Hong Kong Museum of Art – a new gem

Tags

Art, culture, Hong Kong

Almost a decade ago, I had visited the HK Museum of Art, and been overwhelmed with Chinese ink paintings, calligraphy and vases. Nothing against them, but because my knowledge is scarce and the information provided by the museum then was even scarcer, I came away with a slight headache.

The museum underwent an extensive renovation and recently reopened. And what a breath of fresh air!

Mimi and I landed up there after I mixed up the dates for another event we were supposed to go to. I had been hearing good things about the museum and been meaning to go. I wasn’t 100 per cent sure I wanted to go with the kids because it didn’t seem like there was anything specifically for them. But Mimi is an art lover and since we were at a loose end and I couldn’t find anything more interactive, we headed there.

I was attracted by an exhibition that had contemporary Hong Kong artists responding to older work from the museum’s permanent collection, but when we landed there, I also realised there was an exhibition of British landscape painters – including Gainsborough, Turner and Constable – on loan from the Tate so we bought tickets for that (the rest of the museum is free).

My recommendation is to start with the Ordinary to Extrordinary: Stories from the Museum exhibition on the first floor first. This is a beautiful spotlight on selected works – possibly some of those that gave me a headache last time. To my surprise, Mimi was very into the older works, like scroll paintings, trade paintings and artifacts like cups.

The counterpoint to this is Classics Remix on the fifth floor, in which contemporary artists respond to specific works largely from the Stories from the Museum collection. We actually broke for lunch before taking in this one, and I asked Mimi if she’d rather go home, but she was up for it. There were some really interesting pieces up there – the highlight for me was installation and canvases from renowned Hong Kong street artist who goes by the name Frog King; a friend loved Rosanna Li’s take on quirky Hong Kong street names with her signature fat figures.

I just asked Mimi what her favourite piece was and she said Luis Chan’s very long, surrealist take on the Chinese scroll.

I suddenly realised that the tickets for the landscape exhibition listed an admission time, so we kind of had to rush through it. The Turners were stunning, but Mimi was not impressed. She tended to be more into the hyper-realistic Constables. She could pretty much identify what the more abstract Turners were – “boat”, “water” – but perhaps the muted tones were not her cup of tea (hawww!).

One of the things that was a hit with Mimi was the stamp machine. You download an app, and then on each floor, you answer a question and if you get it right, you can get a stamp on your phone from this digital machine (if you get it wrong, you just answer another question). The stamps were super pretty and if you collect all five, you can get a souvenir, which turned out to be this really lovely Wilson Shieh painting of iconic Hong Kong buildings on a microfibre cloth.

Another activity for kids was a series of screens on which kids could create their own artwork and then have it projected on a bigger screen.

We almost missed – but didn’t, thanks to the need to get a stamp there – the interactive installations on the theme of landscapes by local artists (The Breath of Landscape). We particularly liked Rick Lam’s Shape the Water, in which the artwork reacts to your pulse or your facial expression, and Move the Mountain, in which you can use objects provided to create a landscape of shadows.

In all, we spent around 4 hours at the museum and there’s still lots left to see. I would particularly revisit for the Hong Kong Experience collection.

Very unusually for Hong Kong, the museum has lots of seating space – even racks of chairs you can just take for sitting on – unusual in Hong Kong. The earlier building had been criticised for being almost windowless while taking up harbour sidespace. This is amply remedied in the renovation.

We broke for lunch at the restaurant in the adjoining Space Museum complex, which has a very reasonable and wide selection of food. To get there we walked through the art museum bookshop, which I would recommend for Hong Kong souvenirs/gifts.

We criticise our government a lot, but in this instance, they really got it right.

We crowned our visit with a stroll down the harbourfront, where we identified the buildings depicted on the souvenir towel, and a slow ride down to Hong Kong island on the Star Ferry.

 

 

Little Women 2019

Tags

film, little women, louisa may alcott

Have you watched it? Are you a fan of the book? Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog.

Top 10 books I read in 2019

Tags

books, fiction, reading

MinCat put out a call on FB for one book recommendation. Obviously, this is hard especially when I read so much, and so much good stuff, but to my own surprise, I was able to come up with the standouts with too much trouble.

