Flying the coop

On Tuesday, I took a mental health day and went to office.

I felt guilty, of course, for abandoning my children at home to two helpers and a husband, but after eight days of being a stay at home mom – albeit one with the full load of office work – I was ready to bolt.

I feel like those famous Japanese men who are bereft when they have to retire. I need to go to the office as silly as it sounds. I need to space out on the MTR. I need my two screens and desk and office coffee mug. I need to make polite chatter with my colleagues and go out to lunch. I need to need to dress up.

Two things I learnt this week:

1. Apropos the above, I’m not an extended work from home person

2. Homeschooling is better than school:

After disappointing results of an entrance tests in Bangalore and a not-so-great parent-teacher meeting, we realised we have to take matters into our own hands. I’ve been functioning under the illusion that having carefully selected a school, paying quite a steep price, I would leave the teachers to do what they presumably know best. So if this means, no homework, so be it. Heck, no homework is what I think education should be, in an ideal world.

The problem, I discovered, is that no homework and no textbooks coming home on  weekends means that you have no idea what your kid is up to at school, what they are learning and how they are doing, until two months into the term when you meet their teacher and he says, “er, not so great.”

And you realise you need to do something, and again the teachers are not much help. For example, I have known for a while that Mimi is atrocious at spelling but all of last year her teacher told me not to worry. Now, her teacher says, worry, but not how I can help her.

Thankfully, the internet exists, though it turns out there are a lot more resources for teaching pre-schoolers spelling than kids in grade three. So I’m having to invent my own method and I’m actually having some success.

It feels a bit like groundhog month because I went through this in their final year of kindergarten when I realised the much vaunted Jolly Phonics was quite ineffective in teaching my kids to read (and now I recall that epiphany was prompted by the need to do primary school entrance interviews, so I guess I never learn). Finally, the internet, common sense and some kind people here who suggested Starfall helped me get them on the right track, and now I’m wondering again, what the point of expensive schooling is when I end up doing the groundwork?

But so it is. This episode has taught me that I need to tiger parent it up a bit and teach my kids at home. My ideal would be reinforcing what they’re doing at school, but that’s only possible if the teachers cooperate and send their books home on weekends (Mimi’s teacher has agreed to, I’m still waiting for a response from Nene’s).

In the meantime, we took the opportunity of the kids being home a whole week to print out worksheets and basically drill them. Again I knew this, but they forget everything over the holidays, so there was a lot of refreshing of basics to do.

Thankfully, there’s a fair bit of free material available online, but it needs to be sifted through and because I’m not a professional teacher, I’m not sure what to teach when.

Unfortunately, V and I have sort of fallen into the gendered daddy is the math person, mommy is the English person and even more unfortunately both my kids prefer maths but it is what it is.

Onwards and upwards.

But by day eight of this I was exhausted (and the kids insisted they don’t do this much work at school, even though they were essentially doing just three hours or so put together, while they spend six hours at school) and after losing it on Mimi for refusing to take a bath, I decided I needed to get out and “adult” again.

So I fled, took the MTR, schlepped to my own desk and breathed a sigh of relief.

The next day, there was transport chaos again, and I found myself working from home, but sometimes all you need for your mental health is a day at the office.

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Last week in Hong Kong

1. The police shot two protesters. My opinion on this is not popular.

2. The two protesters were putting up barriers to block a road. They were doing so because two days before that a young man had fallen to his death, while the police were doing a clearance operation nearby.

After weeks of claiming people had died in a railway station, that a young woman found dead in the sea had been killed, finally, an incontrovertible death linked to the protests.

3. The protesters were shot near my kids’ school. My helper had just dropped them when it happened. We had decided to send them because Mimi had a camp scheduled and the school didn’t cancel it that morning. I asked our helper to wait around for a while and told her to leave. 15 minutes later, the school announced why it was closing and asked us to pick up the kids.

I must say I’m not impressed with them. Our MTR station and bus services had shut down, and it was nigh impossible to get a taxi. But the school not so subtly pressured us to “come as soon as possible” (as if we wouldn’t) by calling.

Finally, I requested Nene’s friend’s mum who lived nearby to take them home.

It took V three hours (taxi + ferry + train + bus) to get to them and another couple of hours to get them home.

