Quarantine Reading Recommendations

As promised here are the books I recommend you read to pass the time while we are in Quarantine. Fiction is a great distraction so I hope you can delve into these books to escape reality for a short while.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

To quote myself last year in my review of the book is perhaps the best way to recommend it to you now as I don’t think I can improve upon my summary:

‘Invisible Cities is not just a novel by any means. It’s a poetic study of the human experience. Framed by a conversation between the famed Venetian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Invisible Cities explores 55 different cities that may or may not be imaginary or in the very least a description of Polo’s hometown Venice.’

READ THIS BOOK! It has become one of my favourites and I am currently reading Cosmicomics by Calvino and I feel like that will also become a favourite.

Anything (by this I mean any of his books) by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is a genius, in my opinion, I love how he writes and I love what he writes about. I’m still relatively new to his works as I started reading him in late 2016, and to be honest, I have only read four of his books (and countless short stories). But, I am nearing the end of my degree - literally in a few weeks so I feel like I can fully delve into his work and slowly work my way through it.

My recommendations based on what I’ve read of him so far is Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart.

The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher by Ahn Do-hyung

An uplifting story of a Salmon who was unlike his fellow Salmons thanks to his silver scales, he learns to defy expectations and keep working hard to pursue a dream. This is a poetic fable that will warm your heart and inspire you to look deep within and question what you want out of life.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

To continue the theme of heartwarming reads that cause you to have a profound moment of introspection is one of my favourite recent reads (It was the last book I read in 2019). Before the Coffee Gets Cold takes the concept of time travel and turns it into a lesson on how to cherish each moment and that you should always appreciate what you have while you have it! THis book isn’t in the pile as I lent it to my sister so that she could have something healing to read in this time (I also gave her some of Haemin Sunim’s beautiful little books of wisdom too).

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

A beautiful love story that will take you back to a safer time, one summer in Italy when Elio and Oliver fall in love. I love the movie and I love this book, I feel like I may have to re-read (and re-watch) it this summer. And I also want to read the follow up Find Me as soon as it’s published in Paperback.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

With the BBC adaptation imminent I keep wanting to revisit this book. I love Rooney’s writing and I feel like this whole quarantine situation has made me want to read about love stories. Either I’m compensating for the extreme lack of romance in my life or I am trying to expel the heavy emotions that this time is putting on us all. I can’t decide what it is…maybe it’s both (insert cry emoji)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

If you're not feeling too fragile this book is a masterpiece I was going to try and write about it for my final essay at Uni but they cancelled it (cries, both tears of sorrow and tears of joy). The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye from the point of view of three different people: Her husband, Her brother-in-law and Her sister. Its complex and beautiful and is one of the best novels I have ever read! I also have a second-hand copy I managed to get on eBay that is in Korean so with all the spare time I’ve got at the moment I am going to work towards reading it in Korean!

I love it when art inspires art, and for Kang, a line of poetry by Lee Sang inspired her story.

나는 인간만은 식물이어야 한다고 생각한다,

I believe Humans should be plants.

What a strange and interesting sentiment. Perhaps we should at the very least look to plants for inspiration. They work within their ecosystems to keep a balance in nature and support other living things around them.

Best Films and TV Shows of 2019

It’s that time of year again, this is my list of the best of all the movies and tv shows I watched in 2019.

Films

All the films I am listing have had their wide release in the UK in 2019, so films like Burning which was released in Korea in 2018 still counts for 2019

Joker

Joker may have been the most buzzed-about film of 2019, well besides Avengers: Endgame that is. It’s the compelling proposition of Joaquin Phoenix as Joker that put the film on my radar when it was first announced.

A bleak and unforgiving look at how society and mental illness can warp a man. This is the darkest incarnation of the iconic Batman villain yet. Of course Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t surprise with his unflinching portrayal as a man at rock bottom. The film also rejuvenated my faith in DC as the Justice League Movie was underwhelming and while Aquaman was fun I do like a dark brooding superhero story. So this feels like a hark back to the Nolan trilogy in the best way possible.

Burning

A Korean film based on a Haruki Murakami short story. A winning combination if you ask me and if you add into the mix Director Lee Chang-dong and actors Yoo Ah-in and Steven Yeun, then you have one of the best thrillers in recent memory. It’s a poetically shot film with a powerful underlying sense of dread that builds and builds until it all comes to a crescendo at the end. I reviewed the film back at the beginning of last year so have a read if you want a full unpacking of my thoughts on the film here.

Midsommar

This film is more than just a film it’s an experience, a WTF am I watching experience that just keeps giving you weirdness after weirdness. It’s also one of the best experiences I’ve ever had watching a film at the cinema as the audience was audibly cringing and gasping together at the craziest parts of the film. My sister kept leaning over and whispering in my ear ‘what are you making me watch?’, well dear only one of the best movies of the year!

Ad Astra

James Grey’s Ad Astra is a slow study on loneliness and emotional wounds that is beautifully complemented by a symbolic journey into the furthest parts of our galaxy. Existential and awe-inspiring, Ad Astra also feels so thoroughly human and personal. Family is at the heart of the film which challenges the audience to take a closer look at what is just in front of them rather than miles and miles away.