1. An American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
2. The Wife, Meg Wolitzer
3. Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
5. Unmarrigeable, Soniah Kamal
6. Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
7. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
8. Hush Hush , Laura Lippman
9. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
10. The Dry, Jane Harper

My Golden Globes best dressed picks

Tags

fashion, golden globes, Red carpet

The Golden Globes frocks were kinda blah this year, with people the women not only sticking to safe but also to stale dresses. But a few days on, some of the more unusual choices have stuck with me, so here are my favourites in order of preference.

1. Zoey Deutch in Fendi

2. Zoey Kravitz in Saint Laurent: This would have been my top pick, because I can’t resist a good polka, not to mention two, but on second thoughts, I decided Zoey’s dress had more glam power.

3. Kaitlyn Dever in Valentino: Guess it’s obvious I’m drawn to unusual prints and colours.

4. Taylor Swift in Etro: I went back on forth on this, but my initial reaction was yassss so I’m sticking with it.

5. Kirsten Dunst in Rodarte: For straightforward pretty, with just that little quirk a la Rodarte.

Which were your favourites?

 

December reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, family dramas, historical fiction, reading

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

The funny thing was that I picked up the book so I would read something not too intense so I could pay attention to my husband and children and instead the husband and children in the novel caught me and swallowed me whole, and I literally told my own husband to shut up and let me read.

This is a sprawling family drama, about secrets and loyalties, but uplifting in the end.

The Confessions of Young Nero, Margaret George

Read second part first so there was overlap, especially at the end. It’s well written but I lost steam by the end.

The Deal, Elle Kennedy

This wasn’t my favorite. The premise which turned out to be sex didn’t turn me on. And then it went on too long. Garrett-Hannah felt like a repeat of Hunter-Demi in The Play. Still fun read though

Throaway observation: In every single book she mentions the partitions in the showers of the hockey team’s men’s locker rooms. It’s like she’s determined to kill some myth about boys checking each other out in the shower.

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

A family drama in the guise of a mystery. Moral of the story: Parents fuck up their kids with the best intentions.

The Lost Man, Jane Harper

I thought this was part of the Falk series. It was connected in a very subtle way. But it was very good. I love how she sets her stories in the outback and how the land is so much a part of it, how she deconstructs the idea of the noble savage. All the more relevant in these times as fires rage in Australia.

 

The Convenience Store Girl, Sayaka Murata

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here. This is not chick lit, if that’s going to put you off, but it had some commonalities with the single girl narratives of that genre so I put my thoughts on that blog.

The English Cameo – Madhulika Liddle

Love the Mughal era and wish there was more written in that period. I stayed away from this – a mystery series set in Emperor Shah Jahan’s time – for a long time because I felt like it didn’t deal with the main Mughal players but it’s excellently done. Going to read the rest in the series for sure.

Chasing Hillary, Amy Chozick

I expected this to be a bio, but it’s really a memoir about a journalist whose career became inextricably tied up with Clinton’s. I’m just going to post my scattered thoughts:

• Like that it turned out to be a journalistic memoir and that she presents herself as a fuck up
• Dislike that she doesn’t seem to like Hillary perhaps because she didn’t talk to her much (e.g. detail about Botox, the unfair comparison of how Obama handled negative stories )
• Oh well at least it’s not a gushing portrait
• It reads as an apologia of sorts  all those negative stories (Bathroomgate for example, which by mid-book I didn’t remember what it was) there was a reason for them
• My impression of Hillary as a geek who really had her facts down was correct. Apparently that’s not what it takes to be president
• Here’s a writing sample: “Hillary’s Iowa town halls became so frequent and intimate that they started to take on the familiar, if laborious, feel of catching up with an old girlfriend who cites GDP statistics over brunch”
• She didn’t (only) lose because she’s a woman but because she’s a geek. She promised to underpromise, which is hardly going to enthuse an electorate
• Who were Bernie’s people? In Amy’s experience, kids who go to NYU (i.e. rich kids and bros). On Bernie bros saying they’d vote for a woman, just not that woman: “Thirty years of sexist attacks had turned her into that woman. That sooner or later, the higher we climb, the harder we work, we all become that woman.

