January 2021 Reading Round Up
Posted 5th February 2021
Category: Round-Ups Genres: N/A
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January wasn’t bad; aside from the books below I’ve two on the go and turned my way through a further small chunk of pages of A Shepherd’s Life.
All books are works of fiction.
The Books
Elizabeth Baines: Used To Be – A short story collection with the theme of different roads in life. Very, very good.
Katy Yocom: Three Ways To Disappear – Quinn and Sarah lost their sibling, Sarah’s twin, in childhood; now adults, Quinn tries to get back into her art whilst being a mother to her own set of twins, one with a chronic illness, and Sarah leaves her job as a reporter in dangerous locations to work in tiger conservation in India. Much better than my brief summary can do, this is a super book that explores trauma, conservation, and in the conservation all of the social affects conservation has on humans.
Susmita Bhattacharya: Table Manners – A collection of stories about human relationships and connections, linked by the theme of food, whether the food is an item, an idea, or a construct. Awesome.
It may not have produced the numbers, but the reading was wonderful. Everything I read was fab, and the books I have started recently – Catherine Cho’s Inferno and Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant, the latter one of those books I took off my list when I didn’t make headway last year (I’m now further along) are great. Cho’s in particular is just incredible; Inferno is her memoir about her time with Post-Partum Psychosis; it’s a brave book, written – and structured – spectacularly well and I can’t but believe it only narrowly missed out on winning the Young Writer of the Year Award in December (won by Jay Bernard for their poetry collection, Surge).
That’s what I’m looking forward to in February, the Cho and the Li. Absolutely, completely.
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February 16, 2021, 6:19 pm
Great to hear that January was a fab month of reading for you, Charlie and I hope February is going well for you, too! 😃