st century perspective blurs the experiences of the 20th too much.

*

In a predictable coincidence, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best sheds another light on racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His campaign to become Governor of Georgia profited greatly by what a few people ca. 2016 have called 'racial anxiety.'

But Carter upended expectations when, in his inaugural speech, he declared his support of racial integration.

*

In between I have been reading more of Assia Djebar's Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement.

Then I have begun reading Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Set during the recession of 2008-2009,  its main characters are a family of Cameroonian immigrants to the United States.

In an audiobook recording, I'm also listening to Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild. Published in 2020, it is a novel about a Métis community in Canada, in which a wife looks for her lost husband.

***

This past week, Barack Obama has posted his end-of-year lists of his favourite songs, books and films of 2021. A few authors are old-timers, like Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro; others are relative newcomers like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Dawnie Walton. The lyrics of a few of the songs are also worth looking at, in their own literary right.

The Life of President Carter, Take Two

One of NPR's best books of 2020 was an exhaustive (800+ pages in paper, 30+ hours in audiobook) biography of President Jimmy Carter: His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter. Although it is rooted in portraits of rural Georgia during the Great Depression, when the president was still very small, and passes through the wartime 1940s and the halls of the naval academy in Annapolis, it always checks in again with contemporaneity.

His Very Best has ambiguities practically on every page. It makes clear that Carter was not always mild-mannered, not always the greatest husband to Rosalynn (pronounced 'ROE-za-linn'), a tough parent, a skeptic where he is now a kind of non-conformist Baptist, a future humanitarian who did not air his own liberalism on race at a time where the backlash to the civil rights movement made it uncomfortable, a political strategist despite his unworldly(ish) principles. Also: Depending on where you sit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may or may not see a contradiction (seemingly the author does) between the peace-brokering he did between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, and his views on the Palestinian cause nowadays.

Every president proves as best he can that he is a man of the people, while running for office. Jimmy Carter himself may have overstated the deprivation of his childhood circumstances during political campaigning — sure, his family did not have running water for a while, but during the Depression they were rather well off compared to their indigent neighbours. In one passage the author, Jonathan Alter, also writes with painful directness about the way Carter's family economically exploited their Black neighbours even while the family was also at times more tolerant and more deeply helpful than their other White neighbours. — But Carter also seems a much more handy, self-made figure than his presidential peers. The author argues that he is an autodidactic renaissance man.

The truth, as one of Oscar Wilde's characters phrased it, is rarely pure and never simple.

The author — who states that the biography is unauthorized and does write a few very unflattering assessments, but also spoke with his subject for the sake of the book — tries to enhance Jimmy Carter's image, even without resorting to Carter's famously helpful post-presidential career. (Well into his 90s, he has still been on the ground with Habitat for Humanity, helping build houses for those who need them, for example.) 

Alter wants to show that what passed for weak policy in the 1970s is often common sense today: emblematic, the solar panels that the President installed on the roof of the White House. And the author does have a good case: another example is Carter's opposition to the death penalty, something that is now gaining wide currency amongst top Democratic Party leaders. Maybe Carter has been the first 21st century president.

I think the biography is in its approach also very much a reflection of 21st century thinking: we no longer need to pretend that large social struggles were won through immaculate saviour figures, nor is it useful or fair to pretend this. We do not need to write hagiographies of a Martin Luther King, Jr., as a saintly figure who glided through life enfolded by the aura of moral White approval, to appreciate his impact for the better on the course of history. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of all people who did not step into the light of the many others who came together to lead change, the people who would talk with a Menachem Begin and an Anwar al-Sadat — and help them be guided by their own thoughts and feelings toward some course of action that may make the world a slightly better place to live in. The future of civil rights and human rights may well lie (perhaps it has always done so) in a democracy of goodwill.

August 2021 In Books: What I'm Reading

Earlier this month I finished Jutta Person's Esel, a thin German-language volume of cultural history about donkeys and anthropomorphic interpretations of them by everyone from Roman satirists through Christian theologians to German romantics. My uncle M. gave it to me as a birthday present last year because donkeys are my favourite animals. Now another birthday gift, Paul Auster's 4321, is lined up to read next.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji, are also read, and although both were undoubtedly good, I won't write reviews at present because they'd be too half-baked.