Ask Again yes, Mary Beth Keane 

After Commonwealth, I’ve decided I like these modern multigenerational family dramas. I like that they have happy endings these days Nietszche’s amor fati – if you had to say yes to your life again with all its failures and challenges, would you? A tragedy shatters the book but it also shows how it can all be put together again.

Galatea, Madeline Miller

This is a novella, really, and as with all Miller’s mythological stuff, it’s good. But it was also … fleeting.

Ayesha, At Last, Uzma Jalaluddin

Loved. Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

 

 

 

 

Whirlwind Christmas

We weren’t supposed to be in India for Christmas. For one, my boss grumbled about giving me leave during the Christmas week again this year (which frankly was really petty because the Chinese people seem to get leave during CNY every year. This is the problem with Christmas becoming a universal holiday).

But also, we needed the kids to do school interviews in Bangalore and that could not happen during Christmas week because everything shuts down. So, the plan was to go to India in October.

Then it turned out that we would need to be in Bangalore during Christmas week for my V’s parent’s 50th wedding anniversary celebrations. I wasn’t sure how I was going to swing that, but I did a solo trip to Mumbai in October.

Finally, I told my boss, I’d work from India that week. I managed to take the same flight as V and the kids who were going for a longer stint. We flew in the day on Singapore Airlines, which was very nice, avoiding the midnight arrival in Bangalore.

Christmas in India is always hectic but worth it. Every alternate night was some sort of party. My sis-in-law who had broken her leg still organised a carol singing route. We went to V’s friend’s new house. There was a big Christmas lunch, by which time Mimi was exhausted and had multiple meltdowns, but we also had a fun big game of housie. My other sister-in-law had a dinner and had us stay over.

I had been rather skeptical about the big event – my in-laws’ golden wedding – because they don’t have the best marriage. It seemed like the epitome of hypocrisy for everyone to be doing this hoopla over an essentially toxic relationship. But my mother-in-law once said that it takes something to last this long. I dunno, I’m a quality over quantity kind of person.

But in the end, it was fun. There was a mass, at which I did a reading and then regretted it because a) I had to cover up by sari with this massive poncho b) the regular reader insisted on doing the first reading so I had to scramble with the second c) the second reading ended up being one that told wives to be subject to their husbands and even perhaps surprisingly husbands to love their wives.

There was party after with lots of dancing. Surprisingly, the chosen entertainment was a Bollywood dancer leading the crowd. Apparently, the south no longer hates Hindi music, though we did have a couple of Malayalam songs.

My one wishlist was to get some grooming done, and I managed to get my pedicure, waxing and blow dry done before the big event and receive lots of compliments on my transformation. I have not mastered the art of walking, leaving alone dancing, in a sari though.

Every year, my in-laws urge my parents to come down for Christmas. This year, being a big anniversary, they decided to, so we had everyone under one roof, something I’ve always been apprehensive about, but it was fine.

Amid all this madness, I worked four days, two in one sister-in-law’s house where I made the mistake of trying to work in the living room amid games of Taboo and general chit chat and two in the other’s where I learnt my lesson and set up my workspace on the terrace bar (closest to the router).

I went into this holiday feeling somewhat judgy and resentful but I came out of it feeling generally positive about my husband’s family. My sisters-in-law and their husbands not only went out of the way to accommodate me, but also my parents. They are gregarious and generous people who think it is perfectly normal to stretch themselves to the limit throwing massive parties and welcoming extended family into their homes. While this is not to be taken for granted, I have seen and benefited from it time and again. They are also full of drama and emotion, which I do my best to stay on the sidelines of.

I have been feeling this for a couple of years – and I touch wood while saying this – but V’s parents are pretty peaceful. They are very tolerant about whatever we do in their house, and I am not expected to rush around working. It took me over a decade to get to this place, and this is not to say that I have not been the recipient of MIL snark or that having two children, including the coveted male grandchild, did not help, but I am not anxious around them anymore and have realised that much of my earlier angst was the result of insecurity – on both sides.

