This month is dedicated to every volunteer that has asked me about my name over the past month. A perk of the job is, so far, meeting somewhere between 25-100 new people a week. I am enjoying the exercise of perfecting the introduction! Much like developing an eye for which people standing around in a car park are likely to be shy volunteers, I am getting to know the look before someone says “I have to ask, where does your name come from?” and working on the best possible answer.
Out and about
Queen’s Park Book Festival (01.09.24): It is not the impression I expected to have, but after going to a talk by Michael Palin on the book he has just written, I left with a overwhelming sense of appreciation for my Mum. His book is about his mysterious great uncle Harry (important to note that his great uncle Harry died during The Battle of the Somme, so Michael Palin never knew him). But, I have to say, my Mum’s book about an unknown relative (also Harry) was so much more resourceful and ranging, and honestly it felt like Michael Palin had been cheating when I learned he had his Harry’s diaries to work from when writing the book. Our Harry, by every metric I could discover to compare them, led a much more exciting life! Michael Palin was a charming speaker, but I did not feel the need to buy the book. ★★★☆☆
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider (29.09.24): I felt that this collection doubly earned the label “Expressionist”, because they so wonderfully capture these incredibly vivid expressions on the faces of their subjects! The colours and feelings completely drew me in, and I left the exhibition at the Tate Modern feeling like I could look at the world differently. Actually I think Mum and I were both a bit stunned when we got outside. ★★★★★
Watch this
A Comedy of Errors, Midnight Performance (Shakespeare’s Globe, 06.09.24): I love The Globe, and this, to me, was The Globe at its finest! A genuine, true comedy, and an absolutely hilarious performance! There is something about starting a show at midnight. I think the commitment from the audience to be here and enjoy it combined with the edge of tiredness, leads to a slightly delirious atmosphere. We were whooping, stamping our feet, clapping and cheering along with every revelation and outrageous line! The actors frequently waded through the audience, and every balding man in the yard was subject to observations on their condition as seen from the heights of the stage. It was glorious! ★★★★★
The Count of Monte Cristo (15.09.24): The Count of Monte Cristo is the only book that I have ever felt strongly enough about to declare it as my favourite. Was this the folly of a fourteen year old with absurdly strong convictions: undoubtedly. Having a favourite book seems absurd to me now. But, that should prime you for my hopes and fears about this film adaptation going in. It was utterly charming! It retained many of the qualities of the book that made me love it the first time (including being rather long) and while not totally true to the book, was just fun! I loved the casting choices, although the prosthetics applied to their very good actors were iffy. ★★★★☆
Lee (18.09.24): I could go into it in depth, but actually I think it’s probably enough to say, if the premise or the topic appeals you (which it may well, Lee Miller was a fascinating woman), maybe find any other medium to explore this, and maybe don’t watch this film. ★★☆☆☆
Recent Reads
In slightly typical fashion, what was intended to be a couple of one or maybe two sentence summaries of books has turned into half an essay. If you are not in need of book recommendations, feel free to ignore the ramblings below. However, if you are looking for inspiration, I have gotten lost in some really excellent reads this month.
Fire Weather John Vaillant 2023: I struggled with this book. I started reading it about a year ago and have picked it up on and off since then because the premise for the book felt like something I should want to read. It is a book that narrates the course of the enormous wildfire that started in May of 2016, rapidly destroying the bitumen extracting hub of Fort McMurray, Canada. This narrative account is woven in with a larger story about fossil fuel extraction, climate change and the global increase in both the frequency and severity of wild fires. I am very glad to have finished the book because there were many extracts scattered throughout that I did find genuinely fascinating. However, the problem I came up against that made me put the book down and not want to pick it up again was that prose style. This was written like a piece of very very long form journalism. So many adjectives! So many snapshots of horror, dumped unceremoniously on the reader to make you feel things. So, so many long winded descriptions of the mechanisms of fire itself. I felt like a game of spot the difference where I was reading the same three paragraphs with tiny variations multiple times in every single chapter, just to see if I would notice. With a different editor, I would have read this in a week, not a year. ★★☆☆☆
the edge of elsewhere Keanu Reeves and China Miéville 2024: This was fun! This novel is a spin off of a comic book series that Keanu Reeves wrote called BZRKR, which I now definitely want to track down and read. The actual text had something of the quality of stories I have previously read that have been collected from an oral tradition, which fits well. I appreciated the ever-offbeat and twisty mind of China Miéville coming to bear on a protagonist that felt pretty different from the characters he usually writes. It was not that deep, but like I said - this was fun! ★★★★☆
