reading – findingtimetowrite

Here come the stats for 2024!

I don’t have Spotify or other fancy apps to give me a 2024 Wrapped version, but I do have some bookkeeping on Goodreads and Letterboxed. So here are my stats for this past year.

Books:

I read 142 books (this does include a handful of DNFs – less than ten), over 35,000 pages, of which Cannibals was the shortest (only 88 pages) but possibly the one most indelibly imprinted on my retina, and Verena Rossbacher’s Mon Cheri officially the longest (512 pages, although that might be because the print was bigger than for the Annual Banquet… for example) – and quite possibly one of the more forgettable ones. Of those books, 84 were in or from other languages, so it’s perhaps no wonder that they made up the majority of my most memorable reads.

The clear favourite country was Japan, with 23 books translated from Japanese (and another 3-4 set there but written by foreign authors). But I also spent some time in other East Asian countries – South Korea accounted for five books, while Vietnam, Taiwan and China contributed with one each. My usual staple favourites, i.e. books in French and German, didn’t fare too badly, with six and ten titles respectively, and there were ten Romanian books I read for pleasure (rather than merely prowling for possible future translations into English). However, it was Spanish and Portuguese that had an upsurge this year, with ten titles, more than in previous years I believe.

Fireworks at Ryogoku by Utagawa, Edo period, from Tokyo National Museum.

Films and TV series:

I watched 134 films this year, my highest number since I started logging them on Letterboxd in 2020, and bear in mind that many of those are actually TV series rather than one-off films, so that is far too many hours of viewing, I believe! I also seem to have become less harsh in my rating, as I have one five star (a rewatch of In the Mood for Love, one of my all-time favourite films), and no fewer than 28 with either 4 or 4.5 stars. My older son will be in shock, since he seems to think I’m congenitally unable to give more than 3 stars for most films! Of those 28, 23 were Asian (mostly Korean and Japanese, but also some Taiwanese and Chinese or Hong Kong), so that shows you perhaps where my heart and head has been for the better part of the year. It almost feels like being back at university once more, but this time with far easier access to books, music and films from the region.

The lowest scoring film was a Romanian Made for Netflix one, called Selfie 69, which I can barely remember beyond the fact that it irritated me, and which I reviewed as follows at the time:

Wanted to see what young people in Romania are talking about, how they’re behaving…. but boy, those houses were like nothing I’ve seen in Romania! It’s that kind of Western aspirational vacuous comedy that didn’t feel very funny at all (some instances of assault and misogyny).

Music:

I don’t make much effort to keep up-to-date with new releases nowadays, so the only recent songs I’ve enjoyed are the ones I could add to my Upbeat Music playlist (for exercising): ROSÉ & Bruno Mars APT, Megan Thee Stallion Neva Play (feat. RM) and Mamushi (feat. Yuki Chiba), or else new releases by some of my long-time favourite Japanese women musicians such as Electricity by Utada Hikaru, or Faster than Me by Iri or Luciférine by Aoba Ichiko.

However, the main emphasis has been on nostalgia, and my playlists are full of favourite songs from all decades, sparking many happy memories. Some of them I reminisce over with old schoolfriends, while others I get to enjoy all over again with my sons. Skiing down the slopes in Poiana Brasov by full moon singing Ben E. King’s Stand By Me. Falling in love in Cambridge while dancing to Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata Song. Dancing around in my kitchen even in the most difficult times during the divorce to Janelle Monae’s Make Me Feel. And, of course, feeling the pain of having my name constantly mispronounced or misremembered with The Ting Tings. And most of them are also suitable for my 140 BPM playlist (165 tracks, over 6 hours of music), which keeps me sane and well-exercised, although my sons complain that they have to listen to me singing along to it…

Beyond Stats:

The key word this year has been ‘Nostalgia’, but in a very positive, healthy way. I’ve reconnected with dear old friends, listened to music that has given me pleasure in the past, rewatched many favourite films, and even reread some books. Rereading old letters and diaries reminded me at times what a pretentious, wilful, even insufferable youngster I was, but it also reminded me of my resilience, huge appetite for exploration and curiosity about the world (which remain undiminished) and that I was very much loved, even though I didn’t realise it at the time. After feeling quite old and decrepit last year, with my sudden onset of arthritis, I’ve been feeling much younger and more energised this year.

Some may call it a midlife crisis, but I’m not desperate to recapture my youth. Instead, I’m open to new adventures, with the maturity and wisdom I have now, but with some of the energy and hope I used to have earlier. This has given me a bit of distance from the madness, political turmoil, unbearable violence and trauma of the world around us. It has been a difficult decade for me personally since about 2014, so it’s a relief to see that my elastic band is snapping back into position now. I’ve no doubt my optimism will be sorely tested in 2025, but here’s hoping almost against hope that it will be a better year than we might expect.

Happy New Year! See you all safely in 2025!

The Pine Tree of Success on the Sumida River. Print from 1936 by Takahashi Hiroaki.

Best Books of My 2024 Reading Year – Jan to March

I remain very impressed with Susan Osborne’s (better known as A Life in Books) way of summarising her reading year by seasons. You can read her Part One, Part Two, Part Three and even Part Four of her 2024 summary, and I hope she won’t mind that I’ll be stealing (I mean, of course, borrowing) her idea to summarise my own year, both in terms of reading and with other cultural events more generally. I didn’t have a target total number of books in mind, but as it happens, almost every section has roughly six books, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of them have been in translation (or other languages).

