April Reads

A music memoir not for the podcast! I’m a fan of Cameron Crowe’s films and I was aware of his career as a music journalist (I think I only ever read his Pearl Jam piece for Rolling Stone in 1993), so this was a no-brainer for me. It starts slow: if you’ve ever seen Almost Famous then the first few chapters are painfully slow. It’s all the stuff that inspired the family scenes at the start of the movie but the true story, not the polished, far more interesting fictional version. Once that’s out of the way and Crowe is backstage with bands, following them across the US, and hanging out with Plant, Page, Bowie et al while supposed to still be in school, it gets good. It entirely skips over most of 80s, all of the 90s and 00s, so maybe there’s a sequel on the way, or maybe he stuck to writing about people who are (mostly) no longer around. I hope there is a sequel considering how embedded he was in the 90s Seattle scene.

A recommendation from Minori. Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 is a landmark novel in Korean literature, essentially a feminist text that charts the struggles women face(d) growing up in South Korea’s heavily patriarchal society through the experiences of one woman who begins dissociating in adulthood and comes to embody the “everywoman.” The story itself isn’t that great because the scenes are clearly designed to illustrate a point, but as an emotional insight into societal oppression and the effects it can have on mental health, it is incredibly powerful.

I picked this up in Scotland and was really looking forward to reading it. Kelman is obviously one of the grand figures of Scottish literature and I’ve always been drawn more to his short fiction than his novels (though I love them too). This collection however was quite disappointing. Each piece is well written of course, and showcases Kelman’s range and ability to inhabit a plethora of voices, but somewhere between the sheer number of pieces—most a page long—and Kelman’s infamous stubbornness concerning his writing (I know some of his past editors and they have stories) I lost all enjoyment in this book. It reads more like a clearing out of the hard drive than a coherent collection, a collage of fragments and exercises that might have grown into something but never did. More one for Scot Lit scholars than the casual reader, perhaps. Think I’ll go and re-read Greyhound for Breakfast or A Disaffection to rekindle my love of his prose.

Can you guess what’s up next on Books About Bands? We’re going to have Neil Poole, host of the Def Lep Pod on to talk about Animal Instinct, a book I first read when I was about 10 or 11. The episode will come out on June 1, so tune in. In the meantime our latest episode on Stephen Morris’s Record Play Pause and Joy Division is out now.