Every month, I write about three things I really liked (and sometimes a Super Favourite), as a way to reflect upon the good things.
May has been very much about books and all things literary. Of course, there have been many other things going on, especially dissertation-related events, but that’s pretty much business as usual these days. After finally catching Covid in April (and I’m still rather pissed about that because I’d managed to avoid it for over two years), it was nice to dedicate some time to slow leisure and nice stories. Here’s how it went.
➤ New e-reader: Kobo Elipsa
As I was saying in another post, I’ve finally taken the plunge and bought a new e-reader after over ten years of use of my Kindle. I needed an e-reader that would accept more formats as I’m using it for both work and leisure, and preferably something I could take notes on too. I also really needed one that wouldn’t strain my eyes too much, because I spend enough time on screens as it is. I’m happy with my choice, and it has contributed to rekindling my love story with reading, which had been in a bit of a rut lately because of all the time I spent reading for work which left me with little energy to read for fun. I’ll still read paper books, of course (and I have a neverending To Be Read pile), but it was a nice change of pace and I’m loving the note-taking/highlighting functions.
Read my full review of the Kobo Elipsa.
➤ Intimations by Zadie Smith
A new e-reader means new books, and the first one I read was Intimations (2020) by Zadie Smith. Now let’s be real for a minute: if Zadie Smith decided to write a history of the phonebook, or to collate the BBC Good Foods recipes, I’d still read them and I’d still love the heck out of them. So obviously I loved Intimations, a short collection of essays that she started at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and finished soon after the murder of George Floyd. In it, she discusses her work as a writer, how to make tentative sense of this pandemic, what it means to be a woman, and racism in America, while taking a hundred small side roads about everything, in her unique style that oscillates between the very factual and the deeply poetic. It is powerful, intelligent, angry, and beautiful — in a nutshell, it is very Zadie Smith.
➤ It Came from The Glass Curtain! by Adam Paxman
The body of works inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an evergrowing, tentacular, at times terrifying affair, if only by its sheer size. But from time to time, a truly original work appears, and it overshadows the rest. Adam Paxman’s It Came from The Glass Curtain! (2021) is one of those. Drawing on his own experience of mourning, his practice-based research, and his extensive knowledge of the Alice books and of their afterlife, Paxman has written a magnificent epic poem in twelve chapters that are both deeply moving and hysterically funny. Here’s one of my favourite passages (p. 66):
Tenniel hatched but
line drawings can be crosshatched
(intersecting lines).
I don’t suppose that
Humpty Dumpty could survive
The hatching process.
In June, I’m looking forward to…
… reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (twenty years after everyone else, I know), finishing Inventing Anna on Netflix, going back to the gym, and hopefully finding my wedding dress.
See you in June!