Part 1 covers January to March 2024, so of course it will skew heavily towards Japanese and French literature (January in Japan and French February). In fact, all of my favourite reads during this period were in translation, partly because I’ve found books in translation more interesting than the ones published in English and have therefore read far more of them.

My favourite Japanese reads were, unsurprisingly, by two favourite authors: Dazai Osamu’s The Flowers of Buffoonery (one I’d somehow never read before) and Tsushima Yuko’s Territory of Light (just as impactful upon rereading). For French literature, I was amused and exhilarated by the exuberance of Mathias Enard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild and deeply impressed by the translation acrobatics of Frank Wynne. I also returned to one of my favourite recent women writers from France, Maylis de Kerangal, her novella Eastbound was translated this year but I read it in the French original.

I also got involved in the International Booker Shadow Panel, although most of the books on the longlist did not impress me all that much, but all three of our Shadow Panel winners made it to to the top of my reading list in March. These were: Not a River by Selva Almada, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and White Nights by Urzula Honek.

It was also an extremely busy, happy and productive winter period, watching lots of films and plays, socialised with my sons and other friends, translated my first full-length novel from German, and even attended a memoir writing course, which I greatly enjoyed. Now that I’ve been blessed with a Kasper of my own, I had to rewatch The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, of course, one of Werner Herzog’s great films. My greatest ‘event’, however, was leaving my day job at the university and choosing to work full-time on Corylus Books and other freelance projects. I miss my wonderful colleagues and the iconic building, which has appeared on film many times. It has not been the easiest of times financially (so if you know anyone looking for a translator or editor, or an executive coach or trainer, please point them to my For Hire page), but it has really been worth it in terms of health and stress levels.

Monthly Summary October 2024

Reading Summary

I seem to be back on track with my reading, i.e. I’ve finished more books this month, probably because some of them were quite short, and also partly inspired by the #1970Club. All this in spite of having a friend over for a whole week and doing lots of sightseeing with her. Not all of the books filled me with delight, unfortunately, but there were some truly memorable ones among them.

I read twelve books, of which eight were in a different language or translated, three were crime fiction (well, just about), and one was non-fiction. I’ve reviewed a few of these: Jessica Au’s haunting Cold Enough for Snow, the Strugatsky Brothers’ zany The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, the two Japanese novels about sex and violence First Love and Cannibals, and the witty Beloved by Empar Moliner. That’s far more than I’ve done over the past several months. Here are some thoughts on the remaining books.

Raluca Nagy: Un cal intr-o mare de lebede (A Horse in a Sea of Swans) – the title shows how the narrator feels as an English woman living for a while in Japan. This is a strange sort of novel, an auto-fiction I suppose, although the narrator is not the Romanian author Raluca Nagy (whose other novel Teo from 16 to 18 I really admire and have been trying to pitch to publishers for translation). Yet the narrator bears a lot of similarities to the author, who did indeed go to live in Japan for a while, studying both the language and engaging in anthropological research. It’s a very basic story, however, about adapting to a new culture and feels surprisingly dated, perhaps more interesting for a Romanian audience who might be less familiar with that culture.

Sarah Manguso: Liars – I remember someone (an agent possibly?) telling me that no one is interested in reading about someone’s marital breakdown and divorce, but with the increasing appetite for relatibility among readers, maybe that’s not quite true. Although at times I felt like shaking the narrator for being so blind and misguided as to not spot the red flags – but, hand on heart, have we always been wise in our own relationships? This sounded very true indeed to me and was also quite painful to read

Marie Tierney: Deadly Animals – this crime novel started off well, with a precocious 14 year old heroine who is fascinated by decaying bodies of animals and documenting things as scientifically as possible. However, once the police get involved in tracking down a serial killer, the story becomes rather over-the-top, and the killer predictable (and very sad).

Jordi Martí-Rueda: Brigadistes, transl. Mary Ann Newman – 60 illustrated profiles (none of them longer than one page) of some of the international participants in the International Brigades, fighting alongside the (ultimately unsuccessful) Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. I’d have liked to see even more profiles and from other countries as well (I know several Romanians who fought there, for example), but it must have been an immense effort to research even those profiles that appear here. One not mentioned in this book but that I always think of is Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell.

Patrick Quentin: Puzzle for Pilgrims – a crime novel that feels more like an entertainment written by Graham Greene if he had collaborated a little with Raymond Chandler. Patrick Quentin is a pen name for a group of writers, so many of the novels until 1952 were collaborative, but one of the main authors was Hugh Callingham Wheeler, who later moved to the States and became a playwright. It was an entertaining mix of wisecracks and memorably sarcastic descriptions of local scenes and American tourists (the novel is set in Mexico).

Sanborn’s is where the American tourists congregated over strawberry shortcakes, bandying stomach conditions and bargains in silver. The brassy normalcy of my compatriots was refreshing. To them Mexico wasn’t a place where you lost your wife; it was something at the other end of Thomas Cook & Sons where you had to be careful about the water and where a lot of quaintness could be stored up on Kodachrome to bore the folks back home in Minnesota.

Verena Roßbacher: Mon Cheri und unsere demolierten Seelen (Mon Cheri and our demolished souls) – I struggle to understand how this could have won the Austrian State Book Prize in 2022, because I struggled to fully appreciate it. It’s Bridget Jones meets Mamma Mia but also tries to introduce a critique of contemporary society and a more contemplative note about life and death and families (of birth versus families of choice). The tone felt really uneven – too farcical and annoying in parts, trying too hard to be profound in others. And yet, I shouldn’t be too harsh, because there were passages that made me laugh out loud, and there were some beautifully very witty and beautifully written ones too. It just didn’t quite hang together overall – and was also a bit too long for the story itself.