Cover of A Hundred Million Years and a Day
via Gallic Books/Belgravia Books

In a big geographical leap, I've moved to reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, a French hit novel that is set at various times in the first half of the 20th century, It is written from the perspective of a solitary, dry-souled ivory tower paleontologist — written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated sublimely and award-winningly by Sam Taylor. Perhaps because my French literary frame of reference is small, the atmosphere and the setting remind me of Marcel Pagnol and the spare style reminds me of Le grand Meaulnes. It's also well thought out; sometimes time-hopping in books is so tediously confusing that I want to gouge out my eyes, but here the back and forth — as the details are filled in — adds genuine suspense.

***

The book I'm most enthusiastic right now because it makes me happy is Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey by Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro. A basic knowledge of musicals or of mid-20th century film is enough to make its revelations understandable.

The aim of the authors is to tell us exactly what we want to know: each chapter is grouped quite tightly around a specific musical. Fortunately the gossip is generous and not mean-spirited. We hear that Jerome Robbins, a god of sorts among choreographers, was tremendously unpleasant; but we are also told that this was because he was unhappy.

In general Avian (from whose perspective the book is written) and Santopietro express modern views. Avian, in his eighties, makes little attempt to present a great man's (or woman's) sadism as ideal or even as a useful evil. He presents it as a flaw, but as a flaw whose owner still deserves sympathy.

I love the old-fashioned turns of phrase in the book, too, however: 'great gal', or "[... q]uicker than you can say “West Side Story,” Audrey set her cap for Michael and snagged him."

It feels twee or reductive to call Avian delightful, but the adjective comes to mind anyway.

The authors are friendly raconteurs, as we see not just there, but also when they wink at the audience with sentences like this vignette from an unsuccessful play production:

Act Two contained a King Lear ballet—yes, you read that right—and I was completely at sea.

Avian also mentions his experience of 1960s drug culture in a characteristically wholesome way:

I tried pot for the first time and thought, “Hmm, this sure is a lot of fun. And creative.”

He died in January this year, as I was startled to learn when reading his Wikipedia biography.

Readers who want memoirists to disembowel their private lives might find this book not for them, but fans of Broadway, or of 20th century American film star history, and perhaps also fans of New York City's social history in general, will probably love this. National Public Radio included it in their list of the best books of 2020.

*

"Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer Bob Avian dies aged 83" by Adrian Horton (January 22, 2021) [Guardian]

***

As part of my research into the history of the earliest decades of the 20th century, I have also jumped into the World War I chapters of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's Autobiography. Published well after that War, when the Cold War was still on, it is like the oak in Jean de la Fontaine's fable — not in that its roots touch on the realm of the dead, but rather that its roots touch on the realm of Victoria and an era of absolute British aristocratic privilege that seems utterly absurd now.

I first read the autobiography when I was a teenager struggling with my own opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He was briefly an imaginary posthumous mentor.

And now — even as I wince at his views on relationships during the passages about Lady Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell; even as I find him overprivileged in one passage, and mindbogglingly out of touch in another; and even though I don't admire his catty moments — in general it feels like his intelligence, his wonderful turns of phrase, and his dedication are not in doubt. And his insights on political and social celebrities are also great, if partial, gossip.

Cover of Why Men Fight (1917)
via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a passage where he has been imprisoned due to his activism against the First World War, in a rather posh prison division thanks to the intervention of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. [...] I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [...] and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.

(Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1978. p. 256)

*

I'm also reading Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, about a large midcentury American family that included a high number of sons with schizophrenia. I am struggling with it. As a takedown of the conformist 1950s ideal of domestic bliss, or of the unalloyed joys of military service and being in a military family, I think Hidden Valley Road is the most effective.

I would like it better if the family could have written their own history. It's not much fun of reading their lives as a psychological literature exercise. From my amateur armchair perspective, I like it better when we acknowledge that we can follow some of the thought patterns of the more conspicuously mentally ill, for example.

I've known people who are genuinely healthy in mind, like the psychological equivalent of an amazingly athletic person. In most cases I would say, however, that we are participants in, and not observers of, the human battle for logic, reason and proportionate emotional reactions. If we don't acknowledge that, it's unhealthy for ourselves and harmful to others.

