Your summer reading list, part 4

New books for August. Also: sparklemuffins, brat girls and what to do with the work of Alice Munro

Aside from thinking the Strictly ‘scandal’ is hogging way too many headlines right now and chopping 5 inches off my hair with the kitchen scissors (unrelated), this week I…

Learned what a sparklemuffin is c/o Suki Waterhouse

a mushroom trip of an arachnid which measures half a cm and performs an elaborate mating dance

Deep-dove brat girl summer and thought how exhausting it is to be a young woman these days (all days)

Sought clarity in Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece for The Atlantic, where she makes a vigorous, persuasive case for continuing to read the work of Alice Munro following her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner’s heartbreaking and shocking revelations a few weeks ago. “[Her stories] should not only be read again; [they] should be read again in that gray and nauseating light of what we know now.” (For a more perambulatory take on what to do with the art of “terrible, troubled" people, there’s also Claire Dederer’s Monsters, which I wrote about here).

Laughed (a lot) at this

via Mike Rylander

Learned the term ‘call in’ for when you want to correct someone privately/ kindly (vs. 'a ‘call out’). Not everything needs to be front of house

Delighted over my latest secondhand book haul from Vinted for my daughter

psa: it’s the best place to buy kids books, i buy pretty much all of mine off Vinted (I typically pay £1 per book and try and buy bundles)

Watched a ‘90s blinder (not even on our list!!) from 1998. A Perfect Murder, a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, stars Viggo Mortensen, Michael Douglas (who appears in 95% of all films made in that decade), an excellently outfitted Gwyneth Paltrow and an even better dressed Manhattan apartment.

Paltrow is 26 to her on-screen husband’s 54, and as Paul Clinton put it rather elegantly at the time, for CNN: “Douglas is an excellent actor and a gifted producer. However, he should hang up his spurs when it comes to playing a romantic lead with women in their twenties”.

Loved this piece by Anna Newton on seven ways to re-direct the spending itch. Biggest takeaway: intense closet re-organisation is the best way to de-fang an attack of the shoppies.

Endured sensory overwhelm at Six The Musical. For anyone else expecting a bodice ripper (for someone who loves Googling stuff as much as I do, it’s bizarre I didn’t Google it beforehand) it’s like watching The Saturdays styled by Maximum Meridius, with strobe lighting. They all have insane voices - X Factor winner level good. I took my mum, daughter and sister and they all loved it.

Was brought back down to earth by this soothing collage of blue doors in Chefchaouen, Morrocco, via Nenad Georgievski

And if you haven’t had enough of reading about Ballerina Farm (I’m definitely cusping) Megan Agnew tries - and fails - to get alone time with Hannah Neeleman for The Sunday Times magazine, in a piece which roundly disabuses the notion that Neeleman has “an army of nannies” and confirms (who’d a thunk it!) that the farming-infuencer couple are pro-life.

---

If you’re readying yourself for a beach lounger, or just for the British weather to shine sunny for more than one day at a time, then here are 3 new books for August (okay, the second one came out last year, but I only just heard of it.)

There’s one more part of this summer reading list to come and then I’m going to park the new books at Part 5 and go read some ‘old’ books for a bit - starting with Cloud Atlas (2005) and then Hotel Du Lac (1984) and oh I really need to read A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)…

The Wedding People by Alison Espach - out 1st August

A 38-year-old woman whose husband has just left her (Phoebe) goes to an expensive hotel she has always wanted to visit, to kill herself. She has brought herself a new dress for the occasion and booked herself a sea view room. Except it turns out that the entire hotel - bar her room, an error - has been booked out for the wedding of a rabidly efficient pocket rocket (Lila) and her older, easy-going fiancée (Gary), and their extended, deliciously dysfunctional group of friends and families.

With Phoebe’s elaborate plan for her own carefully planned demise foiled by Lila (who informs her that she cannot kill herself at her wedding venue, because Lila will never get over someone dying on her special day) she has no choice but to become part of the wedding celebrations. Over the course of few days, Phoebe becomes the no.1 confidante to bride, groom and his daughter, who hates her impending step-mother and misses her late mother, desperately. And Phoebe begins to wonder if life might hold something else for her, after all. If she isn’t so different to everyone else.

“Maybe this is what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honour and Phoebe has never been a maid of honour. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her.”