Faruk Šehić: Under Pressure, transl. Mirza Purić – this was a book I had to read for the London Reads the World Book Club meeting for November, and if that hadn’t been the case, I swear I’d have abandoned it several times over, because it was such a gut-wrenching, brutal description of the war in Yugoslavia, and its lasting effects on an entire generation of young men. This is drawn from the author’s personal experience, because he was a soldier in the Bosnian army. This is like All Quiet on the Western Front but with the ruthless brutality ramped up even more, and with the occasional mentions of Pearl Jam, Star Trek and Andrea Bocelli reminding us that this war took place not that long ago.

Films

This also seems to be the month that I started watching more films once more, rather than just K- and J-dramas. Some of them, like Black Box Diaries and The Last of the Seawomen, were feature-length documentaries, very well done and very thought-provoking, about the lives of women in Japan and Korea respectively. I was less impressed with the film Queer that I saw as part of the London Film Festival, although Daniel Craig is quite good in it as an aging, drug-addled gay man. Maggie Cheung was also impressive (in three languages) in the film Clean, about a woman trying to reform her life so as to keep custody of her child after the death of her rockstar partner. And, while Wicked Little Letters featured the combined talents of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it was a bit disappointing overall as a comedy.

My Name is Loh Kiwan could have been so much more incisive about the plight of immigrants: it started out well but then ended up being a bit of a romance, which was disappointing. Host was an amusing short horror film very suitable for some Halloween viewing (and best watched on a laptop as it takes place during a Zoom session), while To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was an undemanding comedy my friend and I needed after a busy day of sightseeing in London. I wouldn’t claim either of those two are essential viewing! Of the remaining series that I watched, I found Mr Queen highly amusing and irreverent, although of course not historically accurate, Fishbowl Wives was a bit meh (largely notable for featuring lots of sex scenes, unusually – although J-dramas tend to feature more of them than K-dramas), Itaewon Class was less amazing than I’d been told to expect from reviews.

The very recent What Comes After Love is a Japanese-Korean collaboration and received such high praise that I took out one month’s subscription with Viki Rakuten so I could watch it. Given that both my friend and I spent our formative years studying abroad and met our husbands there, we thought we might be able to relate to the story quite well. The slow-paced drama had some realistic moments, as well as very romantic ones, but it clearly showed the drastic difference in our approach to and belief in love. My friend, who was very happily married until the death of her husband from Covid three years ago, was much happier with the romantic aspects of the TV drama, while I was cynical and impatient (‘what’s over is over, no point in trying to flog a dead horse’).

Plans for November

This will be all about German Literature Month and that’s the reason why I read Mon Cheri, but I’m not sure I have it in me to provide a more in-depth review of this deeply disappointing book. So I hope to have some other good books to read instead. I’ll also be reading a couple of Han Kang novels, although I have to admit I’m disappointed with the new covers (to the left). Some of the books may also fit in the novella category (Greek Lessons by Han Kang, for example), so where possible, I will also participate in Novellas in Novembers.

My Top 10 Reading Habit Shifts

Inspired by book bloggers Lydia and Emma @WordsandPeace, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on how my reading habits may have changed as a result of regular reviewing and blogging.

Genre:

Before I started blogging back in 2012, I was mostly reading crime fiction and had been for several years. But before that, in my teens and twenties, in fact all the way before I had children, I read all kinds of literature from all over the world, and a lot of non-fiction, such as anthropology, biography, philosophy and so on. Once I started reviewing for Crime Fiction Lover, I ended up reading even more crime fiction, but that also meant that I reached saturation point and needed to find other reading outlets before every crime novel started sounding the same (I didn’t always get a choice of what to review, and in 2013-2016 it was the height of psychological thriller era, and they do start to all blur into one when you read many in a row). So I’m back to reading a huge variety of genres and a lot of books in translation. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction anymore, though, and am not particularly keen on YA or romance.

Format:

I prefer reading paperbacks, because hardbacks are heavy and occupy too much space on the shelves, and I can’t seem to remember much or find the bookmarks I made when reading on Kindle. But I do admit having a Kindle is very handy when going on holiday or commuting. As long as it doesn’t suddenly give up the ghost, as my old Kindle did at the beginning of a long train journey!!!

And I have to admit that some of the cheaper paperbacks that I’ve had on my shelves for decades (or even inherited from my parents) are either getting brown spots or falling apart at the seams.

Review copies:

When I first started out blogging, I used to be so proud and so keen to receive review copies, but then the books started crowding me out of the house and I realised I could not give the ones I didn’t want to reread even to charity shops. I’m no longer on most publicists’ mailing lists, but it’s only when I see some rare (and very expensive) research volume on Japanese literature (for example) that I get envious of other reviewers who receive a copy of it.

Reading challenges:

I never did any reading challenges before I discovered the world of book bloggers.

I particularly enjoy the geographical reading challenges: January in Japan, Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month in July, Women in Translation in August, German Lit Month in November. Sometimes I even create my own geographical challenges: French February, Northern Climes in March, Russians in December but there is no rhyme nor reason to it and it switches from year to year. I also like the #YearsBookClub run by Simon and Kaggsy twice a year, the latest of which was 1970 this October. I’ve occasionally tried to do the #20BooksofSummer challenge, and I usually only succeed if I cheat quite a bit.