Also, V and I managed to be on good, even great terms, over Christmas for the first time in a couple of years. I hate to say it but Bangalore suits V. He is among people he wants to be around and he is involved in stuff that doesn’t include me. We achieve the right balance of separate-and-together when we are there.

I managed not to fall sick this time, despite the long hours and party food, for which I am super grateful.

I was happy to fly back to Hong Kong a few days before V and the kids and get some recovery time in though. I spent New Year’s Eve catching up on sleep, taking a long walk and watching the Downton Abbey movie before crawling into bed at 10 pm. I went to office on New Year’s Day, even though there was a massive protest planned, only to find everyone else had decided to work from home. I was super excited to log into my two big screens after a week of swotting over a tiny laptop though. I treat myself to a greasy Shake Shack lunch, came home early and binged on the second season of Big Little Lies.

V and the kids came home a day later than they were supposed to, having missed their connecting flight and been put up in a hotel in Singapore. This was the high point of the trip for the kids, who totally loved the hotel room and three hotel meals, so we can’t complain. I spent the extra day writing a column, having lunch with friends and watching Little Women in the cinema, the kind of day I have not had in a long time.

The end of 2019 was all I could have asked for. 2020 promises to be interesting.

 

 

 

Hong Kong protests: coming full circle

Tags

hong kong protests, India protests

Today, when I came down from my building, having decided to leave work early, not because it was New Year’s Day, but because of the threat of protest violence and MTR shutdowns, I saw groups of people in black with masks on, including some children, with huge Pepe the Frog plushes hanging from their bags.

While most people spend New Year’s Day lazing about and recovering from the night’s festivities, Hongkongers came out en masse to push their government to do the right thing.

And after six months of an emotional rollercoaster since the protests began, I came full circle, finding myself once again awed by their spirit.

When the protests started out in June, I was inspired by the sheers numbers with which people took the streets, largely peacefully.  I was elated when they made what I thought was the impossible happen – the government backing down on a law it insisted it would push through, with the might of China at its back.

But as the protest violence escalated quickly, I grew disillusioned, not because I am against violent protests per se, but in the dishonesty with which violence was wielded.  There was violence from day 2 onwards when protesters threw objects, including bricks, at the police but the narrative insisted for quite a while on not acknowledging this violence and then on not condemning the most egregious examples of it while turning Cultural Revolution-style against anyone who voiced criticism of the movement,

While the international media presented a uniformly highminded picture of the protesters, I saw at the ground level a great deal of pettiness and stupidity.

Then the protests in India began. From afar, my sympathies were obviously with the protesters. But then the uniformity of the narrative coming out of India began to make me suspicious. Reading newspaper reports carefully, including the liberal ones, I began to see a similar pattern to the Hong Kong protests. Conversations with friends also highlighted to me how people cleave to the narratives they are drawn to, refusing to admit inconvenient truths.

And yet, I supported the Indian protesters fairly unconditionally. Why? Well, for one, I’m more ready to believe worse of the Indian police than the Hong Kong police. But also, because I supported the cause behind the protests.

Now, in Hong Kong, I also initially supported the cause behind the protests – the withdrawal of a law that would allow the extradition of people accused of criminal activity by China. But when that law was withdrawn, I was not sure that the protests need go on with this level of intensity, including violence.

While the Western media insists on portraying the Hong Kong protests as a pro-democracy movement – and I don’t deny that a demand that Hong Kong’s leader be elected by universal suffrage has long animated Hong Kong, having been the core of the 2014 Umbrella Movement – the current protests are about something more … basic. They are a protest against police misconduct in dealing with protesters and that those who were targeted in the initial crackdown not be charged and jailed.

The logic is: when violence is the only language the government responds to, those using that language in pursuit of a just cause should not be criminally prosecuted. Moreover, that those tasked with upholding the law must be held to the highest standard of the law.

This is a more complicated logic than a simple demand for democracy or the freeing of the innocent. However, I do believe that except in the most extreme cases of violence, those that put their own bodies on the line in defiance of the state should not be allowed to go like lambs to the slaughter through the prison industrial complex.

We are not in Gandhian territory anymore (and may I say how sick I am of hearing the Gandhi-Luther King-Mandela triumvirate cited at every turn). We are in the territory of righteous anger that refuses to accept the unjust power of the state.