Exit

Thanks to the London East Asia Film Festival, I won tickets to the European premiere to see this rather hilarious and smart film from Korea. Exit is a disaster action-comedy, yes that is a thing, and yes this film balances all of these genres tremendously well. The film follows Yong-nam a talented but unemployed rock climber as he tries to save his whole family and his crush from a deadly gas that has been unleashed in downtown Seoul.

Knives Out

Funny, clever and thoroughly entertaining. Knives Out is an all-star comedy whodunnit in the style of Agatha Christie but for the modern age. Ana de Armas stole the film as Marta a nurse caught up in the mystery, and Chris Evan’s first post-Captain America role as Ranson the spoiled playboy of the family was a refreshing and thoroughly un-typecasted role for the actor. Twists and turns abound and no more can be said so go watch it!

TV Shows

Watchmen

HBO’s Watchmen is a fresh and compelling entry in the myriad of superhero centric stories out there at the moment. Rather than be a retelling of the graphic novel, the Watchmen series is its own thing with a storyline that centres around race rather than the cold war. Regina King as Angela Abar/Sister Night is one of the best black female characters I have ever seen on TV. I also think the show was absolutely fantastic, exciting and kept you guessing and in wonder, as the plot twists unfolded.

The Witcher

While Game of Thrones was epic, brilliant, groundbreaking TV it lost its way towards the end due to rather strange creative ideas regarding the plotting of events and the most lacklustre ending of Bran being the one to claim the iron throne. But not to fear Netflix swoops in with the exact remedy we all were seeking, an exciting new fantasy series in the form of The Witcher. This series is so much fun, Henry Cavill is amazing in the role of Geralt of Rivia, not just because he is mind-blowingly handsome but because he inhabits the role so convincingly. Also, the crisscrossing timelines create an interesting jigsaw puzzle of events that you have to slot together to make sense of the story which makes for an enjoyable watch. Love it: the humour, the cinematography, the world-building, the character development, everything.

Chocolate

Heartwarming, tragic, life-affirming are a few ways to describe the Korean language drama Chocolate. The drama follows Lee Kang and Moon Cha-young, a neurosurgeon and a chef as they fall in love while working at a hospice together. They have a complex history that adds another layer of intensity to the story, but the magic of the show is in the way everyone’s lives at the hospice intersect and everyone ends up teaching each other a valuable lesson about life, from the patients with limited time to the cold Lee Kang who softens over time. And at the heart of the show is food, the characters eat according to feelings and elevate food to more than just sustenance, its a way of bonding, of remembrance and of recovery. I wept my eyes out at most episodes because the story touched my heart so much and it became a cathartic and heartwarming moment each week for me, and the soundtrack is beautiful and it’s the only one I’ve listened to on repeat since One Spring Day and Something in the Rain. I will hands down say that this is one of my favourite Korean dramas to date, and I have watched an awful lot of them so that definitely says something about this one.

March and April Books

Oh it has been a rather busy two months, I am nearing the end of my second year of university and the pressure is mounting up. I feel like Atlas crumpled under the weight of the world, oh what i would do just to release the tension for a short while. Alas I only have until the second week of June and then I am free for the rest of summer! I can do this!!

here are my March and April reads

Conversations With Friends - Sally Rooney

I made it my mission to finish the last chunk of this book off as soon as possible, which I achieved which then gave me some time to read a million and one poems for uni (I exaggerate, which should be no surprise, a million and one…no university could be that cruel). I enjoyed the book but I think it wasn’t as good as Normal People, which is to be expected really as in anything people get better as they gain experience, and seeing as Conversations with Friends was Rooney’s debut novel, it would be weird if it was better than Normal People.

The Strange Library - Haruki Murakami

Murakami is my ride or die author, when I want to read something I know I’ll love it always has to be one of his books, and because I was feeling rather bored with all the texts I was having to read for uni I took a short respite in the pages of a Murakami. The Strange Library is a very short book (can’t be spending too much time away from studies now can we!) and the edition I have is beautifully designed with a plethora images that make this book a whole experience to read.

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

This book is a succession of snapshots of immigrant life in London during the 20th Century and it’s written in a Caribbean dialect to reflect the characters the book focuses on. And while I can appreciate the innovations Selvon makes I found it rather boring, and the constant flitting between characters was rather jarring for me personally. I had to read this book for uni and I think its safe to say I won’t be reading it again and I probably wont check out Selvon’s other works either.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities is not just a novel by any means. It’s a poetic study of the human experience. Framed by a conversation between the famed Venetian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Invisible Cities explores 55 different cities that may or may not be imaginary or in the very least a description of Polo’s hometown Venice. This novel isn’t for everyone, and at first it wasn’t even for me as it had remained on my bookshelf for about 3 years prior to me picking up again this April! But as I’m in the midst of a creative writing module for my degree I decided to give it another go and I loved it. If you want to read abstract literature that doubles up as a masterclass in description writing then get reading.