Languages:

I read mostly in English (including translated into English), but also a considerable amount in Romanian and German (for pleasure and also looking for the next thing I might want to translate), a fair amount in French. That has always been the case, as I grew up with all of these languages. I am now attempting a few short pieces in Italian. I can no longer read in Japanese for pleasure, as I could back in my student days, but I might attempt an occasional bilingual version.

Tracking

I know Goodreads is not the best platform in the world, but it helps me keep track of the books I read, so it’s useful for my monthly and annual summaries. I’m too lazy to use any additional spreadsheets nowadays, but as a teenager I’d make neat notes about my reading at the back of my diaries.

Buying:

Well, we all know that I’m keeping the British publishing industry afloat single-handedly – that’s dedication for you. I buy far too many books, even when it’s imperative that I get rid of many, many books so that I can downsize and transport my library safely across to a different country. I’m a hopeless case NOW, but believe it or not, I used to be quite restrained earlier on (until about 20 years ago) and rely largely on libraries.

Two Writing Craft Books: Amina Cain and Melissa Febos

Two very timely reads as I play around with the idea (and write fragments for) a memoir about living across and between cultures, in those interstitial spaces which show that you never quite fully belong anywhere. Below are some quotes and personal impressions rather than proper reviews, merely to give you a flavour of these books which will certainly sit proudly well-thumbed on my ‘writing craft’ shelf.

Amina Cain: A Horse at Night. On Writing, Daunt Books Originals, 2022.

This feels like a very personal book, a look at one writer’s thoughts as she reads, writes and thinks about fiction but also about life more generally. It is full of beautiful insights, some of which were instantly recognisable, or convincing… and others were persuasive, or at least a good starting point for own reflection.

While the book will appeal most to someone who also wants to write, it is full of wisdom and great quotes. I’ve either flagged or underlined nearly every page in this book and will return to it often.

As a writer, I feel I am always negotiating that: when to give something explicitly to the reader and when to hold back, or when to give just a little of it so that it can be sensed rather than simply seen. There is great value in what can be sensed. And in a way, one of the things that allows fiction its sense of possibility and freedom is this choice of what to make visible.

I don’t believe in perfection and when it comes to fiction, it’s a value I don’t understand. Why should it matter? Is a short story, or a novel, or a work of art, or a film, meant to be perfect? Is it even possible? Do we write in order to create perfect things? I don’t. I never think of it when I’m writing. Yet I too have described a work as perfect… I suppose I meant that I was strongly affected by the novel… that it exists on a special plane for me, above other books. That it is complete in itself.

Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought, what we’ve done? Is it what we’ve gone toward, or what we haven’t gone toward but have instead intensely imagined? If we are writers or artists, is it what we have written or made? Or none of those things?

I used to feel such joy all the time… I used to think that once you felt intense happiness, it would only grow stronger, that once discovered it would keep opening up and out, that experience was like this too, that life became more and more open to you. Naively, I didn’t anticipate a closing down… And now I know. You take hold of your happiness and enjoy it when it is with you. You experience it with gratitude, knowing nothing lasts.

Melissa Febos: Body Work. The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Manchester University Press, 2022.

This book is less poetical and more combative, but perfect timing for someone like me, who is still somewhat ambivalent about whether I dare to write a memoir or not, however heavily disguised as something else.

The author, who has herself penned three memoirs or personal essay collections, lays bare her credo: that personal stories, even of trauma, are worth writing and being read, and that women and other marginalised categories in particular should not fear that their work is in any way inferior. It is a call to battle and a granting of permission to engage in personal storytelling, although it also warns that it requires more than just ‘blurting out’ to elevate it to art.

Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the extravagantly hard work of making good art, which is to say art that succeeds by its own terms. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels… Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing… Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.

The most frequently asked question in any memoir workshop is what to do when writing about others, especially when we reduce them to mere cameo roles, or portray them in unflattering ways. After all, memory is fallible, and others may have equally unflattering views of us and there are always multiple ways of interpreting the situations we found ourselves in:

Cruelty rarely makes for good writing. It can be pleasurable sometimes, both to write and to read, but it is a cheap pleasure. People often rely on cruelty for humor… but the prose and people I find funniest do not deploy their punch lines at the expenses of those who cannot defend themselves. .. writing cruelly is almost always a form of bullying… It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version of a story that has as many true variations as persons involved.

The final piece of advice which I found very useful is that memoir is not about events, but about reflection and growth.

Successful narration of a memoir depends upon the careful interplay of the past I and the present… Self-knowledge, the insights unavailable in the past and acquired in the time since, are what give memoir its depth. It is not experience that qualifies a person to write a memoir, but insight into experience… You make the past known in order to know yourself as changed.

This does not necessarily mean that we need to be sufficiently distanced to those events to have the benefit of hindsight or be able to talk about them without emotion (which is how I initially interpreted it: if it’s still too raw, it sounds too angry or whingey). Writing meaningfully about the past, Febos assures us, simply requires a change of heart, even if our personal transformation is not yet complete.

A Month of Indulgence: June 2024

After a great transition from May to June with Capital Crime, I spent the rest of the month of June (a birthday month for me, my younger son, and many, many of my friends) in rather unproductive, self-indulgent decadence.

Events

I was planning to go out more and do more things, but the trains have been very problematic, so in the end I only saw the stage version of Spirited Away at the London Coliseum (the second part especially was magical!) and went to Oxford for the always interesting and motivating Translation Day. I also really enjoyed the Expressionist/Blue Rider exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve always dreamt of having a group of artistic friends living together in a village over the summer and indulging in our creative pursuits during the day, giving each other support and feedback, and having glorious meals on the terrace in the evening. OK, those are not the most obvious critical points to make about the Blaue Reiter group, but it’s what I love about them.

