Musings

I am very excited to introduce a little Buffy’s rebrand! I loved the logo I made originally, but it just something I threw together haphazardly, and the wine glass began to feel a little irrelevant and I wanted something that was a little more polished. Pleased to introduce it alongside (one of) my latest hobbies… scanning book covers and making a collage on photoshop. Reliving my GSCE art skills here and thoroughly enjoying it. He new logo is going to be part of me making all of the output from Buffy’s more visually pleasing, and also more varied. Book covers offer endless design inspiration, and so I am sitting on a wealth of references.

The year has been off to a strong start with events, the January Book Club was held at Casetta in New York, and a big in store event with J Crew which I loved every second of. It was a celebration of independent book stores in New York, and I visited over 10 different stores to get their recommendations, which were available for people to take home on the night. Below is a list of all the titles available, it was such a great mix!

Aside from our book club picks, I have had a great start to my reading year! Here is where I am up to:

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

I really want to read more non-fiction and Patrick Radden Keefe is my go-to for this, as it reads like fiction. This book follows the Snakehead industry, mostly in Chinatown in downtown Manhattan. For those who don’t know (I did not), a Snakehead is a person at the top the chain of organising human smuggling, and this follows that chain predominantly from the Fujian Provence of China, to New York. It was fascinating, and reading it while I was in New York (I live on the edge of Chinatown) made it even more enthralling. I deeply recommend all of Radden Keefe’s books to anyone who finds non-fiction much harder to get into!

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

This book made me have a lovely moment of self reflection about how my reading has improved over recent years. I could recognise this as a book I would have loved about five years ago, which now read as one I thoroughly enjoyed but craved something more challenging. This saga follows twin brothers who are orphaned at birth, in a lifelong story that follows their upbringing at a hospital in Ethiopia to later life in New York. It did succeed in making me cry, and the characters were really enjoyable to read, there were moments when all of the central characters would be in the midst of some sort of domestic scene that genuinely made me feel warm inside. Verghese took me where I wanted to go, gave me space to love all characters, to dislike them when I was meant to and then feel sympathy for them after that. It’s an enjoyable, flowing, read - that despite it’s sadness would be the sort of book I would want to take on holiday. But, I am definitely honing in my tastes to knowing I want something with a little more… edge? Do you like how I claim I am honing in by backing that up with such a vague adjective… bare with me while I keep working this out!

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

I had high hopes for this because (and I don’t know where I got this idea from), I decided this was very much my sense of humour. Which it was… for a bit. Heller’s famous WW2 satirical novel makes a brilliant show of how futile war is, and does so with humour. There are a lot of characters, which I think was a good tool in the novel to show how many young men were putting their lives on the line, but did make it hard for me to keep up at points. There were some brilliant quirks in this, the character Major Major Major Major (named Major Major Major by his father as a joke, and then made a Major during the war) who only wants people to come and visit him in his office when he isn’t there, was a particular highlight. But overall it got a bit repetitive and could have been 50+ pages shorter. On a whole I do recommend it and I am so glad I finally got around to reading it, but it didn’t reach my (admittedly high) expectations.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

I ended up reading two books in month that exist in a liminal space between life and death (the second being Lincoln in the Bardo, more on that below), both of which were vert surreal, and yet very different. The story follows Juan Preciado, who is instructed by his mother on her death bed to go to Comala, to find his father, Pedro Páramo. I struggled with this at around the 40 page page (it’s a short book, so that’s around 1/4 of the way through) - the opening was very powerful, and I felt instantly gripped, and then through my own lack of understanding as to what was happening, what period of time I was in, who’s point of view I was in… I lost my way. I re-read a few pages, and then did my best to surrender to where this was taking me. It at times felt like being passed from one confusion to the other, but the story did slowly start to come together, in as much as I (think) it’s meant to! I did some reading around the book, and it really is considered a masterpiece by many, that made me appreciate even more what Rulfo was doing. I would like to re-read in a year or so maybe, and hope it’s a novel that I can engage with more and more as my own reading journey develops.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Good GRIEF this was long. My first foray into Dickens and I am either not equipped to read his work, or really started in the wrong place - perhaps both? Maybe I need to increase my ability of reading the Classics before revisiting his work? Something about the looooonnngggg sentences made my attention wander throughout this. That being said, I did enjoy it. I listened to it and thought the audiobook was great, and as its roughly 12 years long, I found listening to it so soothing as it had become a relatively consistent part of my day. Anyway I think you should go find a review from someone who had a better attention span about this book, and that person is not me, and I deeply feel as though I am not doing this justice.