The Dubliners - James Joyce - A Solid 85% of the book!

Bleak, haunting and unrelenting The Dubliners is a collection of short stories that follows the disenchanted inhabitants of the Irish capital at the beginning of the 20th century. Another uni book but unlike most of the texts I’ve had to read this year I actually really like The Dubliners, and the stand out story for me has to be A Painful Case which I actually wrote and essay about (simply because I liked it the most and somehow my tenuous link to the essay subject paid off). I haven’t quite finished all of the short stories as I have had to write my own short story for uni this month which has taken a little longer than I thought it would (I had to do quite a lot of research for it!).

Books I Haven't Finished (Yet!)

I love reading, it is one of my favourite things to do, but sometimes life gets in the way. So here is a collection of books that I have started reading but am yet to finish.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

I started reading this book years ago, and I mean years. There is photographic evidence of me reading the book on one of our family holidays to Greece, when I was 10! So that was way back in 2003! I think I got up to something like chapter 11 or 12 and then I just stopped, I lost where I was in the book and the next time I picked it up I just couldn’t remember what had happened in the story. 15 years later I still haven’t read the book. Will I read it someday? No, I’ll just get Stephen Fry to read it to me on audible.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Quite often I have a love hate relationship with classics, their language is beautiful but archaic, they are problematic in their depictions of Women, other ethnicities and social issues when read from a modern point of view. And so on. But Dorian Gray, I really wanted to love it, and maybe I just attempted to read it at the wrong time, but I found it, dare I say…boring.

1Q84 part 1&2

I love Murakami, I love what I’ve read of 1Q84 so far, but I started reading the book at a really stupid time, just before I started my French module in Uni. That year came and went so quickly and I then had to start reading what has felt like 1 million books for this years studies and as such 1Q84 has sat patiently on the shelf, same for Killing Commendatore too. I promise I’ll get to you two this summer!

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

I received a ebook copy of this book before it was published, I read some of it, but for a reason I can’t remember I stopped reading it. This book has since been so hyped that I’m kind of curious to get back into it and finish the story as I did get quite a way into the narrative.

A Discovery of Witches

Having watched the Sky TV Series based on this book I naturally bought it immediately and started reading it, however it is a rather large book and there have been several novels that I have had to prioritise reading as they are in my course and most likely in my exam in June. So I will have to rediscover A Discovery of Witches this summer.

Le Petit Prince

I set myself the goal of reading a French book in its entirety last year, I failed but I did get quite a ways into Le Petit Prince which is probably the most famous French book from the 20th century. I will dive back into it as I still want to achieve this goal, and hopefully it will also help improve my french so that I can start reading more complex french novels!

So that’s all the books that I started reading and haven’t quite got round to finishing. I wonder how many of these I can get finished this year, shall I aim to get them all read in 2019? Let me know in the comments section what you think!

Korean Cinema – 버닝 (Burning) Review

Burning is a taut and thrilling adaptation of one of Murakami’s most intriguing short stories, Barn Burning.

Of course Burning is not a literal retelling of Murakami’s story, it has been tweaked and reworked seeing as it is only a 20 page story and the film is over 2 hours long. These tweaks work so well and contribute to a study of Korean society that feels raw and rather brutal. It’s a classic example of class division, of the psychological harm that jealousy incurs and perhaps obsession.

Burning follows a young man called Jong-su, he works several part time jobs in a struggle to survive in Seoul, one day he meets Hae-mi, an old acquaintance from his hometown and they start seeing each other. Hae-mi goes travelling to Africa and asks Jong-su to look after her cat even though he has just moved back to his family farm in Paju. Jong-su performs his task diligently without ever encountering the cat. When Hae-mi returns from Africa she is accompanied by Ben a young successful man. And thus the tension begins between the two males.

Having Jong-su and Hae-mi come from simple means the sudden appearance of Ben a metropolitan man who drives a Porsche and lives in Gangnam is rather jarring and as an audience we never warm to his character. And he only gets more and more suspicious in his smugness and rather disturbing collection in his bathroom and the revelation that he likes to burn greenhouses. Abandoned greenhouses that take less than 10 minutes to completely disappear. At this point you start to think that he is just a rich boy on a power trip, later however when Hae-mi goes missing it becomes apparent that burning greenhouses is just a metaphor for something far more nefarious…or is it?

That’s the best thing about Lee’s direction, we are never really told anything concrete. Can we completely trust Jong-su, is he not just completely overcome with jealousy, Ben seems to have everything, success, fast cars, a beautiful apartment and a loving family. Is Jong-su imagining the scenario or is Ben really a psychopathic murderer of Women?

It’s a shame that Burning didn’t make it into the nominations for best foreign film for the Academy Awards this year as this is a masterfully conducted thriller. The acting especially by Yoo Ah-in and Steven Yeun is electrifying, they fit so well into their respective roles. The soundtrack heightens tension terrifically and the cinematography feels at moments whimsical and then all of a sudden concise and rigid.

Let me know in the comments section what you thought of the film.