Closer to home, I attended a monthly Royal Borough Writers’ Group meeting – which I haven’t been attending all that regularly recently. Not quite Blaue Reiter, but it made me a little sad to think that once I move I won’t be joining their sessions of feedback and fun writing prompts anymore.

The other great joy is that university exams are over and my younger son is back home at last. He’s inherited my more ‘mature’ tastes in food and drink, much to the surprise and mockery of his student friends, so we’ll be indulging in cheese, salmon blinis and cocktails until the older son comes home on the 10th of July.

I don’t think I’ve had Curacao since I was a student…

Reading

For the first time ever in my life, I can understand why some people don’t read as much as I do, because this month I’ve only read six books and struggled to finish even those, although I quite enjoyed them. They were all set in different places and I’ve written about three of them (Poland, Hong Kong and Japan). I wrote a reader’s report for Das Herzflorett by Marica Bodrožić, a coming-of-age story of a Croatian girl joining her immigrant parents in Germany. Chinatown by Thuan was part of our London Reads the World Book Club, set in Vietnam, Russia and France, with a hypnotic, repetitive prose that irritated some of our book club members, but which I found oddly soothing (but did NOT like reading on Kindle, especially when my Kindle died while I was reading it and it took a week or more to replace it). I got Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan from the library a week or so before it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and, although it took me several weeks to finish it, I’d have to agree that it was a deserving winner: a family saga with a lot of emotional and social/political history, educating me about the civil war in Sri Lanka. But my appetite for reviewing was even lower than my appetite for reading, so that’s as much as you’ll get about this book.

Five books by women authors, three in translation – not a bad proportion, when the numbers are so low.

So what have I been spending my time on?

I’ve been spending a fair proportion of time getting the house surveyed, decluttering and getting ready to put it up for sale. But, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been continuing my unprecedented TV bingeing. So yes, I can see why people who watch Netflix or other streaming services so much (I rarely did before April) have little time or energy left for reading.

I did this partly because I knew that once my sons came back, I wouldn’t have the time or desire to watch TV much, other than perhaps some films or anime that they might enjoy too. However, it’s mostly because I discovered the gorgeous Korean actor Kim Jae-Wook in Her Private Life and then even younger and more gorgeous in Coffee Prince. So, just like I go down into a rabbit hole and read everything when I find a favourite author, I fell down into the rabbit hole of trying to track down as many of his films and series as possible. He seems to choose his roles carefully, to give himself as much depth and variety as possible, rather than playing the conventional leading man. I particularly recommend Butterfly Sleep, a Japanese film directed by a Korean director, a poignant meditation on ageing, dementia, loneliness and love, but he lights up the screen wherever he appears – that natural rather than manufactured charisma which I associate with Hollywood in the 1930s-1970s. He was previously a model and lead singer in a rock band as well, his hobby is reading and one of his favourite films is In the Mood for Love – so what’s not like, eh?

Of course, after a while, all Korean dramas start to feel the same, with accidents leading to coma, rich chaebol families fighting for succession, would-be lovers failing to talk to each other properly, lots of scenes of drunkeness where one’s true feelings finally come out, dominant and interfering parents (but with an emotional scene of mutual understanding and forgiveness) and a high percentage of orphans being adopted by families in Germany or the United States. Oh, and did I mention that the male protagonists are often portrayed as aloof or arrogant at first, but then utterly committed and caring, endlessly loyal and faithful? I’d have thought it’s obviously a case of wishful thinking, but apparently some women around the world start believing this might be true and travel to South Korea looking for love. This article explodes this myth: and convinces me that my strategy to admire the beauty on display from a distance is the correct one.

Luckily, just in time to avert complete obsession with Jae-Wook, I discovered another versatile and magnetic actor Woo Do-Hwan, in the Valmont-type role of a loose adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses called Tempted. I would have liked to see the TV series being more dangerous and dark, but Do-Hwan did a nice line in sinister brooding which the camera just lapped up. Apparently, he is more like an enthusiastic, smiley puppy dog in real life.

Just in case you thought I was completely wasting my time though, all this Korean drama watching has also given me the idea for a new novel: a sort of tongue-in-cheek fanfiction type thing to start off with, but then getting deeper and darker, as it tackles issues of ageing, loneliness, obsession, being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, celebrity culture and online trolling. Not quite like Baby Reindeer though, which I just couldn’t bear to watch to the end.

However, I don’t really need excuses for self-indulgence, as I don’t believe in ‘guilty’ pleasures – they are all just little pleasures that harm no one and make our lives a tiny bit more pleasant amid the collective wreckage.

Plans for July

Time to get back on track with reading, writing, publishing, translating and home improvements this month, as well as spending time with my sons. Harrogate crime festival beckons, and Corylus will be publishing the fourth novel by our best-selling author Solveig Palsdottir. Shrouded is delightfully creepy without being too gory, and it also addresses issues such as ageing (again! do I detect a theme this month?) and preying on vulnerable people, so do consider pre-ordering it if you think you might be interested.

Stu will be hosting the Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month in July, so I’m planning to read mostly from those languages (and Catalan) over the next two month (because August is Women in Translation Month anyway). What do you think of my choices below? I just hope I regain my reading va-va-voom.