Since then school has been closed and we’ve been working from home.

4. A man tried to argue with the protesters and was set on fire

5. An elderly man got hit by a brick during a clash with protesters and people trying to clear their barriers. He later died.

6. The police stormed a university campus. The protesters’ side is that they did not nothing; the police’s is that protesters were throwing stuff onto the highway below to block it from the university. Over subsequent days, there was touching footage of protesters setting up their own canteen and organising food in the university. There was also footage of protesters making petrol bombs in the university.

Right now, the police have surrounded another universities from where protesters were throwing stuff onto the highway. One can only hope that the police don’t go in guns blazing, but one also hopes protesters could just come out.

7. The Western media portrays this as a democracy movement. Universal suffrage is one of the demands, but this is only by-the-way a democracy movement. At its heart, it’s an anti-police movement. What people are most angry about is perceived police brutality. If you read local reports, the police gets mentioned all the time as a reason for public anger, then perhaps China. Democracy comes in a poor third, if at all.

Simmering beneath is mistrust of China and an (impossible) desire for independence. The distrust of China is supposedly about high ideals and fear of authoritarianism, but is really fuelled by more petty concerns such as “mainlanders” overruning Hong Kong.

None of this fits the Western narrative, many esteemed outlets calling the (local) police Chinese police. For however long it lasts, the Hong Kong police are not (yet) the Chinese police. Heck, they aren’t even the Indian police or the American police. (one line of argument goes that the American police would never shoot protesters. But they would shoot unarmed black kids, but that doesn’t count I guess.)

8. The protesters have successfully won the media war by claiming to be peaceful and wrongfully targeted long after they had begun throwing bricks at police, trashing public premises, setting fires and roughing up the odd soul who dared challenge them. I get it from a PR perspective, but the dishonesty still rankles.

Guess I’d be useless as a politician or an academic, because academics seems quite comfortable cleaving to the version of events that suits the narrative that suits their theory.

9. The writer Haruki Murakami once said, “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.” It’s a precept that’s appealing in its simplicity, and one that protesters occasionally quote.

This series of events has taught me that I’m not cut out for that kind of simplicity.

The saga continues.

 

October reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, feminist novels, reading

Lethal White, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling’s detective-writing pseudonym. I quite liked the first book in this series, but it’s increasingly going downhill. This one took the cake.

The rather cliched attraction between Strike and his assistant Robin has been getting terribly annoying. Sometimes this kind of chemistry works; in this case, I just wanted to slap the two of them and get on with the mystery.

I’m beginning to wonder whether I have just turned into a grumpy old crone because I find descriptions of romantic angst stupid. For example, at the last of this book, Strike shows up at Robin’s wedding, and Robin just has to know whether she’s getting her job back or not, thus basically disrupting the proceedings. And I’m like, FFS get a room. Or not. But get on with the mystery please.

Even more annoyingly, Strike keeps thinking about his ex Charlotte, making one long for the days of Hercule Poirot who barely had a personal life. And then, we are constantly told how much they all drink, as if we are teenagers and this is of interest.

The mystery itself was decent, but this book can be one third shorter without all the romantic mooning around.

Die A Little, Megan Abbott

Abbott’s forte is creating a dense creepy atmosphere, and she does this in 1950s suburbia as well as she does in her teen novels.

The One Memory of Flora Banks 

Is it me or do a lot of these YA books (except Megan Abbott) have kids with some kind of disability? This one is about a girl who has no short term memory. Ultimately, though, it is about parents of teenagers needing to let them go.

The twists were quite unexpected – except the one related to the boy.

The Dry, Jane Harper

Finally a well plotted thriller featuring good old detective work. The mystery here is intensely personal – the detective goes back to his roots and must face his own past. The narrative is set amid Australia’s drought that makes its rural areas a tinder box and shatters then image of village life as kumbaya.

I’ve found another thriller series yay.

In a Dark Dark Wood, Ruth Ware 

The title itself tries too hard, and I can’t say I loved this one. I kept reading it to know what happens, but I didn’t really care about the characters, partly because they struck me as stupid. Here are some ways not to be stupid:

Don’t go to a hen weekend if you haven’t seen or been in touch with the bride in years

Or if you didn’t get a wedding invite

Don’t play stupid drinking games if you don’t want to (why do people play drinking games in their 30s?)