Since Hong Kong’s historic district council elections (Western media please note, these are held by universal suffrage so it’s not like Hongkongers never vote. Heck, I have voted more than once in a single year), I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Hong Kong government continue to pander to the pro-Beijing camp which lost heavily in the elections instead of using the opportunity for some kind of reconciliation through concessions to the other side. Again, the government made it clear that peaceful expression of the public voice counts for nothing.

Interestingly, in conversation with a friend in India, she said that people were protesting not so much against the Citizenship Amendment Act but against the police treatment of the initial protesters, particularly university students. So a very similar logic there too.

After the siege of Polytechnic University, when thousands of students were rounded up after being holed up the university for days, many people thought the protest had fizzled out. But on the first day of the new year, Hongkongers showed us that this fight is far from over.

I can only humbly salute them.

 

Hong Kong and India protests: democratic dreams

Tags

democracy, Hong Kong, India, protests

Although the world might be under the impression that Hong Kong does not have universal suffrage, in fact, it does at the lower and mid-levels. When protesters say they are fighting for democracy, they mean at the highest level – the right of every adult Hongkonger to elect the territory’s senior-most leader, the chief executive. District council members are almost entirely directly elected. The legislature is half directly elected and the other half indirectly elected.

I spell all this out because I recently edited a piece by one pompous Western dude who was in Hong Kong as an independent observer of the recently held district council elections who seemed unaware of the facts. Did I mention how sick I am of Westerners arrogantly commenting and even coming in to judge in a semi-official capacity things they know little about?

So on November 24, Hong Kong went to the polls. There were fears that the government would cancel the elections and, of course, it would then be seen as the enemies of democracy, if that wasn’t clear already. I wonder what people would say if the pan-democrats had seen their offices burnt down and received constant death threats as the pro-establishment did this time? Would they have insisted on an election? Oh well, all’s fair in love and politics.

Anyway, the result of the election was a resounding votein favour of the pro-democrats and essentially an expression of support of the ongoing protests. Election Day was peaceful. The people did make their views known in a non-violent manner as the government has being saying they should.

What does government do? Nothing. Then:

1. Withdraws funding proposals for two universities involved in the violence because the pro-establishment camp (which lost heavily in the election) said they wouldn’t vote for it. Agreed, the proposals would have been voted down, but why not let that be a matter of public record?

2. Announces it will include more pro-establishment advisers. When the whole problem is that their were too many pro-establishment advisers to start with.

Hard not to conclude that:

1. The government only responds to violence and peaceful means of expression receive only a pat on the head and run along reaction

2. The only way forward is to burn everything to the ground.

That said, I don’t see why the protest movement increasingly cannot accept even a modicum of critique, such as perhaps publicly condemning the burning of a man who tried to remove their barricades. Claiming that a fair bit of discussion goes on on online channels used by protesters is not enough; there should be some sort of ethical baseline and an apology/condemnation publicly made if this is violated. Surely the protest movement is not as fragile as the communist party which functions on the belief that any critique should be quickly neutralised because it threatens the entire country.

Perhaps it’s time I eat my hat and agree with those who said that if Hong Kong had democracy, none of this would have happened because the government would be too afraid to push through unpopular policies (which to me is problematic in itself but let’s leave that aside).

But then we have India.

Watching the unrest in India from afar, it might not be immediately clear that the entire thing has been sparked by a democratically elected government doing exactly what they promised the electorate they would do.

The scary thing about being a minority in a democracy is that one is essentially at the mercy of the majority being nice to you. Unfortunately, the majority really isn’t nice or even thoughtful. At some point, the quite rational human instinct to protect one’s own interests kicks in.

In that sense, India had quite a good run of being collectively brainwashed by a handful of charismatic and well-intentioned upper-caste Hindu leaders that it was best for everyone to take the minorities along. Sadly, that could only last so long.

One might argue that Hong Kong, with its educated citizenry and well developed economy, will do better. But will it? Hong Kong is a homogenous society, and the recent protests have tended dangerously towards ethnocentrism. There have been encouraging gestures towards minorities but also less publicised tendencies to blame minorities when some among them behave in less than ideal ways.

