I do love reading, and I decided to post about the books or articles I read here as a symbolic way to claim my own data. I was inspired to do this by Molly White in some article or podcast. I know. I am using WordPress on the site where I host my blog, but it is the best I can do for now.
Anyway. The books. I now use the StoryGraph for logging all the books I read. A part of me needs and thrives on such lists. I was on Goodreads for many years, but I never used the community all that much. I was there to keep track of my books. Period. I did make some friends, but many are friends I know IRL. A friend on the other side of the globe suggested I move to StoryGraph to get away from one particular billionaire, plus I could support a business owned by a Black woman, and that was enticement enough for me to sign up. I had signed up for StoryGraph a few years ago when another friend moved there, but I felt no need for getting book suggestions with a “what book am I in the mood for” graph. I have around 1000 to-be-read books, and new books find me out all the time. I have to work hard to avoid book suggestions! I ended up staying with Goodreads a few more years, but I caved earlier this year. I had things running smoothly, and now idiot billionaire behaviour made me up sticks and move to go find peace.
I read all kinds of books for all kind of reasons so I avoid trying to be put into boxes. Often, I want escape after a hard day at work, or to escape reading about going to hell in a handbasket, which is what news is mostly about these days. Thus, I buy or borrow non-fiction, but it risks sitting on the shelf a bit longer because I need another world for a while.
With that long introduction, what have I been reading? This will be a long post because I am covering three months. I wanted to do this back in January, but that just didn’t happen. Also, I am not sharing what I read in chronological order. They are loosely grouped together for a bit of structure to my storytelling.
Childrens and Young Adult (YA) books
Of course you can read children’s books or young adult books at any age! Some amazing stuff is written for kids and teens these days. I wish I had had even just a fraction of what you find now back when I was a kid.
I kicked off the new reading year by reading Flænger i Tiden. This is the final book in the Danish YA fantasy trilogy called Awen, by Nathalie Liane and Bettina Liane. The story follows twins Aia and Peter who were invited by a suitcase (yes!) to join the guardians’ ship called Galathea. The ship sails between magical worlds, and the twins are educated in how they can become guardians of a world called Igdrafell. There’s quite a big adventure packed into around 1600 pages. As of this writing, this book is only in Danish.
I wrapped up another childrens’ series called The Spiderwick Chronicles when I read The Wrath of Mulgarath. This is a cute little series by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, if you can call hobgoblins, goblins, and fairies cute, along with things that are much worse! This is definitely in the middle-grade category, but I think that age group would enjoy it. The series caught my attention through talk about a movie that I couldn’t find anywhere, so I went for the books instead. Again, it had the kind of magic that thrilled me when I was a kind, so younger me would have enjoyed it thoroughly.
I have been time-travelling back to the 70s when social-realism was popular in childrens’ books. I vaguely recall politicians complaining back then about marxist-leninist leanings in education and in literature. I found a list of such books from a Danish publisher called Hanegal Forlaget, whose history seems to have vanished from the internet, and I started reading them all to see what they were like. These books have no subtlety at all. They are pure anti-capitalist and kind of dry as literature goes. The literary qualities of the following three books are not great, but the core message in all has remained constant since the day they were written, and that made me angry 50 years on.
- Mysteriet på Mønsterskolen by Egon Clausen is from 1973. It is designed as a comic book with a rather crude line like many zine-type comics were back then, and no colophone. A teacher is murdered, and two children set out to solve the mystery. Fundamentally, it is about teaching kids capitalist ways by brainwashing them in schools and homogenising them all. Also, one teacher and one parent are only out to destroy any raw nature and to build, build, build to line their pockets. I didn’t think the book was all that great, but it is fun to look back on such books from the 70s, and again, there is a lot of truth to the message about destroying nature, turning people into puppets, and lining the pockets of a select few.