When you’re cautioned by the police, don’t keep talking without getting a lawyer

Meh. Anyway, I read a few reviews because I was astonished at how bad I felt the book was, and I have to say that the resolution was not unexpected but not as expected as a the critics said either.

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer 

Wolitzer is not the opposite of Sally Rooney but the synthesis of Rooney and some chick lit writer, say Sophie Kinsella (or someone who writes about entirely ordinary people). She tends to write about precocious kids, but in a self-aware way without taking them entirely seriously.

Take the title itself. The group in the camp decided to call themselves “the Interestings” because each of them was in some way. While they tried to be ironic about life, they also believed their own hype at some level.

When Jules was inducted into their midst, she wasn’t sure what her thing was. This pressure to find one’s thing ,do we all feel it? I certainly did.

I loved this book. Maybe I will return to it as Jules returned to her camp.

Anthony and Cleopatra,Colleen McCollough

My general knowledge of this pair came from the Shakespeare play. What Shakespeare makes out to be a great love story is basically politics.

It’s a massive tome. I learnt a lot, but skimmed through the wars.

One curious character in the novel was King Herod, who those of us steeped in Christian lore know of as the baddie who ordered the first-born sons of Jews to be killed so that he could weed out the future messiah. Turns out – surprise surprise – he too was a complicated character, and not necessarily the bit player I had thought he was.

The thing about these Roman books is that I didn’t realise – silly me – how much Christian history was intertwined. I mean, the Roman emperor is mentioned a lot in the Bible, heck it was a Roman governor who ordered the Crucifixion, but again, I didn’t realise how significant Judea was, or maybe it’s made out to be because these novelists are, like me, steeped in Christian lore and can’t resist playing up that connection.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Becky Albertalli

Why did I read this? Because a girl posted on an FB group about its sequel (coming up next) which I wanted to read, so I picked this up.

Of course, I enjoyed it. But questions.

I’ve been wondering about YA as a category. What is a young adult?

I’ve always categorised YA as books 13-year-olds read but 13-year-olds are not even close to being adult. Or even 16-year-olds.

But the voice in these books sounds about that old, or rather young. Is this how adults think kids sound?

Also is it necessary to be into music if you’re in a teen? Because I’m going to fail to relate as a parent.

Leah on the Offbeat, Becky Albertalli

Obviously, I loved this, but perhaps because I read it right after Simon, I was a little less enamoured of the teen angst. Also, the obsession with coming out – what’s with that? I get that telling and who one tells is significant especially to teenagers but making that the plot point of two novels in succession is a bit much. And all the need to have everyone happily paired off.

The End of Everything, Megan Abbbott

I speed read this in one evening, not in a good way. I did not love it, I just wanted to know the end.

There were twists but they were not entirely unexpected.

I love Abbott’s spooky writing but I felt this one was trying too hard.

Love in the time of Affluenza, Shunali Shroff

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

This is the first in a triumvirate of feminist novels from the 70s that have long been in my list. This one’s claim to fame is its concept of the zipless fuck. I quote:

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one

Lovely. Thing was this concept was the best thing about the novel and it came early. It’s ostensibly about a single woman trying to find herself, but the way she seems to do this is to have lots of no-strings-attached sex (even as she sorta wants a string) and I don’t care to read about sex that much in novels (except in Judith Krantz novels, she does sex so well). Also, I get the whole sex-as-liberation thing, but seriously it cannot be the only thing, can it?

Read Vogue’s take on whether the zipless fuck has become quaint in our era here.

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

Feminist 70s novel no 2. Liked this one a lot better. It’s surprisingly contemporary. Three women take Manhattan, then LA, trying to make it and find love as they go along. Sound familiar? Except that this novel makes no bones about how difficult it is to do this while being female, even if you’re pretty.

 

Flying solo

Since my boss is being a pain about letting me have leave during Christmas in December, I decided to do our annual pilgrimage to India in October this year. Then we realised we had to be in Bangalore in December for my in-law’s golden wedding, so it became an Mumbai-only trip, with a very short stint in Bangalore.

