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Fiction October 16, 2019

Book Review: Flying Home, Ralph Ellison

Fiction August 10, 2018

Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang

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    Charlene. A Londoner. About the book life. And other sorts of lives. And food. Runs this blog.

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    • First time doing a wrap up, October was a very productive month!  I was happy to be able to make time to read and post some reviews in the middle of life and renovating. Took an embarrassing amount of time to pick a white wall paint today. Favourite thing I read last month was A Stranger's Pose! 📚 Link in Bio for full Wrap Up. I included some links to articles I enjoyed.....Having fun playing around with Canva too 🎬 Even got a chance to go see The Last Tree, wrote a bit on that 🗓 Don't know what November will be like! I will be continuing Kehinde Andrews' Back to Black and have started Red At The Bone, hoping to continue posting some short reads too. Always been obsessed with magazines/quarterlies there are a few I will post on soon 🗓 What are your plans for November, books or otherwise? 📚 📚 #wrapup #thelasttree #bookblogger #ukbookblogger #canva #booknerd #londonblogger #bookreview
    • Unbelievably, I've been missing this little gem in Peckham Rye! Was excited to FINALLY drop by @bookspeckham ... got to pick up a few books, speak to the owner and just rummage through that beautiful collection of secondhand books. Enjoyed seeing stacks and stacks of vintage Penguin paperbacks and a lot of old titles I've never heard of. Made me want to start my own vintage collection. There were quite a few current titles too. Will definitely be back. 📚 Had a chat with Pete about how he got started, where he gets the books and some interesting clearances hes done. Even got a great book recommendation...Link in Bio for full Blog post! 📚 📚 It’s open today and Saturday 11 am- 6pm this week so drop by! Opening times posted weekly on Instagram: 125 Rye Ln, Peckham, London SE15 4ST 📚 📚 Have you been here? Where do you get your second hand books? 📚 📚 #southeastlondon #southlondon #ryelane #thingstodoinpeckham  #bookspeckham #peckham #SE15 #secondhandbookshop #secondhandbooks #thingstodoinlondon #indpendentbookshop #bookblogger #ukbookblogger #ukblogger #londonblogger #booknerd #booklover #booksaremybag
    • 'For those of us who had elsewhere in our blood, some foreign origin, we had richer colours and ancient callings to hear' 📚 Something in that phrase resonated and stayed with me, beauty in truth. 📚 For the most part though, the Jhalak prize winning author wasn’t going for pretty phrases. The story was raw, very alive, very of the time, it’s needed - there’s nothing else that I've read that captures that specific moment in time in London when there was a public nervousness about extremism and the radicalisation of young men. Gunaratne uses a friendship group of different ethnicities to highlight the commonalities of racism and working class struggles in our city. 📚 Although the London he vibrantly describes is very real, the exaggerated peppering of conversations with a million 'ennet's and 'nattans' sometimes gave the effect of watching caricatures. At times the dialect used seemed inconsistent with rest of a character’s style of speech or thought. I get what he was aiming to do, the protagonists are immediately recognisable as inner city Londoners. 📚 Inspired by the shocking murder of Lee Rigby in 2013, In Our Mad And Furious City follows three teenage boys over a 48 hour period after the murder of a British soldier by an indoctrinated young Muslim extremist. Selvon (yes, like Sam!), Ardan and Yusef are friends trying to find their way against a turbulent backdrop of riots and unease. There is an engaging tension that runs right from the start, Londoners who remember that period will be very familiar with this general unease. Gunaratne communicates it with urgency and honesty. Out of curiosity, I would definitely read what he writes next 📚Full review on blog, link in Bio!📚 📚 📚 #inourmadandfuriouscity #guygunaratne #tinderpress #londonlit #LDNlit #manbookerprize #manbookerprize2018 #manbookerlonglist #jhalakprize #dylanthomasprize #goldsmithsprize #ontheblog #bookreview #bookphotography #bookblogger #booksofig #unitedbookstagram #diasporalit #literaryfiction #ukbookblogger #ukblogger #britishwriters #londonliterature
    • It's easy to mark movements like The Great Migration down as a historical era to just 'be aware of'. Of late, I haven't read much about it. Last time I noticed it given much page space was in the latter half of Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing 📚 For me, through the 13 short stories in Flying Home, Ellison gives individual faces to the Black American experience during this era. As a body of work, the message is clear: we are all going through violent injustices but we are not a monolith. We are going through these atrocities but we still hang out at the bar, our kids still laugh- when you let them. We are still humans. We outchea. 📚 I liked most of it. Felt parts of it. Some stories were powerful in their display of innocence or frankness through criminally heartbreaking circumstances. Other stories, while still worthy in their own sense, did not pack the same punch. 📚 Ellison writes all the narratives with an even casual approach that powerfully suggests that they are all equally representative of the era- whether it's a white boy witnessing the public burning of a black man in the opening story- A Party Down At The Square or two black kids trying to teach chicks to fly- That I had Wings. 📚 The stories in Flying Home were written before The Invisible Man and posthumously published.⌚142 pages (plus intro) 📚 I haven't read The Invisible Man (dont come for me!) Have you? 📚 📚 #roughly200 #blackhistorymonth #ralphellison #penguin #wellreadblackgirl #bookcover #flyinghome #penguinmodernclassics #gordonparksphotography #theinvisibleman #bookreview #coverlove #booksofig #bookblogger #ukbookblogger #ukblogger #booknerd #shortbooks #shortstory #shortstories #quickread #goodreads
    • Do any of your books remind you of a particular song? 📚 I have absolutely no idea why but from the first page, this book made me think of Frank Ocean’s song White Ferrari 📚 📚 Unpretentiously lyrical, sometimes poetic, sometimes even funny, this travelogue/ memoir is a beautiful piece of work. Iduma mentioned in an interview I read somewhere that he was trying to connect his memory and imagination. I think he succeeds in doing exactly that, the result being pages and pages of thought in some sort of dream state. The idea of closing that gap between memory and imagination is fascinating to me because I think that's what nostalgia really is- a romanticised version of what we remember. There is an understated beauty and vulnerability about A Stranger's Pose, I would definitely recommend 📚 📚 Full review on blog, link in Bio! 📚 📚 📚 #roughly200 #cassavarepublic #astrangerspose #emmanueliduma #travelogue #africanlit #africanlit #africanwriters #nigerianwriters #bookworm #booksofig #wellreadblackgirl #ukblogger #ukbookblogger #blogger #ontheblog #bookreview #ondaatjeprize
    • Haven't had a chance to step out yet today but in celebration of National Bookshop Day, I've posted a quick blog profile on one of my favourite local indie bookshops, Chener Books. 📚 Love the classic look, it's always tempting to step in here after eating on Lordship Lane.  It's also one of the few bookshops I've been to with nothing but books..... no postcards, no tote bags, just the books! 📚 Actually did this profile ages ago and it's been sitting in by drafts for some reason 📚 Link in bio for the rest 📚 Do you have a favourite local? Or will any of them do? 📚 📚 #bookshopday #nationalbookshopday #chenerbooks #lordshiplane #eastdulwich #independentbookshop #bookblogger #ukblogger #bookstagram #indiebookshop #booknerd
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