Around the World in 32 Countries: South Africa

"Typically, hair gets done on weekends (Hillbrow, 2010)"
Two women in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Attributed to Guinivere Pedro, c. 2015
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Official languages:

• English (first language of 9.6%)
• isiZulu (22.7%)
• isiXhosa (16%)
• Afrikaans (13.5%)
• Sepedi
• Setswana
• Sesotho
• Xitsonga
• siSwati (Swazi)
• Tshivenda
• isiNdebele

Modern-day state formation year: 1994 (democratization)

"Dune Strandveld growing on dunes
in Blaauwberg Nature Reserve. Cape Town."
Photograph taken ca. 2010, attributed to Abu Shawka
via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Capital city: Pretoria (executive), Bloemfontein (judicial), Cape Town (legislative)

Surface area: 1,221,037 km² (larger than Ethiopia and smaller than Mali or Angola)

Currency: South African rand

Driving side: left

Main trading partners: Germany, the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Spain

Crops: Sugarcane, maize, grapes, oranges, potatoes, wheat, soy

Mining: Amongst top 10 worldwide producers of platinum, chromium, manganese, titanium, vanadium, iron ore

Sources:

South Africa [Wikipedia]
List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]
Economy of South Africa [Wikipedia]

***

While the history of South Africa stretches back thousands of years, I concentrated in my reading of South African books on the period from 1900 to the present.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is a classic that requires little introduction. I am still reading Volume I. He portrays his childhood in a chief's extended family and household in the 1910s and 20s, then his education in colonial British institutions, reaching the apex of his university studies at Fort Hare. Then the life he'd envisioned takes another swing into the unknown as he runs away from his guardian, a short job at a mining complex abruptly breaks off, and he grows into work at a lawyer's office in Johannesburg. There he meets anti-apartheid activists, including Communists, and no longer just attempting to fit into the socioeconomic reality of South Africa as it approaches the Malan years where apartheid became solidified into its extremist nadir, he begins to become political. Altogether he takes pains when setting forth his own life's story to portray the different groups and milieus in South African society, to depict a bonded rather than isolated nation.

Because Albert Luthuli's life ended in the late 1960s, long before the defeat of apartheid, and he was more religious, his book Let My People Go offers the most insight into specific topics: Christianity in South Africa, attempts to bring about reconciliation between groups in the country (South African civilians who were facing apartheid in different parts of the land, urban or rural; the different White political groups and administrators; the interracial 'Coloured' population and population of Indian extraction; Communists and Anglicans and Catholics; racist White individuals and policemen and less racist White individuals and policemen), the creeping influence of apartheid on Luthuli's home ground of education, and initiatives to organize passive resistance on a large scale, in the mid-20th century.

Maloti-Drakensberg Park (Lesotho, South Africa)
by Véronique Dauge, c. 2005
via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of UNESCO
CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

Apartheid, the volume of anti-apartheid essays edited by the exiled writer Alex La Guma to help concert international pressure to undermine the apartheid government, offers a broader spectrum view of all of South African history up to the early 1970s, when it was published abroad in Britain. It establishes a factual basis earlier in the book of the gradual introduction of racist government policy whether English or Afrikaner, details apartheid's impact in the fields of education, land ownership, military spending and even sports, and winds up with perspectives of the future that admit in some cases that violence and/or Communism may be the answer.

While the essays aren't always thrilling to read, and the earnest interspersed poetry often feels like the offcuts of better work, it remains informative even after 40 years of events have piled on top of the ones in the book. It's also interesting to me even in that bygone era of the Vietnam War, other after-effects of colonial rule, Cold War coups and invasions, etc., South African government policy internationally still had the power to shock.

"City Deep container terminal Johannesburg 2014"
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Turning to fiction: Lauren Beukes's novel Zoo City, set in her birth city of Johannesburg and published in 2010, gives a fantasy view of present-day South Africa. Her heroine is a young Black woman who had intended to become a journalist but had become sidetracked by the violent death of her brother, drug abuse, and a prison term, into petty crime. Even strangers recognize that she has been in trouble with laws written or unwritten, due to the presence of a large sloth by her side. This particular one appeared after the brother's death and it is linked to her by magic: a pet with a mind of his own, her external conscience, and her partner.

Crime and socioeconomic inequality in fictional Johannesburg are the focus of the novel. But, although this is by no means central, Beukes also mentions how the city (fictionalized in the book, but mirroring in some respects the 'true' South Africa) has paradoxically been a haven of sorts for refugees from violence, specifically wars in the northern African continent. 

To quote Wikipedia:

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2008 reported over 200,000 refugees applied for asylum in South Africa, almost four times as many as the year before. These people were mainly from Zimbabwe, though many also come from Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. Competition over jobs, business opportunities, public services and housing has led to tension between refugees and host communities.