Monthly Summary February 2024

Unlike January, February seemed to pass by in a flash – perhaps because I spent a few days with my older son in Geneva (and finally realised the limitations of my aging body while skiing) and also because I’ve been so busy with handover responsibilities at work. Nevertheless, I got a reasonable amount of reading in: 15 books – an odd mix of planned (#FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies) and completely random selections. Seven of the books were in translation (or in French original), one was a book of poetry, one a collection of essays so non-fiction, one was Erasure by Percival Everett (because I’ll be going to see the film adaptation soon) and the remaining five were crime fiction (one of the books in translation was crime fiction too – The Meiji Guillotine Murders).

I attended an event organised by Chorleywood Bookshop with Alex Michaelides and enjoyed what he had to say so much that I bought his latest book, The Fury, and then borrowed his first two books immediately from the library. It’s been a long time since I’ve fallen into that kind of reading urgency, so it was nice to experience it once more, although after three in short succession I may have had enough of the psychology of troubled people.

The #FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies books were quite short and all by women authors: Maylis de Kerangal, Faiza Guene, Nolwenn Le Blennevec and Delphine de Vigan.

With hindsight, it was probably not a good idea to read the Trauma essays in parallel with Saramago’s Blindness, which I found profoundly disturbing. I needed a day or so to recover after every chapter, so I’m still not sure how to digest it or talk about that book at our London Reads the World Book Club on the 4th of March. However, the Trauma essays themselves were very diverse, on a wide range of topics, styles and approaches, so at any other time I would have appreciated them, although perhaps best to dip in and out of them.

Captains of the Sands will be reviewed next month for the #1937Club, but I borrowed it from the university library so had to read it this month and return it before I leave my job. To my great dismay, I discovered that I cannot keep my library privileges as an ex-member of staff or alumni, and that it would cost me over £200 per year to continue to have access to the library (still half the price of the London Library, I guess).

Which brings me to another hidden advantage that has kept me in my workplace until now, even when things got really tough, namely free entry to the permanent exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. I took advantage of my last few remaining days with my staff member card to see the galleries for the first time since they underwent a thorough refurbishment and they look more beautiful than ever.

Beyond reading, I also embarked upon a memoir writing course with The National Centre for Writing, although I have to wonder at the wisdom of doing that (and having to hand in assignments every fortnight) when I have a very, very busy few weeks ahead. I also attended two sessions organised by Manchester in Translation – a keynote by Anton Hur to revitalise me and make me feel more optimistic about translation in general and a German translation workshop with Katy Derbyshire, which reminded me how much fun it is to translate in a group (even if you never agree about anything).

I also attended one day of the Independent Publishers’ Guild Spring Conference, where I met other small publishers, including one-person bands, and made a long list of things I still have to learn and do to become more professional at this publishing malarkey.

I watched six films this month, of which Poor Things was probably the most memorable and genuinely funny at times. I was discomfited at first but finally won over by the highly stylised set, the strange sound editing, and, above all, Emma Stone’s performance. Full Time, a deceptively simple film about a single mother’s daily struggles during a train strike in Paris, starring Laure Calamy from Call My Agent, was perhaps too stressful to be considered enjoyable – but amazing how tense a film with such a straightforward premise can be. I finally watched Chicago (after seeing it on stage twice in London many years ago), and was wowed by how beautiful and sexy Catherine Zeta Jones was in this. The remaining three films Inglorious Basterds, Triangle of Sadness and Past Lives were ok but did not quite live up my expectations, after some people raved about them.

March promises to be a very, very busy month, with London Book Fair, the Alternative Book Fair, working on edits and covers on two books at once, meeting my Romanian author, possibly hosting a publishers’ showcase for the Indie Press Network and so much more. Good job I stop my day job on March 6th! Which reminds me, I’d better put a page up listing my services for my freelance career…

Annual Round-Up and Plans for 2024

It’s that time of year when, whether I like it or not, I get to review my reading, writing, film-watching (even my performance appraisal at work), which inevitably leads me to wonder if blogging, reading at great speed and reviewing are indeed the best use of my time. Every year I decide that no, probably not, I should spend more time on translating and writing, and every year I fail to do things differently. Or do I?

Blogging

Actually, my WordPress annual statistics show that I’ve written far fewer blog posts in 2023 (and therefore also less words) than at any time after 2013. There is a downward tendency for the number of likes and comments on my blog posts anyway, this has been the case for years after a peak in 2017 (and this is what my other blogger friends report too), so this is probably a wise use of my energy. I certainly don’t intend to post more frequently in 2024 and will only review the books that fit the ‘theme of the month’ (more about that anon). The majority of my blog visitors are from the US, followed at quite some distance by the UK. France and Canada are nearly on equal footing (very far behind those first two), and Germany and Australia are slightly behind them. I am curious what drove the single visitor from Vatican City (or Namibia or Turkmenistan) to my blog! The most popular blog post has been my sort of review of Lessons in Chemistry, which simply shows the popularity of that book rather than my qualities as a reviewer, although I’m pleased to see that my second most popular blog post hopefully encourages others to discover my favourite Japanese author Dazai Osamu. It also amuses me greatly to see that most people discover my blog thanks to Pinterest rather than Twitter or WordPress subscription or any other links: and my Friday Fun posts remain popular, although as usual they require minimal effort and are not necessarily all that representative of my interests (although yes, I suppose I am a little bit obsessed with interior design).

