October Wrap Up: Books, TV Shows and Movies

Did I watch Squid Game? Yes, like the rest of the universe, I'm sure even our alien neighbours in Alpha Centauri sat down and binged the Netflix drama. Let me know in the comments whether you're the only human on earth not to have watched it!

I also talk about the books I read, the TV shows that got me through the month and whether or not Denis Villeneuve’s Dune lived up to my expectations or not as a book reader - click here to read my full Dune Book Review.

June Books

This month has basically been a marathon of short fiction, a final trudge through Dune and me discovering a new favourite book and a desire to read classics again. Oh and I read one of the most obscene books ever written!

Dune by Frank Herbert

I wrote a separate review for Dune as I felt like I had a lot to say, and I did. So TL;DR I liked it but I didn’t like it. It’s complicated and it depends on how you read it and from which POV. But if you fancy reading the full review then click here.

At The Sign Of The Cat And Racket (La maison du Chat-qui-pelote) by Honoré de Balzac

This month I decided to start tackling French author Balzac’s The Human Comedy (La Comédie Humaine) a collection of interlinked works which is made up of novels, novellas and essays set in during the Restoration period and July Monarchy. Balzac could be seen as a French Dickens, as both wrote about society and with a focus on realism. This novella follows a few characters who work at a small shop in Paris and the owner marries his daughters off to two very different men. The themes of money, happiness, status, faithfulness, art, and work run throughout. At some point when my French is up to scratch, I’ll probably try reading some of The Human Comedy in French so stay tuned for that (let’s hold me accountable please!)

Also, Balzac’s At The Sign Of The Cat And Racket has forced me to reconsider the genre of realism, and particularly whether I was wrong about Dickens! I have for many years refused to touch a Dickens novel after reading A Christmas Carol at school and finding it veritably boring. I even avoided reading Bleak House for my degree because I thought I knew that I would hate it (ended up reading Walden by Thoreau and despised that instead) but maybe I would have liked it! Maybe I need to reconsider Dickens, and that folks is something I never thought would happen!

Micromegas by Voltaire

More French lit, I think I often coincide my cinematic choices with my book choices as recently I started watching French films again and suddenly all I want to read is classic French Literature. It’s a bit strange but I’ll go with it (I’ll have to because I have ordered so many French Lit second-hand books recently). I read Candide for Uni last year and really enjoyed Voltaire’s wit and seeing that I was miles behind on my 75 books in a year challenge I thought to myself “why not read this tiny little book by a French author that you’ve read before”. So I did. Micromegas is a rather strange little thing, it is essentially Sci-Fi before Sci-Fi was a thing.

The short story follows a giant from a planet called Sirius as he journeys through the solar system, he meets another giant (though much smaller than Micromegas) on Saturn and they soon find themselves on Earth. For these giants, Human life is so small (literally) and they find our behaviour (waging wars) perplexing due to how insignificant we seem, as in comparison, humans are tiny, and live such short lives and have a much inferior intellect to them. Voltaire’s brand of satire is fantastic and I can’t wait to read more of his works.

Record of a Night Too Brief (蛇を踏む) by Hiromi Kawakami

I like abstract stories, I like bizarre and challenging stories. But I did not like any of the short stories in this volume. I also have in the past read Kawakami and enjoyed her prose, but this collection of three stories just didn’t do anything for me. I found them too strange and I was unable to connect with them on any level. All I can say is nevermind, you win some and you lose some. Will I continue to check out Kawakami’s work? Sure, I think she’s an interesting and talented writer, it’s just that these stories didn’t touch me.

A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

I have found a new author to consume wholeheartedly. Her prose is deliciously poetic, and the way she writes Sabine is so vivid and relatable but alarming and deplorable at the same time. I loved this novel and I feel like I need to get a physical copy (I read it on Libby) to underline all the moments of poeticism and to read it over and over again.

Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant

This Penguin Little Black Classics book contains four short stories set in 19th Century France was nothing particularly fantastic, just ok in my opinion. But for 80p you can’t really go wrong and I might read Maupassant’s most famous work Bel-Ami as a result.

Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'œil) by Georges Bataille

This is a book that will leave an impression on you. It’s interesting to analyse from a psychological angle but my goodness it is utterly depraved and probably the most f***ked up book I have ever read. All I’m prepared to say is that I can probably never look at eyes and eggs the same way again.

My Thoughts on Dune

Frank Herbert’s Dune is heralded as one of the greatest Sci-Fi novels ever written, its influence in the genre is absolutely undeniable, but, is it actually any good? Let’s find out.

Spoilers ahead so proceed with caution if you haven’t read the book!

Dune is a mammoth of a novel and granted there is a lot that happens but I found it to be quite boring in places. I loved the beginning of the novel with the political intrigue, the foreshadowing and the imminent danger that Leto was caught up in. I also enjoyed Yueh’s internal struggle about his betrayal and his role in the assassination of Leto. The Bene Gesserit were fascinating and the litany against fear is something I will take from this book and use in my life, as I feel like the line ‘fear is the mind killer’ can be a powerful mantra for anyone in a time of anxiety or difficulty (Hello 2020 I’m looking at you).