- Kurt stikker af by Kjeld Rasmussen is about Kurt who gets caught up in the social system when it is decided by the authorities, sort of in collaboration with his parents, that Kurt needs to go into foster schooling far from home. Kurt, of course, runs away. It’s about being misunderstood and not fitting in. There are many layers of being misunderstood here where society has expectations of its citizens, and what do you do when citizens don’t fall in line. This was written in 1973, and I couldn’t help but think that this “Kurt” would be in his early 60s now, and what would have happened to him. He would have been let down by society many times. He might have pulled himself out of the mess that society actually helped to put him, but he could also have been held down by so many barriers in his path. Not fantastic literature, but I got the feeling Kurt had a kind heart, so I hope he survived and found some happiness in life.
- Hassan kommer til Danmark by Poul Jørgensen and Dorthe Svendsen, also from 1973, is about a father and son (Hassan) who come to live and work in Denmark because the father had to flee Turkey, as it was called back then, for his life. The story of trying to settle in is told from Hassan’s point of view. The father gets a job at the big shipbuilding yard near Copenhagen, and experiences one of the many strikes workers held to gain better working conditions. The father and son experience racism and xenophobia, and sadly, nothing has really changed. Some Danes think there is no racism nowadays, but it doesn’t take much reading and self-education to know that it still exists.
Comics and graphic novels
I love Comics Plus, a digital service from my library. That is where I found the following three items.
- The Hard Switch by Owen D. Pomery. Three scavengers are travelling through space trying to make enough money before “inter-system jumps” are no longer possible. I really liked the art, and I hope this is just the first of more in a space adventure series. I like the idea of a trio of scavengers where two are human and one is an octopus!
- The Library Mule of Cordoba by Wilfrid Lupano. The adventure here takes place in the Caliphate of Al-Andalus in Spain in 976. The author has spun a great tale based on a few facts about how a young copyist and a vagabond thief put a mule to work to help save some priceless books from the library of the Caliph Abd al-Rahman III and his son al-Hakam II from being destroyed. Fine illustrations by Christophe Bouchard and Léonard Chemineau. Translation by Rodolfo Murachuchi and Lynn Eskow.
- A Childhood in Syria (Haytham) by Park Kyugeun and Nicolas Hénin. This is the true story of Haytham al-Aswad who grew up living like any other kid in the world in Deera, Syria, until the revolution breaks out and the family must flee for their lives. I think graphic novels can be an excellent form of communication about serious ikkes like war and a refugee crisis. I am sure older kids would read and learn their history and current affairs if delivered like this book delivers. You don’t need to be a kid to read it, of course. That goes without saying.
I found Blankets by Craig Thompson on display at the library and took it home. It was a massive book at 592 pages. It’s autobiographical, a memoir, a coming-of-age tale. There was something slightly haunting about the illustrations that drew me in. The storyline itself wasn’t that outstanding, but for a while, I felt a little of the sadness in his universe at this time, and then moved on, as he did, too.
A mix of this and that
Friends in Need and A Bit of Murder Between Friends are the two books I have read so far in Elliott Hay’s The Vigilauntie Justice series. There are two more – so far. I am spacing them out for when I am desperate for relief with some cosy, noir-ish queer crime mysteries. What’s not to like with a diverse group of septuagenarians who are not the types to go quietly into the good night! Crime and injustice will soon be vanquished if they dare to step foot in their neighbourhood. I, for one, would not mind hanging out with them in the coffee shop, although Carole would take a bit of getting used to with her comments! I discovered the author on Mastodon, so another brownie point to the community I found on Mastodon!
Another septuagenarian pops up in Clare Pooley’s How to Age Disgracefully. The title caught my attention on my Libby app because who doesn’t want to age disgracefully? This is the wild tale of a group of seniors being “activated” in a club in a falling-apart community center that the city council would like to raze to the group. Add the neighbouring day-care center, a young teenage father, a middle-aged woman who has been bullied by her domineering husband all her life, and you have a fantastic group of people you want to cheer for when they fight to save their community. Each of them help to bring out the best in the others across age and life experiences. There is nothing schmaltzy here, but I did have a good feel-good moment at the end.