Unfortunately, I came down with a stomach problem that has still not been resolved, even if it is more manageable now. I was really nervous about falling ill, because V wasn’t going to be in Mumbai with me to pitch in with the kids. Depressingly, I had to resolve to eat very carefully, which takes away a large part of the fun of going to India at all.

We are now seriously looking at schools in Bangalore (if any of you have suggestions, do tell) and had to make a short trip there for two entrance tests. I was not optimistic about these given that my kids do not have exams at school and we had no idea how to help them prepare. One of the schools didn’t have space anyway, but the other ridiculously gave them an end of year test when they are only a couple of months into this school year. So that situation is in limbo.

I did get more sold on the idea of moving to India – mainly the prospect of family (more for the kids than me), bigger houses and being closer to, if unfortunately not in the same city as, my parents whose health has declined.

The Bombay trip was as good as it could be. I now only have one close friend in the city, but we only managed to meet for a very early morning coffee. I did not eat out at all, save for a sandwich at the Taj (more on that later) and some dumplings that had been ordered in.

Because V wasn’t around to chauffeur us, I didn’t take the kids out as much as we might otherwise have. We visited our neighbourhood and fed kittens, made a trip to Juhu beach that has become an annual highlight (in which I let the kids play in the water, something I think people living in Bombay refuse to do), walked down our local shopping street and did a drive into town that I have been wanting to do for a while.

We had watched a documentary on the Taj Mahal Palace hotel and since then Nene has been fascinated with it. I also thought it might be worth seeing the Gateway of India, and “town” in general, so I planned to have a bite at the Taj cafe. Unfortunately, Nene behaved like a brat in the cafe, insisting that he wanted his own plate of pasta while I tried to convince him to share with Mimi, and I had to give him a talking to, which rather spoiled the mood. And then, we had to rush out of the Gateway area due to rain.

But I did enjoy the rather nostalgic drive through town, past the route I used to take to college, even if my children were not similarly enthused.

My mum organised a dinner for close family so I could meet them all in one place though my cousins from my mum’s side were out of town.

The most fulfilling thing about the trip was that, because we were housebound a lot, the kids spent a lot of time with parents, especially my dad who seems able to relate to them better now that they are older. There was a lot of TV watching, but my dad who has either the news or sports on every waking hour, at least makes it interactive. So, on day one, they were all poised on the couch for the counting of Maharashtra poll votes, and ready to support grandpa in his aspirations for his (unfortunately losing, but you wouldn’t know it to hear him) team. They are now aware of the BJP and the Congress party, and possible merits of kabadi.

The sad thing was that literally zero kids were seen playing in our building’s very generous playground. I had to take Nene down myself and bowl to him every day. It seems more kids congregate downstairs in our estate in Hong Kong.

I must say flying without V was rather peaceful. It meant I had to be in charge of all documents but it also meant that I could set the agenda without secondguessing myself. And if that meant each child chose to buy food from a different outlet, so be it.

On the flight back, we travelled premium economy on Cathay Pacific, and it was really good. There has been some debate on the merits of premium economy with kids because the handrests do not move, which means the kids cannot lie across. However, with kids my age, the wider seats and the leg rests that come up worked well, and I could sleep without having two little people sprawled over me.

The other advantages are that the food service starts from that section first and you also disembark right after business class (and so do have to contend with the annoying people who jump up and form a tight queue).

So that was that. I survived, we had some good times and unfortunately some tears.

We got back and I basically crashed the entire morning, rousing myself only to go out Halloween shopping with the kids. That evening some parents had planned a trick or treat route, and I followed twenty candy-filled screaming children down numerous corridors. There was a barbeque after that I didn’t plan to join as I thought the kids wouldn’t be up to it and also because I wasn’t sure I wanted to socialise with sundry parents, over hot flames, but I ended up hanging out there a bit, and it seemed like it would have be nice.

It also struck me that we do have a community in Hong Kong, at least the kids do, and this could be expanded, and so Halloween in Hong Kong dispered the ghosts of my India longing.

 

 

The browns

This birthday was probably my worst birthday in memory.

My illness in September never quite went away. For over a month, I’ve had a stomach upset that’s just … there. I’ve been existing on the blandest, most basic food possible. Thankfully, Hong Kong knows how to do this food well.

