February Reads

A little late today as I'm in a different time zone.

Another book for the podcast, this one a suggestion of Jason’s. I didn’t know much about Lucinda Williams, so it was interesting to learn about her life and music. As always with these memoirs they are really aimed at fans, not newcomers, so a lot of it didn’t really land for me. For example, she spends a lot of time connecting the lyrics of some of her biggest songs to events in her life but since I was only hearing those songs for the first time, it wasn’t so much getting a glimpse behind the curtain as it would be for a fan. Still, it’s very well written and easy to read, and now that I’ve started to learn about her, I’m happy to continue the journey.

I bought this while travelling in Indonesia recently. I always try and pick up at least one book of local literature wherever I go, ideally a short story collection. It’s part of a series called Weird Girls which also features Kanehara Hitomi and Ogawa Yoko, so I was sold from the start. I can’t sum it up any better than the blurb:

These stories set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages—reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Melding horror, myth and fairytale, this is subversive feminist fiction at its best.

A new issue of Gutter is a thing to be celebrated and I inhaled this one. Great new work from old favourites like Shane Strachan and Jenni Fagan, a cracking story from a new writer, Murray McLean called “Heritage Speaker” (new to me but also new, his bio says this is his first published story, bloody good start), and a wonderful essay by Ali Millar.

I’m doing a presentation with a colleague on David Peace’s Patient X on March 14, so I’ve been rereading that alongside Katy Shaw’s excellent study of his work. Patient X is an odd, though good book, and my part in the presentation will look at how he attempts to replicate the authentic Japanese internal voice of a real person in fiction in English. An easy task, obviously. The things I say yes to…