The author also spent time studying in New York City. Her depiction of urban crime seems like it can be applied beyond Johannesburg, perhaps as a result of that, even if it's true that in smaller cities like Berlin I do expect violent crime but not regular shootouts. What I did find refreshing is that, although for example the imaginary musical scene in her book is influenced by American pop culture, she helps make pretty clear through her descriptions that the world doesn't revolve around the US or Europe (as I'm sometimes tempted to think from my German-Canadian perspective). Most of the preoccupations, entertainment and future of South Africa are driven from within.

Beukes's writing style in Zoo City is prone to clichés and the narrator indulges in libertarian-esque cynicism that I unkindly found performative. First-person, present-tense narration is not everyone's favourite quirk, either, even if it is fashionable. But her strong characterization, scene-setting and writerly intensity made me forget and overlook these aspects, and the novel was compelling to read to the end.

April 2021 in Books: What I've Been Reading (Children's and Youth Literature)

In the course of a deep dive into the Edwardian Age, I launched back into Beatrix Potter in April.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), of course, is a classic and led to the breakout success of the author, when publisher Frederick Warne — wiser than other publishers who had rejected her — asked for the manuscript to be illustrated in colour and accepted it on those terms:

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin: A young squirrel, bristling with energy, goes on short boat trips together with other squirrels to an island in the English countryside. The others, who respect the chief inhabitant of the territory, bring tribute to the elderly owl who inhabits the island, before they roam around it. But Squirrel Nutkin badgers the owl, taunting him with flippant rhymes, as the threat that the owl will finally take his revenge intensifies. I have to confess I didn't particularly like this book.

It is a cannibalistic book, in a way. In the Narnia books the conundrum of humanizing animals, but still making them attack or eat each other, also arises; but I think C.S. Lewis took more steps to address the paradox. One assumes that in the Edwardian Age, children were not thought to be particularly sensitive.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

And The Tailor of Gloucester shows off Potter's range of illustrator skill with watercolour paintings: they teem with 18th century formality, panache and detail. It was, apparently, the author's own favourite work and is based on a local legend not unlike the Heinzelmännchen of German fairy tales.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

***

King and the Dragonflies is a middle grade or young adult book that was published in 2020 and landed in National Public Radio's best books of the year list. Kacen Callender also wrote Felix Ever After, which follows a transgender teen and, getting a lot of attention when it came out, feels like a pioneering book in the broadening social awareness of transgenderism, non-binary ideas of gender, etc.

via Publishers Weekly

The narrator protagonist of King and the Dragonflies is a teenager who lives in rural Florida, in walking distance of the wilderness of the bayou. Hurricane Katrina's legacy still looms large, and based on the ages and birthdates it is clear that the plot is supposed to be set in the here and now. The bayou itself mostly suggests, to the protagonist, his brother Khalid — an older, only sibling who died unexpectedly as a school athlete, and whose spirit King likes to think is reincarnated in the dragonflies that fly over its surface.

His parents are torn up about the sudden loss of their son, also uneasy and angry in a social environment where the sheriff is a racist and they feel unsafe.

King and the Dragonflies has old-fashioned elements: the benign and not-so-benign rednecks who appear in the periphery of King's life are not too far off from the 1930s Alabama of To Kill a Mockingbird.  This (possible) literary continuity says more about how engrained racist thought processes become in the mass psyche once they enter it, however, than about the author's intentions, I imagine. [A line of thought suggested also by Ibram X. Kendi's historical book Stamped from the Beginning, which shows in hundreds of ways how racist tropes and practices that we consider as part of the social landscape now, and don't always question and fix as much as we should, were introduced over the course of colonialist history, were certainly 'not always there,' and have unfortunately been very difficult to de-introduce.] 

Racism and homophobia are shown as parallel ills, the battle against them both necessary for equality and individual freedom in the present day. Callender (the author prefers the pronouns they/them) also specifically stress intersectionality. People who champion the one cause might reject the other cause — in the book, King's father is homophobic, and King's friend Sandy, who is White and gay, is struggling to recognize his own family's racist legacy even if he does not share their prejudice. We can't fix one problem and believe that everything is fixed; the problems are interconnected and, to very crudely paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., we can only enjoy justice for the one once we have ensured that it exists for all.

*

For the target audience: I think this book is a friendly companion to gay (or bisexual) children/teenagers, and an encouragement to come out of their shell, trusting in their own individual truth and worth. And to straight classmates it is a great encouragement to be a braver and more reliable ally.