Kairos Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann 2021: Now this was a strange one for me. I walked away from this with two very strong impressions. The first was that this was a very well written book. I thought that the prose was evocative and thoughtful, and I really liked the translation choice to include lots of German. The story totally drew me in and left me with the feeling that I could have known any of the characters. The second was that I did not enjoy this book. It was compelling in the “I can’t look away from this train wreck” kind of way. I felt totally tainted by the story and the horrible things people do to each other in it. It felt real enough to really upset me, which is a show of talent - absolutely, but I have never loved this sort of book. To over-generalise (it’s my blog, so I can if I want to): nasty people being nasty, no matter how creative and convincing their methods, just isn’t something I particularly like to read about. ★★★☆☆
My Brilliant Friend Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein 2012: This has been recommended to me through every imaginable channel. Friends, strangers on the internet, journalists. It has recently won every reward imaginable, and in fact it was almost to my benefit because in my mind it had passed into the realm of “simply must be over-hyped, cannot possibly be that good”. This inevitably led me to expecting the book to be irritating, pretentious or to have some other mildly offensive quality. It was none of these. To me, as to so many others, this was simply brilliant. I am SO LATE to the party, but so glad that I got here! This was an absolutely riveting examination of teenage female friendships (I have partaken in a few, this spoke me), and the worlds we build in our minds. There was an electrifying feeling of truthfulness in this story, that I think makes it compelling whether the subject matter is relatable for a reader in the details of characters lives or not. If it feels like I’m heaping on too much encouragement to read this book but you think “fuck it” and pick it up anyway, perhaps you will be lucky and go through the same process of revelation that I did. If so, please report back! ★★★★★
Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer 2013: There is one particular concept in this book that I am going to try and hold on to. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book by a native American ecologist trying to resolve the two frameworks that she uses to interact with the natural world. The indigenous teachings and deeply held relationships she has with the natural world are overlapped and interwoven with her scientific training and work as a professor of ecology throughout the book. It would be absolutely a futile exercise to attempt to convey the wonderful vision that Robin Wall Kimmerer creates in this book, but the one element that has most thoroughly seeded itself in my mind since reading the book was this: I love the natural world and what if the world, the plants and animals and wind and rain, loved me back? It is an absolute given among ecologist, and I think most people, that we love many bits of the natural world. I have favourite trees and birds and cats, I am without fail delighted by the first blackberries in the autumn, and the first snowdrops in the spring. But what if it went both ways? If we believe that the brambles love us back then the fruit becomes a gift between friends, gratefully received. The book makes a very convincing case that gratitude for the gifts that we are given by a loving world will be a necessary part of any truly sustainable human society. ★★★★★
Piranesi Susanna Clarke 2020: My experience of reading this was almost exactly the inverse of reading My Brilliant Friend. There were so many elements the I thought that I would love and that I also thought I ought to love. Despite being strange and imaginative in a way that very well might have resonated if I had simply picked the book up knowing nothing about it, the fact that I have meant to read it and expected to love it since 2020 left me feeling underwhelmed. It’s difficult to pin down exactly where the problem with the actual text lies for me because I definitely did enjoy reading it, but I suppose it’s a bit like if you’ve been promised the best ever brownie and then what you are actually given is a very nice flapjack. I want to read another of Susanna Clarke’s books another time with a more open mind to see whether expecting a flapjack, I can revel in it’s excellence at being a flapjack. ★★★★☆
In other news, I have spent many glorious hours this month in the both the Blackwell’s bookshops in Oxford with my own Brilliant Friend Sabrina (who gets all credit for persuading me to finally pick up that book), and so of course my camera roll is full of pictures of books that look enticing. If anyone has strong feelings about any of the books below, I would love to hear!
Working it out:
As you all know, I started my new job in August, and I am pleased to report that as of the 30th September, I have been promoted! The actual title of my new job is still up for debate, but the working title offered up by my boss is “Green Space Lead”. I am hoping to pitch for “Environmental Project Lead” or something like it that is generally a bit more serious sounding. I also need to find a way to work in that I am also the head community volunteering coordinator. Please do pitch in if you have any suggestions! If you are around in London and would like to volunteer, also please do let me know. It would be so fun to have pals along at work.
In other news, I have been very encouraged by the amount of wildlife I have seen as I work in London’s parks. The environment I am trying to improve is not altogether a lost cause, and it is really a joy to see the volunteers I work with discover frogs, mice, snails and (after I had let them know that there are no wild geckos) a rather thrilling baby lizard!
Anyhow, I hope you all have a great October. Catch you in the next one! x