Reading Update: April

Here, there and everywhere

Hello, it's me, Laura King. I've had a very exciting month, defined by two trips - a week in Paris for work (and some free time at either end thank God) and four nights in Madrid with lovely friends. At the start of the month I thought this would mean for some nice reading time, but I'd have had to sit still in either city for this to really happen.

Even though I didn't have a huge amount of time to sit and read, I did really enjoy the books I read either on flights or in a few stolen moments. Even more importantly, there's something energizing about visiting new places, especially such beautiful places, that makes me really open to different types of art and creativity too. I visited the Louvre Couture exhibition and felt very grateful to have the chance to see such beautiful pieces in those magnificent rooms, and the most memorable part for me was standing for a moment behind a woman intently painting one of the pieces with watercolours. This care and attention and skill was a joy to watch.

At the opposite end of the scale, I was moved by my visit to the Museo Reine Sophia, particularly in seeing Picasso's Guernica in person. An eleven foot tall, monochromatic reimagining of the chaos following a bombing in the Spanish Civil war was always going to be an arresting sight, but I particularly enjoyed reading about how the modernist movement which always fascinated me within the realms of literature and critical theory worked in fine art, but still drawing on the experimental, fragmented, and deeply political. It made me appreciate how artists across so many different forms were influenced by each other in how they tried to capture the world around them, and it reminded me of how necessary it is to try to understand this work across all forms, even if we ourselves aren't as knowledgeable or skilled in those arts as we would like.

All that to say, here are the books I managed to squeeze in between cheese plates this month:

Run Out and Read!

Skipshock by Caroline O Donoghue is the first in what I expect to be a series of books for young adults. It is set across a range of different worlds connected by train, on which Irish teenager Margo accidentally finds herself while on the way to boarding school. In this novel, worlds are measured by the amount of hours in a day, and while privileged Southerners have something closer to the 24 hours we take for granted, those in the North age rapidly in days as short as 2 hours each. There's just so much to think about with this novel, so I'm glad that it's clearly intended to be part of a series, but I'm absolutely raging that I can't just keep reading more about Margo and Moon now! It comes out in June, but in the meantime you might like to read her other YA trilogy beginning with All Our Hidden Gifts.

Highly Recommended

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney is out later this month, about a woman reeling from the death of her parents, making a new life for herself in her childhood home until that new peace is disrupted by her ex-fiancé arriving in the town, but it's also a book about secrets becoming unburied, about the past refusing to stay in the past, and the violent past lurking under so many beautiful rural areas in Ireland. You know I love books about generational trauma (thank you to Oona Frawley for undergraduate seminars years ago in Maynooth University for that), and Feeney's exploration of this problem is thoughtful and rewarding as ever.

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine will deservedly be a book everyone is talking about when it comes out in June. It's Erskine first novel but she's the author of two brilliant short story collections and this skill really shines through in this novel which is voiced by a kaleidoscope of characters narrating the assault of a vulnerable girl by the golden boys in their community in Northern Ireland.

I actually finished Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor on 1st May, but I read the majority of the book travelling home from Madrid and only had the last couple of chapters left by the end of April, and it's my Substack so I'll lie if I want to. This was a really engaging read and a lot of fun, particularly as it reminded me a lot of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevlin (which you should read in the meantime), but mixed with the Disney Plus series The Dropout based on Elizabeth Holmes. The novel comes out on 10th July and will definitely be a trendy one this summer.

Expectations were very high for the new Eimear McBride novel, especially after I learned it was a sequel to my beloved The Lesser Bohemians. Of course McBride is as excellent as ever and The City Changes Its Face is such an impressive book, both for its use of form as well as depth of feeling. However, I felt there was a far more interesting story waiting to be told about Eily years later, even thirty years on in the present day, rather than setting the book within eighteen months or so after the first book left off. The novels are about a lot of things really, but I was struck about how both are about the relationship between how memory is recounted and how art is made, and what happens when that story goes out to the world and is translated and interpreted by the reader, or viewer, or actor. It wasn't the book I wanted but was so rewarding and thought provoking nonetheless.

Recommended

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson's memoir of her relationship with Harry Dodge and her pregnancy with their son Iggy blurs boundaries of what it means to be part of a family. Harry, who is gender fluid and transitioned during their relationship, already had one son, and Nelson charts the changing appearance and interior realities of their relationship, puzzling out ideas of gender and sexuality in the private, public and political spheres in reference to other artists and art forms. I can't say that I love this book, or that I appreciated all of the elements especially as I didn't have some of the necessary reference points used by Nelson, but it's one I'm glad I returned to after abandoning it a few weeks ago.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors is about three sisters reeling a year after the death of their beloved sister Nicki, the third born child and charismatic, caring glue that held them together. Now adrift from each other and self destructing in their own ways, they need to learn how to make their own way in the world in the wake of this loss. I enjoyed the vibes but wasn't as invested in the characters as I needed to be in order to love the novel.

Not for me/did not finish

I was listening to A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Mass at the start of the month based on so many recommendations but then I thankfully remembered I have free will and I don't have to suffer.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche was really hyped up, since it was her first novel since the brilliant Americanah in 2014, but unfortunately I just couldn't get into this, and judging by reviews I'm not the only one.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me again soon for another installment of LauraEatsBooks.