***

Kacen Callender [Wikipedia]

February 2021 In Books: What I'll Be Reading Next

For the Around the World series, I am still finishing the reading from South African writers.

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, edited by Alex La Guma, is of course the book with which I started the reading.

Its essays, by expatriates who are far-flung in Europe due to their opposition to the apartheid government, lay out the racial political, economic and cultural structure of apartheid by the time the book was published. (Ironically perhaps, given colonial history, the book was published in London, 1972.) Land allocations, education, defence spending, the entire history of the colonization of South Africa are knowledgeably sketched... I think the interspersed poems, pan-African themes and all, are meant as seeds for a free post-apartheid culture.

Albert Loethoeli, leider Zoeloes in Zuid-Afrika (1967)
(Albert Luthuli, leader of the Zulus in South Africa)
From the Nationaal Archief, Netherlands
via Wikimedia Commons

Long Walk to Freedom (Vol. 1) by Nelson Mandela and Let My People Go by Albert Luthuli offer two perspectives on the fight against apartheid. Mandela (a member of the Xhosa people) came from a more prestigious background, and also appeared to benefit by the pre-apartheid reality more, and has more rigour and skepticism and lordliness. Luthuli (a member of the Zulu people) came from a less prestigious background, working as a teacher in what he describes as a cloistered academic environment for well over a decade before becoming a less well-paid chief; he also embraced Christian precepts to an extent that makes him feel more idealistic and gentle-tempered —most of the time. Like my paternal grandfather, one can sense bedrock underneath his mild willingness to find out what other people want and to let them have their way. Both Luthuli and Mandela, of course, became Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

A South African colleague, when I asked him, conceded that I could theoretically look into many classics of South African literature (Nadine Gordimer's work and Alan Paton's amongst them). But he suggested skipping them — instead, exploring contemporary South Africa and urban crime through the lens of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. I'm still hoping to come across an ebook version; but, failing that, the audiobook is an option.

*

As an accidentally companionable read, I am also reading more of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's non-fiction and criticism. Although his personal experience of colonialism and neocolonialism centres on Kenya, he alludes in the particular works I'm reading to the South African apartheid state — not yet dismantled at the time he was writing. Apartheid would only crumble in 1994. There's also a tragic element in the knowledge as a reader from the future, of the impending bloodshed in Rwanda.

I've become impatient with the rote Communist passages — I can only read 'join hands with the proletariat' or 'comprador classes' so many times, without feeling that these phrases lose all meaning — in these essays/speeches. And I suspect that he turned into a self-conscious Hero of the Lecture Hall type of academic in his later years (I say as a disgruntled former undergraduate). But Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms is fascinating as a geopolitical time capsule of the 80s and 90s.

I do feel awkward when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes of the need to write in African languages, not English or French or Portuguese, and he celebrates writing works in Gikuyu. In the end I am reading his celebration of writing in Gikuyu in English, because that is accessible to me.

His writing in Moving the Centre is less raw than the writing in his prison memoir Devil on a Cross, but the mood remains invigorating. He is always resisting.

To know a language in the context of its culture is a tribute to the people to whom it belongs, and that is good. What has, for us from the former colonies, twisted the natural relation to languages, both our own and those of other peoples, is that the languages of Europe [...] were taught as if they were our own languages, as if Africa had no tongues except those brought there by imperialism [...]

and

'A peaceful country, don't you think', he [a colonial farmer] would say turning to the house servants who stood by ready to serve him his breakfast. And the house servants would also stand on some of the bodies but at a respectful distance from the master and they would chorus back: 'Yes master, peace'.  

***

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi is proving challenging and rewarding, an indispensable and amazingly researched completion of any picture of European and American politics from the Renaissance onwards, and a gem to any history enthusiast who is genuinely curious. A few passages are horrible to read, like the fate of Sarah Baartman, the 'Hottentot Venus,' who was treated essentially as a laboratory rat by scientists of the late Enlightenment and early Napoleonic era.

*

In British contemporary literature, I started listening to Summer by Ali Smith.

It is a stream-of-consciousness third-person-narrative novel from 2020, of the musings of an English teenager on political news as she grapples with homework, her parents' separation and her brother's predicament.

The book is well-written and critically acclaimed.

It is also very 'of the moment' as it talks about everything from the deported British residents of the Windrush Generation through Trumpism to Australian wildfires. But I don't like remembering the times where I 'burned at the stake' of world politics as much as the teenager in this book. To be fair, likely the author's own angst derives from Brexit, which is generally not felt as the deep crisis of economics, politics and social culture, the daily emotional torment, in Germany that it is felt to be in the UK itself. But at least I walked in protests against the War on Iraq instead of just complaining at home.

