What We're Reading
Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.
Bronte is watching A Young Doctor’s Notebook & Other Stories
A mini-series of just four episodes starring Don Draper and Harry Potter – sorry I mean Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe –
A Young Doctor’s Notebook & Other Stories
is a recent discovery.
The show is based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, a collection of short fictions largely based on his own experience as a new and inexperienced doctor in 1916 when he was sent on a rural assignment in the Russian countryside, thirty-two miles from the nearest electric lights. While the humour is ever-present – sometimes even slapstick – the overall tone is very Russian, featuring babies dead at childbirth in the snow and addiction.
Hamm plays the older, more experienced doctor looking back on Radcliffe as his younger, bumbling self and, in a playful take on reality, the two versions interact with each other. It’s a bit strange, but also refreshing, to see their imagined conversations play out on the screen. Both the leads take on their roles with gusto and watching the two actors shake themselves loose from my pre-conceived notions of them was a lot of fun. The gore factor is high in this show and watching it I endured the same excruciating discomfort as when watching the British version of The Office.
While you also might not think you ever needed to see Harry Potter amputate a leg with a blunt saw over several grating minutes – you too may be surprised by how satisfying the experience can be.
Annie is reading Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld
I was very excited when Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel came out this year –
and
are among two of my favourite books and I think she really ‘gets’ relationships between people and the insecurities that plague everyday life.
But reading the blurb on the back of Sisterland made me put it right back on the shelf. Psychic twins? Surely not! I left the book on the shelf until a friend convinced me to push ahead and I’m so glad I did. I read the whole thing in just one day and can now recommend it as a brilliant piece of work.
Sisterland refers to the name twins Kate and Violet gave their room when they were younger and closer than they are in the present. Told from Kate’s perspective, the story weaves between past and present and examines the girls’ relationship. Kate is the ‘sensible’ twin: she takes her widowed father shopping weekly, is married with two children and worries about her less stable sister Vi. Vi operates in a different world to Kate – she runs psychic workshops and when the book opens, predicts a major earthquake in their vicinity.
As Vi receives increasing TV and radio coverage based on her predictions and her work, Kate has to face the past, the dysfunctional family they grew up in, and all she has done to escape her sister and her past. Kate’s marriage is also put to the test – she is married to a straight scientific type who eschews the notion of psychic predictions, and she must balance this with her love and concern for her sister.
I don’t have siblings, but I recognised friends’ lives in the push and pull and sibling relationships. Sittenfeld (a mother herself since her last book was published) also writes eloquently on both the fugue and small joys of early motherhood. It’s a riveting well-written book and begging not to be put back on the shelf…
Belle is reading POLPO
I have been reading a cookbook this week – not to prepare a meal but for the tales of a different culture and the story of the cook himself – the kind of thing I’ve always found just as interesting as the recipes.
, which is the Italian word for octopus, is a very handsome book, with an interesting spine detail (I noticed it’s also practical, allowing the book to sit completely flat even when cooking from the middle of the book) and classic Roman-type fonts that set the mood for the Venetian recipes inside (I’m looking forward to the chicken cotoletta with the zuchinni, basil and parmesan salad, served after beverages that make you wish even harder for spring, like the Bellini).
Russell Norman is the chef, who first visited Venice as a student in the late 1980s, and fell in the love with the city. Restaurants in Venice have a mostly appalling reputation, I read, and it’s one that Norman notes is not entirely unjustified – that is except for the small wine-bars, the bàcaris, serving simple, snack-size portions of authentic Venetian food – it’s the same pared-back cooking that he serves in his restaurant in London, and shares with readers in my new favourite cookbook.
Entirely unrelated, I’ve also eagerly just begun Chloe Aridjis’s Asunder. It’s Aridjis’s second novel, and follows her debut, Book of Clouds. Asunder tells the story of Marie, a museum attendant at the National Gallery in London. In the opening chapters we learn that Marie’s grandfather, Ted, also a warder, slipped and fell just moments before reaching a woman who slashed one of the gallery’s masterpieces with a cleaver. I’m captivated already by the strange character of Marie, and Aridjis’s writing is precise and elegant. I’m anticipating the rise of something quietly sinister as I read on.