I picked up The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin by accident. I am always attracted to books about books. I didn’t notice that this was a romance, which is one genre I really don’t enjoy. However, this was not all that bad. There was no awful (to me) purple prose. I think the practical side of the story – helping to run a bookshop in London during the early days of World War II – was the part of the book I enjoyed the most. The protagonist wasn’t even much of a reader at first, but she starts reading because of her job, and that leads to her contributing to hold the community together during the struggles of the war, especially the Blitz. I took away the lesson that we can all help out in some way when we are in a community fighting against issues, big or small. You don’t have to lead the charge. Every little bit helps. That is an important lesson right now, but actually all the time.
I read Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert (yes, the Dune guy) years ago, and wanted to read it again out of curiosity. I’ve read almost all the Dune books years ago, and have forgotten a lot of the details. Someone wrote somewhere that Dune was an anomaly from Herbert’s hand. They said his core books had an element of claustrophobia in them, and that claustrophobia can be interpreted in multiple ways. I was curious to re-read the book, but it didn’t survive the ages all that well in some ways. I did think the elements of conspiracy, fanaticism, subterfuge, state surveillance, and more did have some faint echoes today. The claustrophobia was there as you might see from the words I just shared, but I don’t dare say more without revealing what is really going on here. It does have some very disturbing elements. It is an interesting read if you want to read more from Herbert.
This is the third time I have read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. This is totally by accident. I listened to it as an audio book the first time, and I didn’t recognise what other people said they read in the book. I might not have listened well, so I read it again when it came out in Danish, which was brilliantly translated by Mette Holm, who is famous in Denmark for her translations from Japanese to Danish. I remember when she would discuss word choices with her followers on Instagram. That gave a fascinating insight into the world of translating. A good human translator will always be a billion times better than machine translation. Always. I digress. The book in Danish didn’t stick for some reason, and now I decided to go back and really focus on reading the story. Murata has some later books that are real doozies. Real “what did I just read” books! In this book, it is so obvious to me that the protagonist is on the spectrum and is desperate to just fit in, or at least, not stick out. I think I kind of overlooked her being on the spectrum in my first readings because I just sympathised with her being the outsider. I think the outsiderness is also just as much pointing fingers back at how whacko society itself really is. I believe there are many commentaries on Japanese society here, too, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on that.
I absolutely adore the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire. I almost squealed when I learned about Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. “Children” is in the name of the series, but is it for children, or for adults, or the child in adults? I know it is for me. These are stories of children who don’t quite fit into their lives, and they find a door to another world… This book is the ninth in the series, so if you want fantasy with a touch of queerness, you have nine whole books to look forward to. Ten actually, because Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is apparently due out in 2025…! She also writes urban fantasy and horror, and has won a slew of awards. I am a bit stunned by how many books she has written. I won’t read the horror, but bring on the fantasy anytime.
The last book to make this wrap-up is Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum. Yes, another book-related book! I had mixed feelings about this one. The language felt choppy, but there were some issues that I had with the flow and the story that I thought could well be due to me not knowing that much about Korean culture although I have read Korean authors before. This is why I like a diverse reading list. I enjoy expanding my reading horizons to help me better understand the world, or at least be open to the multitudes of ideas and thoughts that I meet when I read books outside the cultures that I know. I did see one Korean-American person comment that the book was a bit bland and clichéed, which made me feel not so far off in my criticism. I did enjoy meeting some of the different characters, and spending a little bit of time hearing their stories. That feels like a win.
Now I need to post this entry and get on with reading more books. It was a nice exercise revisiting all these books again. I wrote fresh comments on everything. I didn’t copy/paste from my reviews in StoryGraph. I enjoyed the mental effort and exercise of pondering my feelings about the stories once more with my own human brain! I rarely say too much about the actual story line because every publisher already has a ready-made blurb. I just write how a book makes me feel and whether I valued the time I spent with the book. I just want some decent exercise for my mind, my heart, and my soul.