Knucklebone

Read 04/08/2021-10/08/2021

Rating 3 stars

Knucklebone is a police procedural with a twist set in Johannesburg. Detective Ian Jack has left the South African police force to fulfill his late mother’s dream for him to get an education and not turn into his father. His former colleague Reshma Patel has risen up the ranks in the meantime and is now a Captain. They reconnect one night when Ian is shadowing a security guard as research for his Criminology MA, and the police are also called to the scene of a crime.

Summer Reading Challenge 2021

Cathy, over at 746 Books, is hosting 20 Books of Summer again this year, or however many books you think you might be able to knock off your To Read pile. The challenge runs from 1 June to 1 September.

Six Degrees of Separation – from The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to The Mill on the Floss

 

I’m sitting in a freezing cold departure area (I can’t dignify it by calling it a lounge) at Dublin Airport, waiting for my connecting flight home. The café, which is more of a hot beverage kiosk, is closed. There is a pillar that invites travellers to use three smiley face buttons to express your satisfaction with the facilities. I might warm myself up by hammering on the red sad face button later.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, I thought I’d do this month’s Six Degrees of Separation.

Born a Crime

Read 22/03/2017-24/03/2017

Rating: 4 stars

Read for The Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge

When this book came up as one of the Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge reads, the description interested me. I didn’t know who Trevor Noah was. I learned that he’s the current host of The Daily Show, but I was more interested in the description of his birth being a crime.

Burger’s Daughter

Read 21/02/2016-28/02/2016

Rating: 5 stars

LibraryThing review

I don’t know how to describe how I feel about this book. It’s beautiful. I feel almost as though I’m in love with it. It’s not the book that I was expecting. I thought it was going to be deeply political in the way protest novels usually are, and it is deeply political but not as a protest. It is political about the self. It rejects as central the political situation of the time and country of its setting, and instead places it in the background, incidental to the story of Rosa Burger’s self.

 I feel challenged by it but also strangely comforted. I’m comforted by its pace and challenged by the inequalities hinted at as Rosa moves through her life.