Although English is an official language, it is increasingly disappearing from public life and one would be hardpressed to find an election leaflet that explains candidates plans and positions in English except in the most tony constituencies. Strangely, it is the pro-establishment politicians, not the pan-democrats, who tend to have at least some election material in English. Yet, we are expected to trust when the much vaunted democracy is achieved, pluralism will be upheld. More likely we are not considered at all.

While it is often argued that democracy/capitalism/marriage is not perfect, but it’s the best we have, left-leaning liberals have pointed out that this is not a good enough reason to keep capitalism. If the (politically not economically) liberal argument is that we should be able to think beyond capitalism and communism, then surely we should able to think beyond democracy too.

November reading list

Tags

detective stories, feminism, fiction, reading

People who eat darkness, Richard Lloyd Parry

Why would I want to read a book marked by tragedy from the start? A young British woman disappears in Japan, the newspapers reported extensively on the case (though I wasn’t aware of it). How much is there to say?

But the writing pulls you in. And while Parry goes on a fair about supplementary characters like Lucie’s mother, they are all interesting stories.

Sometimes I lie, Alice Feeney

Like In a Dark Dark Wood, this one tries too hard to be a thriller. Is it possible for a thriller to have too many twists. Apparently, it is. I didn’t care about the characters but just kept reading to find out. And then, I had to Goodle to understand the ending, which is not a good sign.

So irritated was I by this novel that I had to read some academic papers as a palate cleanser.

The Women’s Room , Marilyn French

OMG this. All of it.

The Women’s Room is the third of my triumvirate of feminist novels from the 70s and for some reason, possibly the literalness of the title, I thought it would be the most meh, so I kept it for last. Turns out I had saved the best for last.

This is like a go-to on how to write a feminist novel – so many feminist issues (okay pertaining to white women of the 50s, 60s and 70s, but I’ve kind of realised upper caste Indian women share many of those concerns) given living, breathing human form.

French presents one of the most unsentimental description of pregnancy I have ever come across. Reading about the birth of the protagonist Mira’s first child was traumatic

Some questions:

Is marriage destined to be like this in some form?

Why doesn’t Natalie leave Hamp? Why don’t we all?

Don’t tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford

Here she achieves what she was striving towards in the last two novels – perfection of tone and cutting satire.

Again, although this novel was written in the 60s about aristocratic British Society, I found something to resonate with. Just when I was worrying about my kids, Fanny has the same dilemmas about whether the kids are all right.

The Splendor Before the Dark, Margaret George

This is the second book in George’s duet about the roman emperor Nero (I hadn’t yet read the first). I only knew of Nero as a tyrant, but George sheds a different light on his character, what his perspective might have been on events he was maligned for. It opens with a different take on the epithet that many of us might be familiar with – that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”.

This was just the right length and well written, making be resolve to read the first book.

Force of Nature, Jane Harper 

Better than Laura Lippman. Nuff said.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, Laura Lippman 

This was more novella than novel. It was weird to see detective Tess Monoghan, one of whose defining characteristics is her penchant for exercise and eating, home bound and on a strict diet. We don’t hear of her bouncing ponytail once. My least favourite of the series.

Hush Hush, Laura Lippman

On the other hand this was really excellent. If the Green Raincoat was simple, this one was complex. The theme running through was mothers – Tess as a working mother, the two mothers in the case she’s dealing with, her aunt Kitty’s relationship with motherhood.

Loved it, and can’t believe this is the last Tess Monoghan book.

My Sister the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithewaite

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Grief is a Thing with Many Feathers, Max Porter

This is poetry in novel form. Not as sad as I thought but maybe that’s Crow’s influence. Feel quite smirky that I got the Crow (Ted Hugh’s, not Laura Lippman’s) reference from the start.

I was surprised to read the bio at the end and discover that Porter has a living wife. Some people are just geniuses, I guess, and do not need to live what they write.

