Delicacy: A Memoir About Cake and Death

Delicacy is an examination of what it’s like to grow up as a tall, clever, quiet, funny woman in the UK. Katy Wix shares moments of trauma from her adolescence and adulthood and explains how cake has become associated in her mind with the awfulness of life. Cake is ever present, as a treat, a comfort, a distraction. It’s often eaten in stressful circumstances. Possibly more often than it’s eaten simply for pleasure.

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The Island of Missing Trees

Elif Shafak’s part-magical realism novel about family, ancestry, war and the inner thoughts of trees is a wonderful wintery read. The Island of Missing Trees crossed my path thanks to Emma’s review at Em with Pen. Emma’s thoughts on the novel made me want to read it, so I reserved it at the library.

The story starts with a history of an island divided by war. The island is Cyprus, its long history bound up with legend, its recent history one of violence. In a well lies a pocket watch and the chained together bodies of the joint owners of a tavern. The tavern is significant to the story in this novel.

Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain

Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain is a scholarly tome from the team at the Hepworth Wakefield. Written to accompany an exhibition there in 2018, which I didn’t see, it attempts to position the photographer Lee Miller at the heart of the British surrealist movement in the 1930s and 1940s.

I can’t remember where I first encountered Miller’s photography. It was in an exhibition many years ago. I recall seeing solarised images she had made in collaboration with Man Ray alongside the photographs she took as a war correspondent during and at the end of the Second World War. I bought a postcard of her image ‘Portrait of Space’, depicting a landscape seen through a torn piece of netting with an empty picture frame hovering over the sky, because it made me think of Magritte. I was drawn by the framing and lighting of her images, that borrowed from the world of fashion she had experienced as a model and that also had a theatrical feel to them.

Novellas in November 2022 – How did I do?

I did pretty well with this challenge. It’s the first time I’ve properly done Novellas in November. I’ve tagged the odd novella that I’ve happened to read in November before, but never followed the prompts. I enjoyed it. It made me think about my reading more strategically and helped me to knock six titles off my To Read pile.

Somebody Loves You

Mona Arshi’s novella Somebody Loves You is the story of Ruby, a young girl who chooses mutism as her coping mechanism to deal with the stresses of her suburban life. It opens with a quote from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet that speaks of feeling unnoticed and finding a way to preserve your inner self.

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Book of Form and Emptiness to The Book of Ramallah

How quickly the year is turning. We’re almost a week through August already and it’s the first Saturday in the month. Time to join Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best for Six Degrees of Separation.

Our starting book is Ruth Ozeki’s 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction-winning novel The Book of Form and Emptiness.

Jolts

Jolts is a short story collection from the Argentine writer Fernando Sdrigotti. It’s a punchy collection that looks at being an émigré from somewhere and an immigrant to somewhere. Across the nine stories there is anger, frustration, a sense of being lost in spaces in between, broken up by leaving bits of yourself in the places you inhabit and move on from.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wintering to The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

Here we are again and already at the first Saturday in the month. July this time, and a new round of Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

I’ve read this month’s starting book, Katherine May’s Wintering. It’s a bold choice with which to start our chains, and it took some thought for me to find a thread. I forged my chain late on Saturday night, but chose sleep over wrangling it into a post. Only a day late with that.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Sorrow and Bliss to How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

From the posts in my WP Reader, I see it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation, the book meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

I have lost track of the days because Britain is in the middle of an extended weekend that started on Thursday with a reallocated Bank Holiday Monday, moved through a Bank Holiday Friday that felt like Sunday, and now it’s anyone’s guess what day it is.

It is the first Saturday of the month, though. Really.

For our starting book this month, Kate has chosen Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.

I haven’t read Mason’s debut, so genned up on it by reading a review. I now want to read it.

Six Degrees of Separation: From The End of the Affair to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Here we are at the first Saturday in March, meaning it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

The starting book for this month’s chain is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, about extramarital love in a time of war. Although I haven’t read this one, I like Graham Greene’s writing and am interested in reading this novel at some point.