Initially, I enjoyed the weight loss that came with this, but now I’m fed up. The idea of never eating anything spicy, or just so little food, for the the forseeable future, kills me. Not to mention the timing – I am scheduled for a trip to India, which means not only would I have to stay away from all the food that would otherwise have been the highlight of the trip, but I would be in mortal fear of coming down with diarrhea in India, as I am prone to at the best of times.

The most depressing thing was being told a day before my birthday that my test results came back negative for infections. You’d think that would be a good thing, but I was hoping something would be detected so it would be easy to prescribe something targeted to knock it off.

Now, it’s pretty much a guessing game of dealing with symptoms. I actually teared up at the doctors. Fortunately, he’s sympathetic and tried to give me something to help the symptoms.

I’m not a fan of a big shebang on my birthday but I was scared to even eat my own birthday cake. I allowed myself a can of coke because that actually calms my stomach, though it’s not something I want to live on because that would undo all the weight loss that is the only silver lining to this whole saga. Okay, and my facialist said my skin is much better. Obviously, on a diet a congee. Meh.

Oh, and I’m now an expert at dealing with shit. I mean literally. I have done a stool test once in my life as a child and have avoided one ever since. Just the logistics of collecting poo – a substance I should have made my peace with considering how much of my life is spent dealing with it – kill me. But just when you think you can only sink so low, you realise, there’s a bottom under the bottom and this one involves scooping excreta of the solid kind.

Because of course when you need to collect poo, your body goes into panic mode and it refuses to come. As if you hadn’t spent every second hour on the potty these past few weeks.

We had booked a body check – at which I discovered I have slightly low blood pressure (and I am now convinced it’s a PMS thing) – and I had been firmly said I was not going to do a stool test. But then I decided to do it, considering that is my main problem. Then my gastroentrologist asked me to do another one.

Meanwhile, Mimi has fallen ill with similar symptoms – three times in the past month – and we had to do a stool test for her to.

So I’ve basically been carrying shit in little bottles here and there. This is my life now.

So, yeah, I had not agenda on my birthday except to not spend it primarily on the pot, and for that I have the gastro to thank.

So what do I want for the coming year? For my gut to get it’s act together.

 

 

Cynicism

Tags

democracy, Hong Kong

Hong Kong is in its fifth month of increasingly violent protests.*

I am not averse to violence if the cause is big enough. Opposing the extradition bill, which would have allowed China to claim people it deemed criminals, was a big enough cause. Unfortunately, getting the government to shelve that bill required violence on the part of the people.

The current protests are largely an anti-police movement, demanding an inquiry into police use of force on the protesters (both sides have become increasingly violent) and an amnesty for those arrested. I am undecided if this is a big enough cause or even a justified one. Those who break the law for a cause, especially who do so violently, should be admired but perhaps willing to take on the consequences of breaking the law, especially if rule of law is one of the things they seek to defend?

More worrying, the protests which began idealistically have degenerated into something rather hysterical, ethnocentric and strident. There is the tendency to believe the most stupid rumours, and almost desperate need to invent martyrs.

The most troubling aspect is the bullying of anyone who disagrees with the protesters. One of the abiding legacies of China’s cultural revolution were the “struggle sessions” in which people accused of being the bourgeoisie were publicly castigated and humiliated. Ironically, today in Hong Kong something similar is happening to people who disagree with the protesters or refuse to condemn the police. This while the protests purport to defend freedom of speech.

Perhaps being too close to a movement always involves disillusionment.

The surprising personal consequence of the protests is that I have lost my faith in democracy. Universal suffrage is a demand that has been tacked on to the protest agenda, unlike the Umbrella Movement of which it was the central demand. There are some, particularly Western commentators, who argue that full democracy (Hong Kong has a form of limited democracy but not for the highest levels of government) is the answer and that people are rioting because they have no other outlets.

Erm, by that logic, half the world should be rioting and there would never be riots in a democracy. No, people are rioting because violence has proved to be effective and short-circuits the system. They are frustrated and the government pushed its luck in trying to curry favour with Beijing, but some of Hong Kong’s problems are intractable and a democratically elected government would not help.