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

This book came second place in our January book vote, and I am actually so glad it didn’t win. It’s a heavy read in terms of it’s content, following Betty and her seven siblings growing up in Ohio. There is a lot of trauma in Betty’s life; racism, sexual abuse, bullying, grief… the readers accompanies her witnessing and enduring some really harrowing scenes. Her safe space is her relationship with her father, a spiritual man becomes the town’s holistic doctor, who tries his best to give her confidence in her Cherokee heritage, and to give her hope that men can be good people. I found the scenes with her father very touching, and the landscape McDaniel paints around the house they grow up in and it’s gardens were so beautiful. But, I felt she almost entirely glossed over how Betty actually feels about anything that happens to her! It became increasingly frustrating as the bad things ramp up throughout the book with so little character development alongside it.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Oh I LOVED this weird little book. It was so much FUN. The first 30 pages I was honestly completely lost and was about to admit defeat and then I had my own wave of genius and decided to actually Google it and not give up or start scrolling through my phone instead. Huge personal growth and I believe I am now one step away from enlightenment. That aside, I watched this great interview with Saunders that really helped me digest the book. From then on, I was away! It found this so fun to visualise, his descriptions were just right for me - the perfect amount of information without being too descriptive, this dark and surreal world really started to take shape in my mind. There are definitely pages I skimmed where so mane characters suddenly appeared (but even the suddenness of that was brilliant), which I think you can get away with doing - it all adds to a general busyness in the book that creates the chaos of the Bardo. There were some beautiful moments of grief in the midst of this too, and I think Saunders balanced so many things very, very well.

Whenever someone asks me what I have read this year, unless the book is literally in my hand at that moment, I go absolutely blank. So reading tracking apps are essential for me - we have all discussed this a little on the chat, but I would love to know which you use and if you want to share your profile, please do in the comments!

I still automatically go to GoodReads but it really does feel as though it’s been designed on Paint, and am trying to use StoryGraph more but breaking the GoodReads habit is no easy task.

Here are my profiles: Goodreads, StoryGraph.

Another hugely important discussion we must not overlook is JIGSAWS. Jigsaws and AUDIOBOOKS to be specific. It is combination that is truly helping me switch off. I think people who love books and cats (me) and very much a jigsaw companies target market because a huge amount of them seem to be of an image that incorporates either books or cats, and often both. So I essentially feel a sense of belonging in the world of jigsaws. I can gladly say much more about them but I will instead pivot to the content you actually want; audiobooks. I asked on Instagram which ones you loved, and made a list of the answers:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Deborah Levy’s ‘trilogy’: Things I Don’t Want To Know, Cost of Living, Real Estate
The Martian by Andy Weir
Down the Drain by Julia Fox’s memoir (I have heard many good things about this!!)
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein
At Home by Bill Bryson
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (this was the most recommended!)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer (this is what I have started and it’s beautiful)
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
Dubliners by James Joyce
Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Mill on the Floss by A.S Byatt
Paula by Isabel Allende
Yellowface by R.F Kuang
Anthony Bourdain books
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
Room to Dream by David Lynch
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
David Sedaris books
The Bequest by Joanna Margaret
Awareness by Anthony do Mello
All Fours by Miranda July
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Summerwater by Sarah Moss
East of Eden by Steinbeck

Special mention to the Fitzcarraldo that cost me and arm and a leg but are worth it!

Thank you so much for reading and supporting me and Buffy’s! It would be nothing without you!!

Lizzy

xx