Writing and Translating

I’ve not written as much as I’d planned (not edited/rewritten my novel, not written a lot of new poetry or submitted anything much), I only submitted 24 things (including translations and residency applications) and I’ve very nearly had more rejections than submissions. The only two acceptances have been translations: of the fantastic (as in fantasy) short fiction by Urmuz in Turkoslavia magazine and of a short play by Edith Negulici in Asymptote Journal (forthcoming). A previous translation of Urmuz which appeared in Sublunary Edition’s Firmament Journal in early 2023 got a mention in the annual round-up by that publisher, which was a nice little boost. I’ve also had my translation of Deadly Autumn Harvest by Tony Mott published, of course, and it was great fun working on that (being a translator and editor all at once) and developing a really close relationship with the author, who was game for anything. I am also currently working on my first full-length translation of a German crime novel (page 282 of 430), which we hope to publish in January 2025.

Travelling

2023 has also been a year of travelling, ostensibly for DIY writing/translating retreats although not that much writing got done: to Switzerland in January, to Lyon and Provence at the end of March/beginning of April, to Gladstone’s Library in Wales in November. Add to that family holidays – our much postponed Japan trip in August, a wedding in Romania in late October – and an online Translation Summer School in July, and you can see that I’ve managed to keep myself thoroughly busy (or distracted, whichever way you choose to look at it).

Publishing

At least one third of all my time and effort has gone into my publishing venture, Corylus Books, this year (and every year since we started in 2020). Like all tiny independent publishers, particularly those of translated fiction which has substantial upfront costs and generally lower sales, we have found this year quite rough in terms of trading figures. People kept saying that Twitter didn’t sell books, but the scattered flight from that platform with no clear successor emerging shows that perhaps it was far handier in building a community and raising awareness about your books than we thought at the time. Of course, there are many other reasons (rising costs of paper, printing, distribution), the decline of reviewing off-line (and the decline in readership for online reviews), the opaque nature of gaining visibility among booksellers and festival organisers (the latter is even harder when you have authors who have to come from quite far abroad). I also have to resign myself to the fact that Romanian authors will always have a very niche appeal in the English-speaking world compared to Scandinavian ones. Anyway, I don’t mean to moan, but I’ve heard similar stories from other publishers and have compiled some of their thoughts into an article which will appear in 2024 in a special edition about books of the Romanian academic journal Culture. Society. Economy. Politics.

Reading Plans for 2024

I rather like having themed months, but only selecting a few books on that theme each month, so that still have some leeway for book club reading or anything else that might catch my fancy. So these are the months I already have themed:

January in Japan
French February (includes any French language, not just from France)
Moldovan and Romanian March (because there is no month that starts with R, and March contains both the letters M and R)
#1937Club in April – and possibly that will lead to a Classics or at least pre-WW2 reading all month
Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month in July
Women in Translation in August
German Lit Month and Novellas in November

Additionally, I would like to make it a habit to start and end the day with some poetry, to help me gain some perspective and regain some hope, despite all this horribly depressing news from around the world.

Writing, Translating and Publishing Plans

I will stop my day job in early March and will therefore need to start making money from translating, editing and writing, as well as the freelance training work I’ve done prior to 2017. I also have a house to sell in England and a flat to buy in Berlin, and organise an international relocation, so that should keep me deeply mired in administration, NOT my favourite thing to do. Nevertheless, although I might have to scale back my personal ambitions this year, I still need to have some creative outlets or goals.

I’m almost afraid of making any writing plans, because I failed to stick to them last year, but one thing I realised, after being part of the Write Club Plus programme in 2023 with The Literary Consultancy, is that my default option is being a multitasker when it comes to writing. I need the variety of working on multiple projects: poetry, flash fiction, non-fiction, novel, alongside translating. I have to accept that and learn how to work within that constraint (and finish things). So my only ‘resolution’ is to keep working at my writing and to not give up hope.

I will continue to pitch translation projects to various publishers and generally make them aware of authors they might be missing out on, although it has been a very disheartening and depressing process these past couple of years. My dream authors to bring into English would be Marlen Haushofer, Ödön von Horváth, Lavinia Braniște, Alina Nelega, Tatiana Țîbuleac and many more. I just wish that copyright holders (i.e. foreign publishers) were more responsive to my queries, and that the English-language publishers were not so good at ghosting.

Corylus will keep us busy in 2024 with five books being published, as well as the prep for the 2025 list. We have been keeping Quentin Bates busy as a translator with no fewer than three Icelandic authors. Óskar Guðmundsson is back with a very dark, haunting novella The Dancer. The irrepressible Stella Blómkvist will appear in a second investigative outing in May. Meanwhile, fans of Sólveig Pálsdóttir’s solid police procedurals will be glad to hear that a fourth translated book will be available in the summer. The two I’m most excited about, however, are the more overtly political books: our first author from Argentina Elsa Drucaroff with Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case and Catalan author Teresa Solana, whom I’ve long admired, with the start of a new series set in Barcelona, Black Storms, touching upon the long-term consequences of the Spanish Civil War.

Reading and Event Summary September 2023

I know September is not quite over yet, but I won’t get a chance to blog this weekend, and, besides, it’s felt like an endless month, so high time I wrapped it up with this summary!

It has felt strange not to have any more school runs to do or uniforms to buy this September. With the two boys leaving at such different times (the older one left for Geneva for his year abroad almost immediately after we returned from Japan, while the younger one left for his university only yesterday), with my hip being diagnosed as arthritic, and with work being very busy in preparation for the autumn term, it just hasn’t felt like that optimistic, energetic September New Year that I usually look forward to and enjoy.

Nevertheless, there have been some cultural events and books to keep me happy.