The Chase, Elle Kennedy
The Risk, Elle Kennedy

I am only a little sheepish about admitting that I am hooked on this series. Thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

This is My Life, Meg Wolitzer

Didn’t love this from the start as I have tended to with her other novels

Somehow I didn’t get into the characters as much. The character I liked the most Erica, the older, fat sister was floating through two thirds of the novel

I really liked the last third

This is a very female-centric novel – a mother and her two daughters and two of these characters are fat and it is dealt with (each of them takes a different approach to it, it’s interesting).

Speaking of fat, listen to this podcast.

Still House Lake, Rachel Caine

Not bad. Well paced with decent characters. Just that, like many of these popular thrillers, it was just too much. And also, the end was so written with a sequel in mind.

Fleishmann is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

The thing that confused me is that this was described as a feminist novel. How could it be feminist if the whole thing is told froM a mams perspective ?

Maybe she was trying to flip the narrative so we sympathize – some kind of defsmoliarisation thing, some joke on the men who wouldn’t have picked up a novel entitled “Libby is in trouble”, or they’d put down the novel in 20 pages because they couldn’t bear to listen to a woman “whining”

But I wouldn’t  have. I was a teeny bit bored of Toby .

Or maybe Libby + Rachel = Toby but no, the novel was set up as Toby-centric and we were set up to dislike Rachel.

But if not feminist, this is a novel about marriage About how marriage is an impossible project because it expects people to stay the same

My dear English Lit prof in college said to this us once and I remember both thinking “that’s not very profound” and “that’s not going to happen to me”. Because it’s not everyone sells you the idea that’s marriage Is wonderful – most of us saw our parents marriagr firsthand  – but that we think we’d be the exception, don’t we?

[spoiler alert]

By the end of the novel, it turns out that doing a riff on a Norman Mailer/Philip Roth kind of thing, which feature the preoccupations of an angsty, divorced white guy, is exactly what she was trying to do, so okay. Even though I didn’t find it completely convincing. Did she manage to redeem Rachel? I didn’t think so initially, but now when I think of Rachel, I not only don’t think of her as a bitch, I think of myself.

Although Libby’s the one I should have identified with but throughout her  soliloquy I kept thinking – woman you need a job!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The whole nine yards

I won’t lie. This was a difficult year. You turned from a sweet, obliging little boy into a pre-teen.

You have two major interests – sports and video games. You want to, need to, be physically active. You still wake up at the crack of dawn, and an hour later, you’re raring to go. We can’t keep up.

We started you in a football class over the summer that turned into classes twice and even three times a week on weekdays, not a schedule I tend to favour. Then your team qualified for a league and I’m officially a soccer mom. You had a slow start but last weekend you played so well that your coach deemed you the unofficial man of the match.

You had a basketball tournament and I couldn’t imagine what you’d do since to my knowledge you don’t know or even like to play basketball but you came home with a medal for best player. Since then, you’ve been into basketball. You like to win.

You discovered cricket and it became your favourite sport. It’s amusing watching you and your Indian gang take over the basketball court for some cricket.

You used to be good at academics, but this year, you seem to have decided it doesn’t matter. Sports is all. Your reading ability was above average, but it’s hard to get you to sit down with a book. Homework is dispensed with with the minimum possible effort. I’ve belatedly realised that I need to be a Tiger Mom.

When you were born, I looked at you and knew I could kill for you. This year, an cranky old woman started chasing your and your friends off the basketball court because no other games are allowed on that court (but basically because she wanted to do her morning stroll there). The rage I felt on your behalf surprised me.

Your other love – video games – I’m not so fond of. It is the source of many of our arguments with you, which makes it rather stupid that we got you a Nintendo Switch for your birthday. You decided you’d rather have a screen than a party. Well, the fact is that the screen was cheaper, if not cheap, and the time around your birthday proved to be very busy, so that worked out, but I was rather sad.

You are no longer my compliant kid. You shout, you argue, you fight back. We’ve had to learn to say no to you – something we didn’t do very much earlier, because you never asked for much – and to stick with it, despite your rages. “I don’t care,” is your epithet of choice.

You’re still afraid of the dark, you don’t like to sleep alone, you like to cuddle. You aren’t chatty, but there are subjects you get on and won’t stop.

I’m only just about getting used to your new personality but hopefully we’ll both do better next year.