Espach’s writing reminds me of Katherine Heiny’s - keenly observant, ruthlessly honest, quietly elegant and utterly charming, with the ability to make you quietly weep when you least expect it - and the better half of Big Swiss. (Which is the first half, obviously.) Nothing turns out the way anybody plans - but exactly as it should. I loved it.

8 Lives of A Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee - out in paperback now

I was sent this debut by the ShelterBox book club. I generally prefer choosing my own books to read, but I signed up for this book club (my first!) because I love their unique MO: they choose books inspired by the people who’ve been helped through their own disaster relief work. What I love is how often I’ve never heard of the book before receiving it. It helps me read past my geographical blind spots and to read lots in translation.

Mirinae Lee’s debut is about Ms Mook, a magnetic nonagenarian at the Golden Sunset retirement home in Seoul, who tells her unbelievable life story to an administrative assistant who has started an obituary-writing programme, so that residents can celebrate their lives and find agency in death. With a twinkle in her eye, Mook informs her sceptical obituarist that she has had 8 lives: she’s been a slave, escape-artist, murderer, terrorist, spy, lover, mother and trickster.

Set against the brutal, poverty-stricken backdrop of Japanese colonial rule of Korea (which ended in 1945) and then against the Korean War (1950-1953) which ended in the strict division of the country that still exists today, Ms Mook has adopted multiple identities to survive Korea in the C20th.

Despite the violence and suffering, the writing is energetic and lyrical Mook’s childhood is a like “a tiny bird” thrumming in the soft pit of her sternum, mama has a “rapier wit”, whilst father is an alcoholic “stewbum”. It’s not remotely sentimental (notes Mook, sentimentality was considered a dangerous quality that must be beaten out of you), but rather, a richly layered and playful read, which crackles with Mook’s extraordinary bravery. “I refuse to be a helpless victim” she notes, reminding me of Demon Copperfield.

I found the most moving part of the book to be at the very beginning, when Mook calmly tells the exasperated care workers that her roommate, Grandma Song, who has Alzheimer’s, is sifting through her own excrement because she is stuck in the memory of being 13 and forced to swallow all of her wealthy family’s precious jewels, when the Japanese occupation ransacked their house. The answer, says Mook, is not to drug or restrain Grandma Song, but to give a box of large, plastic jewels - so that she thinks she has found them. “Then she’s happy”.

The book does demand quite a lot of focus (no bad thing) as the chapters jump between her 8 lives and different time frames - I’ve read her 5th, her 1st and her 3rd Life so far (in that order) - and the real and the perhaps spectral, but I’m actually really enjoying flipping back the pages in order to tie up the threads, like I did with A Visit from the Goon Squad and the fractured story-telling emphasises how Ms Mook has had to shape-shift through her life, just to stay alive. I’m savouring it, so as not to miss a single detail.

The Group by Sigge Eklund - out 8th August

Sigge Eklund is a well-known novelist and screenwriter in his native Sweden and his latest novel, The Group, is already an international bestseller. A Swedish girl in her early 20s, Hanna, moves to Spain for an internship at the world-renowned Prado gallery. She is thrilled, but lonely and unformed, impatient for experience and excitement.

In this porous state, she meets a trio of elegant, wealthy Swedes, Tom, Samuel and Leah, who are busy rinsing Madrid for all that it can offer. Hanna, desperate to seem as debonair as them, pretends she is much more senior in the gallery and in order to (occasionally) pay her way, when she comes across an uncatalogued etching, she steals it to pawn. But Tom is suspicious of Hanna and her assumed worldliness - in her, she sees a fraud…

The Group is very much for fans of The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s era-defining novel. (Might need to give it another read.) It’s all hedonism, cynicism and the finer things in life. About the trauma that lies beneath pretending you are something you are not. About the grit beneath the gleam. If I’m sounding a bit paint-by-numbers, it’s because the book is fairly formulaic. It’s easy to read, full of beautiful food and elegant clothes, but it’s not particularly moving. It doesn’t wrench the same kind of emotions from you as Tartt does. I’ve included it because I think it’s a decent summer read - it’s glamorous and thriller-y and clips along nicely.

---

I’ll be back on Friday with an episode of Book Chat. Bobby and I deep-dive Percival Everett’s 2001 book Erasure, which the recent movie, American Fiction, was based on. Until then!