Reading

A month of deliberately aimless reading; in this case, lighter reading, to make up for the increased workload. Fourteen books: nine of them were crime fiction, my default option for relaxation. More surprisingly, two of the books were memoirs, which is not a genre I pick up all that often, one was creative non-fiction for want of a better word, and one was a speculative/fantasy YA with murder. Very untypically of me, only one of the books was a translation – The Mantis, a Japanese sort-of thriller. So clearly I felt a need for a bit of change as well as reverting to comfort reading. The number would not have been as high if I hadn’t attended the Crime and Wine event last weekend, which made me instantly acquire all three author’s books and instantly read them too, which doesn’t happen all that often. All three are marvellously entertaining and thrilling reads, which I read in just one or two gulps.

In fact, all of the books I read this month were really good, each in their own way, which just shows what a load of snobbishness it is to believe only ‘literary’ books are worth reading. They were exactly what I needed right now.

I haven’t had much time or desire to review the many books I read, but I did attempt to write at least a couple of paragraphs about four of the recent reads, including two coming-of-age stories.

I hope I’ll recover my reviewing mojo in October, when I plan to go back to more thematic reading, namely Spanish and Portuguese language literature.

Events

I was still a bit jetlagged when I attended an online masterclass about the poetry of the uncanny with Helen Mort in early September and heard about the fascinating ‘broken spectre’ phenomenon for the first time. I also attended an incredibly useful session on editing your own work with Hannah Chukwu, editorial director at Dialogue Books, organised by the The Literary Consultancy.

The most exciting live event was a Q&A with my fellow Corylus director and translator, Quentin Bates, at Horsham Library. Entitled ‘Crime: A Universal Language’. We had a much better turnout than we expected (we thought it might be just us and the librarians initially), some really good questions and engaged audience, and we even sold a few books.

I also watched the latest Christian Petzold film: he is shaping up to be one of my favourite contemporary directors. I also have plans to watch another film tonight, a French one called The Innocent, directed by and starring the gorgeous Louis Garrel, because I need a bit of a comedy heist caper.

I also sneaked away early from work to catch the exhibition about the Rossettis at Tate Britain, which was the first time I saw so many of their works in one place, especially the work of Lizzy Siddal. Their style of painting is never going to be fully to my taste, but it is undeniably attractive, and I find their talent and passion across many fields inspiring. Christina is still my favourite.

August Reading and Getting Back to the Routine

When you’ve spent five years dreaming of a trip to Japan, and many months planning, booking and paying, it is inevitable that the trip itself seems to go by in a flash, even if it is nearly two weeks. Thankfully, none of my fears came true: we did not experience any earthquakes, typhoons or flooding/tsunamis (in case you think I’m OTT worrying about such things, at least one of the above has happened to me on four of my previous five Japan trips). None of us lost our passports or Japan rail cards (although there was one panicky moment when I couldn’t find mine in the right pocket). None of us fell ill with Covid or other health issues, even my painful hip held up to the miles and miles of daily walking (helped, no doubt, by relaxation in the onsen nearly every evening). And, although we had a couple of fraught moments of what could be called ‘travel quarrels’, on the whole we had a wonderful time together and the mother/children relationship did not break down irrevocably. Japan was as beautiful and quirky as I’d remembered it; pictures and more details to follow on Friday Fun this week, but for the time being here is a little glimpse into my acquisitions from the Ghibli Museum, which was one of the highlights of the trip.

The little film strip was the entrance ticket, which gave us access to watch one of the Ghibli short films that are not in the public domain. We watched Momo the Water Spider, which was Miyazaki’s attempt to make people appreciate the little creature more.

In the meantime, it’s down to earth with a bump, as I have three very tough weeks at work to follow, plus shipping off one son to his university abroad at the end of this week and the other one to his university in England in 2 weeks’ time, with lots of preparations still to do. I will breathe an enormous sigh of relief once this month is over and I can relax by myself, although I bet I’ll start missing them terribly once they are out of the house.

I was somewhat overoptimistic about the amount of reading and writing I’d do in Japan. I was too exhausted by the walking and the humid heat to write more than a page or two in a travel journal (you will laugh when you hear that I’d packed a book of Marlen Haushofer short stories in the vain hope that I might translate one or two of them if I got bored in the evening). I read mostly on the plane, and mostly classic holiday reads: two Mary Stewarts, one set in Avignon and the surroundings, one set in Crete, and a couple of family or neighbourly dramas from Netgalley or Hobeck Books. I also read some of the stories from the Book of Beijing by Comma Press; although Beijing is very different to Tokyo, there were sufficient points of comparison to keep me very intrigued. The number of books below is rather deceptive, as not all of them were read in August, but gives you a rough idea of the past 5 weeks or so, including all six of my #WomenInTranslation reads. Let’s just say that I saw much of that loneliness and lack of connection in Japan described in Diary of a Void and Mild Vertigo.

My favourites this month were A Little Luck, Annie Ernaux’s love affair and Mild Vertigo, although I think I need to reread the Book of Beijing in quieter circumstances and review it properly. I also want to give a shout-out for Liliana Corobca’s insight into the mind of a censor, although its impact would have been greater if it had been a bit shorter.

Since it is such a busy month, I won’t give myself any reading ‘homework’ and rely instead purely on mood to make my selections. In October, however, I’d like to focus on Latin America and the Iberian peninsula. In November, it will be of course German Literature Month. And in December I’m contemplating Hardbacks on my bookshelves (another attempt to reduce the number of books on my shelves).