That feeling of not wanting to read hundreds of pages of aimless whining, however literary and however near my own political orientation, was why I did not finish the book.

Cover of Summer, via Penguin Books UK

(The narrator of Summer's audiobook struggles with the repetitive 'he said' and 'she said' that dot the dialogue. This dialogue, in its faster rhythm, does bring movement and pace to the book. Therefore I found myself wishing that Ali Smith had written a play instead.)

*

In preparation for Canada Reads 2021, the televised competition will broadcast starting March 8th on CBC, I have begun reading Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Magical realism a little along the lines of Toni Morrison, it begins by telling the tale of the childhood of a spirit that tends to slip away from the living world.

(Content warning: There's menstrual blood in an early chapter, so the easily shocked should likely find a more soothing book to read; and also serious subject matter like stillbirths etc.)

Cover of Butter Honey Pig Bread, via Arsenal Pulp Press

It's not self-consciously literary — you never feel like the word choice is stiltedly signposting its own excellence, even while it is excellent — nor pretentiously enigmatic.

*

Buck Naked Kitchen has a risqué title, but it's a respectable Canadian cookbook, published last year by Kirsten Buck. It has become a favourite of mine to the degree that I am sprinkling around good reviews around the internet.

I don't follow the Whole 30 Diet, which is a main nutritional inspiration for the book. But it's easy to stick to the more permissive recipe variants.

My family favourably reviewed the Smashed Potatoes with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce when I baked them the day before yesterday, as well as the pepper maple syrup bacon, so these appeal even to traditional tastes. I also liked the more consciously healthy or 'new-fangled' recipes. The Creamy Cashew Milk was frothy and sweet. The Perfectly Cooked Wild Rice was well cooked as promised: nutty and lightly salty and nicely grainy without being hard. And I've been making Buck's variation of a Fruit and Nut Trail Mix — walnuts, cashews, coconut flakes, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, dried goji berries and blueberries and white mulberries — for my brothers. It's filling and has a nice balance of natural sugars and colours.

The cookbook's healthy ingredients (well, all right, I guess the bacon is debatable as a healthy ingredient), when mingled imaginatively, can have an experimental flair while being as satisfying as steak and potatoes.

The author of Buck Naked Kitchen,
via Penguin Books Canada

It was also pleasant to see the peaceful photography: daytime lighting and a leitmotif of green plant life.

The idea for soup-to-go came to me while on a fall hike in the Whiteshell Provincial Park, located in southeast region of Manitoba along the Ontario border. The wind coming off the water was cold enough to give me a chill. Instead of the energy bar I packed, I really just wanted something to warm me up. 

Earlier in the week I had made the saffron rice from Yotam Ottolenghi's and Sami Tamimi's 2012 Jerusalem cookbook. It turns out that I dislike the flavour of saffron, even if the barberries were tasty. But I also undercooked the rice — not the recipe's fault, I am certain, because I used brown basmati rice instead of white basmati rice. The dill and white pepper instead of black pepper are important to the flavour, blending into and softening the stern flavour of the saffron, and I was impressed that the authors had figured this out.

Cover of 100 Cookies, via Chronicle Books

Lastly, I've begun baking recipes from Sarah Kieffer's 100 Cookies, an American bestseller in 2020, beginning with the soft chocolate chip cookies recipe. It is as regimented as Buck Naked Kitchen is flexible. Before the recipes begin, there are firm instructions, rather than idyllic word-paintings of kitchen escapism.

While Ottolenghi can be precise enough and I've grumbled in my head about the fiddly gram measurements and the need to measure fractions of a centimetre, it was only with 100 Cookies that I felt like I was baking with a fastidious superego looking over my shoulder.

But my family, of course, just experienced the final result. They made blissful, Cookie Monster-like gestures as they ate the doughy, freshly baked cookies with the chocolate melted and gooey in them.

So, in the end, weighing out each 45-gram sphere was worth it.

*

Aside from Buck Naked Kitchen, Barack Obama's A Promised Land has become a 'comfort read.' Since I followed the news so much during the 2008 financial crisis, etc., the book is illuminating the past, as well as setting a 'prologue' for the not-identical-but-similar challenges of the Biden Administration. Besides, it calms my anxiety when turmoil arises in the workplace.