My sad realisation during the protests is how venal the pro-democracy politicians are. It is so obvious that they are stirring up violence or hesitant to rein it in with an eye on their vote banks. I actually prefer the existing civil servants, who know how government works, to the band of loudmouths who have not really offered any workable solutions to Hong Kong’s problems themselves.

In Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework, agency (the idea that individuals have the power to act and make choices and move events) is a function of an all-encompassing and generative power. Voting in a democracy seems to be just that. You feel like you’re doing something, but you’re not doing much beyond moving the status quo incrementally while feeling like you’re doing something. A sop, basically.

Between India, the US, the Philippines, the UK and now Hong Kong, I don’t feel like the “majority wins” schtick that democracy inevitably becomes is for the best.  Charismatic people, the kind that get elected, are rarely good at governing and increasingly they are too full of themselves to listen to people that can.

Whether one gets a good government seems as much a function of luck as anything else. Democracy, like religion, gives us a sense that we are in control. And, okay, it adds an additional layer of accountability, but the cost seems to be populism.

Hong Kong does not have democracy, but a leader who loses popular support – and there are enough ways to make popular discontent known – will not be reappointed by Beijing. But that leader, being not popularly elected, has a bit more leeway than she would had she been responsible to a particular vote bank.

What Hong Kong, and perhaps most places, need is something of a mix between democracy and leaders who do not have to answer to “the people” who sadly often do not know best.

*Despite which, I don’t feel particularly unsafe, just slightly inconvenienced. The protests necessitate staying out of areas where protests are ongoing but even if one did, the larger fear is being caught up in police reprisals or being caught in an MTR service shut-down than the protesters beating one up, which is my fear during riots in India, for example.

What we did – September

Basically, we fell sick.

First, Nene was a bit off colour, so I kept him home for a day. He bounced back.

Then Mimi suddenly came down with fever. The fever went, to be replaced by diarrhea.

She recovered. Then Nene caught the same bug.

He recovered. Then I caught it. Of course, mine was the worst. I stayed home for a record three days of work. The last day, I said I would work from home, and boss asked if I needed the day off and I said ok, because honestly I had been feeling faint that morning. But by afternoon, I felt relatively okay, so I logged in and asked if I could do anything, only to be told to go rest. I ended up doing some work for the next week, thus proving that I cannot just hang out at home.

This was the second time I’ve fallen sick in the space of a month. There is something wrong with me – my stomach mainly – so I’ve decided I need to eat very light food for… a week. And not forget to take vitamins. And not push myself to exercise till I’ve recovered my strength.

In between everyone falling sick, we did very little as a family. V and I started going on walks on the weekend – we asked the kids but they thought it was lame – but that was shortlived given my illness.

The kids started school and are doing fine. Mimi seems to have regular friends and likes going to school (fingers crossed). Nene is fine as usual.

The protests in Hong Kong show no signs of abating.

September reading list

Tags

books, reading

Okay, before we get started, I read a lot this month mainly because I was unwell a lot. Have been wondering if these monthly lists are two long and I should be breaking them up. Let me know if you have thoughts on this.

Now onto the books:

The End of the World — Again: Why the Apocalypse Meme Replicates in Media, Science, and Culture, Barry Vacker

This is a semi-academic book which, as the title suggests, tries to account for the popularity of apocalyptic memes – that is, doom-and-gloom predictions that the end of the world is nigh. The answer:

1. Because we can wipe the slate clean and start over
2. Out of some instinct to fast forward to the end
3. To know what’s coming

Vacker points to the failure of philosophy to provide a metameme that accounts for our new scientific understanding of our place on the fringes of the universe. The result is an ever more ardent clinging to religion and superstition. That’s the part I liked.

The part I didn’t like so much was his use of Baudrillard – a very cool philosopher whose work I want to read more, because I’m convinced that the Kardashians are exactly what he’s talking about (having read only a summar of his work) – to rant about people staring at their screens (booooring!) and reinforce some kind of authenticity that the contemporary world is apparently lacking.

