April comes around again and with it the first Saturday of the month. Shall we hammer together some links in a Six Degrees of Separation chain?
This month, our host Kate has chosen The Correspondent by Virginia Evans as our starting point. You can find out more about the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
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Isabel Adonis is an artist and writer based in North Wales. I first got to know her work as an artist when The Weavers Factory gallery held an exhibition of her show Scraps, Patches and Rags in 2021. The works in the show explored meanings of ‘home’, a theme that is also a strand in And… A memoir of my mother. Here, Isabel reflects on her childhood and her mother’s place in it, alongside an examination of what ‘home’ meant to her mother. It’s a book about fragmentation and division, about how society tries to constrain individuality, and how the search for the true self is almost impossible.
Continue readingHello February, already a week old. Shall we dance through a bookish Six Degrees of Separation?
This month, the meme’s host Kate has chosen Flashlight by Susan Choi as our starting point. You can find out more about the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
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Wes Anderson: The Archives is the catalogue to an exhibition of the same name. It’s a co-curation between La Cinémathèque française, Paris, and the Design Museum, London. I have yet to make it down to the Big Smoke to see it, but the catalogue has geed me up to book tickets and a city break in 2026. A Christmas present, it made a perfect end to my reading year. Reading the catalogue has also made me want to watch all of the films again, in sequence.
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Adam Scovell is a writer I discovered through my love of the books Influx Press publish. I bought his first novel, Mothlight, back in the Covid-19 pandemic as part of a subscription. His view of the world and its uneasy locations, the way in which their strangeness bleeds into the everyday, and the relationships people form with them over time, intrigued me.
Local Haunts collects together Scovell’s non-fiction essays written between 2012 and 2024. The focus is on place, but not from a geographer’s perspective. Scovell explores the cultural connections between place, people and creativity. He does this across literature, film, television and the psychogeography of wandering.
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Johanna Hedva’s Your Love is Not Good is one of my Year of Reading Independently books from this year’s attempt on Mount To Read. It was part of my And Other Stories subscription in 2023. I picked it up because February is LGBT+ History Month in the UK and I hadn’t read any LGBTQ+ literature since last August. I went into it knowing only what is on the publisher’s website and what is written in the blurbs. On the basis of the arty gushing, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did.
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I absolutely loved Jim Moir’s first bird art book Birds, published in 2022. I pledged immediately for the follow up More Birds, and it arrived this October. I decided to save it, though. Christmas is a good time for reading the smaller books that are deserving of closer attention.
More Birds follows the same format as Birds, with a double page spread for each bird with a reproduction of a watercolour on one page and the bird’s popular and Latin names plus an interesting fact about it on the other. There are 80 birds in this volume, instead of 100, and the printing quality doesn’t feel quite as good, or perhaps it’s the paper stock. The images of Jim Moir’s paintings aren’t quite as crisp.
It’s still a beautiful book, though, and I enjoyed looking through it on Boxing Day afternoon. There are some birds that are new to me among the entries, and a small number of repeats from the first volume – with new paintings and facts, of course.
We saw lapwings in the wild for the first time this year, at Martin Mere, so I was particularly happy to see one in More Birds. Jim’s painting captures its colourful beauty perfectly. I also enjoyed meeting the red-breasted merganser, which made me think of Woodstock from Peanuts.
Read 26/12/2024
Leaf Art Encyclopedia of Animals is a collection of photographs with stories by the Japanese artist Lito (リト). It was one of my Christmas gifts this year from Mr Hicks.
Lito describes in his introduction how he has always been fascinated by the natural world and as a child loved to read illustrated books about animals. He talks about looking for his own way to be in the world and being inspired by a Spanish leaf artist to create his own leaf art. He’s entirely self-taught and describes his process at the end of the book.
My Japanese is extremely rusty. I’ve forgotten almost all of the kanji I learnt for GCSE and A Level. I was thankful for the assistance of Google lens in translating the text in this delightful book.
I spent some of my festive down time looking at the detail of the leaf art, marvelling at Lito’s skill, and laughing at the funny little stories. While it is enough to look at the beautiful art (there are examples on the front page of his website), the stories beneath add even more charm.
On his website, Lito describes himself as a clumsy man who was always being shouted at for getting things wrong. In his leaf art, he has found a world where he belongs. In an article in the Asahi Shimbun, he talks in more detail about what is behind his apparent lack of skills in day-to-day tasks and how his ADHD diagnosis encouraged him to think about the things he is good at.
The book is absolutely gorgeous and I know I’ll return to its pages again and again.
Read 25/12/2024-26/12/2024
Nick Bradley’s novel Four Seasons in Japan is his second book set in Japan, and follows part time translator Flo through a moment of crisis. Flo is from Portland, Oregon, but is living in Tokyo. She works part of the week in an office, part of it as a freelance translator of Japanese literature. She has had success with the translation of a collection of short stories by a respected Japanese author, but has started to have doubts about her abilities, thanks to reading bad reviews of her translation. Her relationship is also at crisis point.
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Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain is a scholarly tome from the team at the Hepworth Wakefield. Written to accompany an exhibition there in 2018, which I didn’t see, it attempts to position the photographer Lee Miller at the heart of the British surrealist movement in the 1930s and 1940s.
I can’t remember where I first encountered Miller’s photography. It was in an exhibition many years ago. I recall seeing solarised images she had made in collaboration with Man Ray alongside the photographs she took as a war correspondent during and at the end of the Second World War. I bought a postcard of her image ‘Portrait of Space’, depicting a landscape seen through a torn piece of netting with an empty picture frame hovering over the sky, because it made me think of Magritte. I was drawn by the framing and lighting of her images, that borrowed from the world of fashion she had experienced as a model and that also had a theatrical feel to them.
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What I Think About When I Think About Reading 