In Big Trouble, Laura Lippman
The Sugar House, Laura Lippman
In a Strange City, Laura Lippman
No Good Turn, Laura Lippman

As you can see, I binged on the Tess Monaghan series this month. I liked all of these but I had to google the first two before writing this, which just goes to show. What impresses me about Lippman is how the cast of characters remains vaguely the same but the mise en scene as it were shifts quite a lot in each book, so that one is exploring an entirely different area or theme – Texas (which is a state bordering Maryland weirdly),  Baltimore politics, Poe and antique collecting, and crime among youth African-Americans. With regard to the latter, I was a little uncomfortable with how white people, on both the good and bad sides, were both the evil and the saviours behind the scene of black people’s deeds, but Lippman mitigates this somewhat with self-reflection on the part of the white saviour at least.

Daisy Jones and the Six

This came highly recommended. I didn’t love it initially, but it grew on me.

I did like the format of each character offering their own perspective on the events. What I loved: three women – the manic pixie dream girl, the one of the guys, the Madonna – and sultry sidekicks. They could have been chicks who hated other women and defined themselves according to men. But no. They were that, but supported other women. This is becoming one of those must-haves in novels for me.

Anna of Kleves, Alison Weir

I love Weir’s take on events, but I’m getting rather tired of unwanted pregnancies as a plot point.

While a lot of attention has been paid to Holbein’s over flattering portrait of Anna, which may or may not have disappointed King Henry when he saw her in person, Weir focuses on Anna’s reaction to him.

Her take on their relationship is different from the usual one, which claims that Anna inspired disgust in him. Instead, Weir proposes a more nuanced reading of their relationship, which accounts for Henry’s growing illness and perhaps that somehow (believably) she was not to his taste. Apart from Katherine of Aragon, Henry seemed to get on best with English women, whom he had courted himself.

While I liked the parts which were grounded in historical fact, I found some of the fictionalised parts quite trying.

Sleepwalking, Meg Wolitzer 

Along with Curtis Sittenfled and Megan Abbott, Wolitzer is my third newly discovered favourite authors. This is her debut novel, and I loved it.

Like Sally Rooney territory, Wolitzer’s subject are three precocious girls who march to their own drum beats. Each of the “death girls” as they are called are obsessed with a different (death-obsessed) poet. This is right up my street; I like to think that had I grown up in an American high school I would have been a goth (though I probably would have been the coolish nerd aka Andrea in Beverly Hills 90212). Let’s just say I’m an aspirational goth.

I tend to be a little impatient with these too cool for school types, but Wolitzer saves her novel my not taking them too seriously.

Children of Jocasta, Natalie Haynes

The thing I have always wondered about the Oedipus myth is how could he sleep with his mother. The answer, Haynes provides, is that she was much younger than his father.

This book is a repudiation of superstition, a pragmatic explanation of where the myths came from even as it brings the characters in the myths alive.

Also, while Antigone has been recuperated as a heroine recently, especially in feminist work, Haynes focuses on Ismene.

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

This book has been all over the interwebs – a young adult novel about a teenage black girl who witnesses a friend being shot by the police. I did not love love it initially because many of the issues the book deals with are not new to me but it does a great job of putting them across in a simple and engaging way.

However, weeks after reading it, the characters and plot points have stayed with me, so I guess it did find its mark. The part I liked the most was how it shows a black community which has its flaws but also where families and neighbors are loving.

Wonder, R.J. Palacio

This book was reccomended to me by my teenager niece and her friend. I asked about it while driving somewhere with them and they started telling me so enthusiastically even though I had just been trying to be polite.

I felt I should read it for my niece. I resisted because I knew it was going to be sad and it’s a kids book

I loved it.

I did cry a lot. It touched a nerve because my kids may be in a new school next year and while they do not have any disabilities, some of the cruelties inflicted in this book could be on just about anyone.

It has a happy, quite scripted for the screenplay-type ending though, so rest assured you’ll come away on a positive note.

Queenie, Candace Carty Williams

Loved. Read my review here.

The Gendered Brain, Gina Rippon

“What are you reading?” asked Mimi

“A book about the brain. Some people think that men have different brains from women.”

“Whaaat?”

“Yeah, but this book says that’s nonsense.”

“We already knew that.”

Yeah we did. But the book shows the lengths that different fields of knowledge – including science/ have gone to prove otherwise. Apart from definitively showing how the evidence for gender differences in the brain is almost non-existent, there is lots of interesting info about, well, the brain.

For example, just after we bought Nene his coveted Nintendo Switch, I came upon this: “30 minutes a day of playing Super Mario over a period of 2 months also proved to be a brain changing experience, with increases in gray matter volume in the hippocampus as well as the frontal areas of the brain”

Also this: Hits to self esteem are registered in the brain as strongly as  as physical pain. It made me wonder: is this why we seek romantic love? We need that unconditional anchor to our self esteem. Maybe this is why the love meme is so attractive – the idea of being chosen as an adult.

I ended up falling sick and not finishing this, but I intend to pick it up again once my brain is back to normal.

The Uninvited Guests, Sadie Jones

This is a really well written Downton-Abbeyesque Edwardian novel. Except that there’s a paranormal element. This novel proved to me – as if I needed proof, but the fact is, no matter how many fantasy novels I struggle through, I still keep hoping I’ll get into them – that I am not cut out for anything fantasy or paranormal related. Harry Potter was an anomaly.

I ended up speed-reading towards the end, just to know what happened so I could give it up. I later came back and read it through, but nope, no more paranormal for me.

The Forest of Enchantment, Chitra Banerjee Divakurani

Hmmm, okay, so I don’t like fantasy, but I love mythology. Heh.

In the Preface, the author notes how many people wrote to her after The Palace of Illusions asking when she was writing her next book and she promised one on Sita very soon. Then, she found it was harder than she thought to write a Sitayan and it was ages before the book came out.

I didn’t write to her inquiring, but I was one of those Palace of Illusions fans waiting for the Sita book. And it just about lived up to my high expectations.

Sita has been the subject of much feminist criticism – though there is a famous essay by Madhu Kishwar about how Sita holds feminist potential – so this book can be seen as part of the enterprise to rescue Sita. The underlying argument is a fictional articulation of Kishwar’s thesis – that Sita was a strong woman and a rebel in her own way, in her own context.

Apart from rescuing Sita, however, Divakurani also rescues Ram. I did not have a very favourable impression of Ram with his obsessions with abstract ideals of right and wrong (although for a long time I myself was obsessed with these). However, Divakurani humanises him and makes him, well, hot. If that is not a feat – for those of us who grew up on the Doordarshan version of Ram – then what is?

She provides a modern interpretation of the rakshasas and asuras as tribals. Not surprisingly, she provides a sympathetic reading of the Suparnakha story, but she also offers us a Kaikeyi we can admire. Unfortunately, she chooses to blame the hunchback for the whole Bharat-first debacle, when the physically disabled were often blamed in ancient times for all misfortunes because physical deformity was equated with moral baseness.

My one problem were the explicit meditations on the nature of love – though I guess the point was/is to reestablish the Ramayana as a love story – but overall enjoyed this one.

 

 

 

Unexpected thing I find myself doing at work #6448

As part of a fact-checking exercise I find myself going through the list of cancer drugs that patients in public hospitals technically have to find their own funds to pay for but which are also covered under a funding scheme. I need to cross check two lists and root out repeat drugs to figure out the exact number of drugs covered.

I find myself repeating the names of these exotic chemicals:

ANAGRELIDE (AGRYLIN / THROMBOREDUCTIN)

2. ANASTROZOLE

3. ATEZOLIZUMAB (TECENTRIQ)

4. BICALUTAMIDE

5. BLEOMYCIN HCl

6. BUSERELIN ACETATE

7. BUSULPHAN….

While tearing up because I know what they do. I have a close friend whose had two cancer bouts and a double mastectomy all before the age of 40.

I grew up reading these medical novels, one of which was about a child with leukemia and so I was on familiar terms with the ravages of chemotherapy in my early teens. The drugs have got better, if you can afford the better ones.

As I grew older and realised that I cannot properly handled antibiotics, I have become convinced that I would be a very bad candidate for chemo. I’ve always thought that I would rather die than go through it. Now that I have kids though, I suppose I’m obliged to try.

Was talking to nice work colleague and she was saying how her cousin has pancreatic cancer and I was talking about how chemo sucks and she was like, “yeah but you don’t have to do it” and then she was like “oh you have kids I guess you do”. And this is why we are friends.