So what was boring? Well the Villain, I didn’t really want to read about him and delve into his thoughts. The Baron was rather one dimensional and his paedophilic obsession with young boys was vomit-inducing. I also found that the novel was just a bit too long, if some of the desert roaming stuff had been condensed then I would have enjoyed the novel a lot more than I actually did. I also found flicking between the story and the glossary to understand all the invented terms rather irritating as it instantly removes you from the narrative and reminds me of reading ye olde classics for English literature at uni!

Another thing is the question of whether Dune is problematic or not. You have a white saviour narrative, the uncanny references to Iraq (I mean the name of the planet is Arrakis, it’s too similar to be a coincidence) and Arabic culture and history. The spice Melange as a metaphor for the oil crisis, the list goes on. What was Herbert doing, as a White American Man, should he have been allowed to play with a whole culture’s history and use it for a novel? On the flipside, Paul can be seen as a villain, if you read the novel as a treatise on the dangers of colonialism and the violence of white supremacy it becomes something else entirely. Maybe this is what Herbert was trying to craft, a politically woke novel. One can hope. And actually, Quinn’s Ideas (go follow him if you’re a Sci-fi nerd his videos are brilliant!) on Youtube makes the perfect case for this:

The novel can also be read from an ecological angle, the world of Arrakis is a delicate and balanced ecosystem. Water is precious and the sandworms are revered as gods. But, a disturbance in this balance would be catastrophic, just like global warming is going to and has already caused immense harm to Earth. There are a few lines that stand out to me on this subject…

"The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis," his father said. "You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.”

I feel like this is exactly the sentiment that needs to be adopted by society before it’s too late!

Back to my overall thoughts on Dune, I’m still harbouring mixed feelings but I like how much there is to analyse, and this review is only hitting the surface. I am still excited for Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation as I know he will take the best of the novel and make it pop on screen, and I’m pretty confident that Timothée Chalamet has the skill to play Paul as a complex and morally ambiguous character. But is Dune the greatest Sci-Fi novel ever written? It depends who you ask…

Space Bunnies Book Club - April & May - Dune

Me and my sister Charlotte have decided to launch a new book club. It’s called Space Bunnies and will be a Science Fiction and Fantasy orientated Book Club

Our first book club read will be Dune by Frank Herbert. I chose Dune this month because it’s been on my bookshelf for years and all those Dune images for Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation have finally made me grab it off the shelf!!!! Dune was also part of my Quarantine Reading List.

As we are already half way through April and this book is kind of massive we will be reading it until the end of May.

Feel free to join the club on any of these platforms:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

We look forward to you joining the club!

So all thats left to do is buckle up and get ready to head to Arrakis!

My Quarantine Reading List

These are all the books I’m going to be reading while in Quarantine, some for Uni but many others for the sheer pleasure of reading seeing as I have much more time to do both.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영) by Cho Nam-joo

Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 became a sensation in Korea when published with it becoming the first million-selling Korean novel since 2009’s Please Look After Mom. It follows Kim Jiyoung as she navigates the trials and tribulations of being a female in a mostly misogynistic world. The book also recently got a film adaptation starring Train to Busan’s Gong Yoo and Jung Yu-mi, which I’m looking forward to watching if and when we get it in the UK.

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

A Uni book, but the book I have been looking forward to the most this year as I have already read Invisible Cities by Calvino which I loved. The Complete Cosmicomics collects all of the Cosmicomic short stories together in one volume; they are bonkers, comically absurd and totally wacky tales of science, family and politics set in space.

Dune by Frank Herbert

A Sci-fi classic that influenced many that wrote after him, Herbert’s Dune has been on my bookshelf for ages, but I will finally get into it while I’m stuck at home for the foreseeable future as I really need to escape reality and be transported to a far off land right now (like most of you too). Also, Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation starring Timothée Chalamet is coming out later this year, so that’s another reason to read it.

Pride and Prejudice & Persuasion by Jane Austen

Two more Uni reads, but everyone loves Austen, and I can’t wait to delve into her world, I’ve seen many a film adaptation of her works such as Autumn De Wilde’s recent lavish and stylish Emma. but I am yet to read her novels! Yes, I am fully aware that it is a literary crime to have got to 26 as a self-proclaimed book worm and to have never read a single Jane Austen novel. Thankfully Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion will put an end to that, and then I really want to read Emma (as I loved the aforementioned movie), and then I’ll probably end up reading the rest of her books.

The Uncanny & Other Essays by Sigmund Freud

I’ve always been fascinated by Freud and his theories, and in my Modern Lit course for Uni he is kind of required reading if you want to get a look into the socio-historical context of modern and post-modern lit. I also read Civilization and Its Discontents recently, and I found that rather interesting and helpful for an essay on Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. The Uncanny can also be applied to many other periods and genres of literature, especially the Gothic, which is a genre I absolutely love.

Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Another uni read, although this one didn’t manage to find itself in the stack of books for the post picture as I have misplaced it in the frightful mess that is my bedroom. But I am really excited to read this book as it’s another piece of translated fiction, and it will be the first translated from Arabic that I will read. Seasons of Migration to the North is the story of how colonialism and orientalism can be extremely destructive to a society as a whole and to the individual’s within it. Being set in Sudan also means that the novel explores the interconnectedness of African and Arabic cultures within the country.

The Three-Body Problem (三体) by Liu Cixin

Liu is China’s master of Hard Science Fiction, I’ve read most of his short story collection The Wandering Earth (the title story is also a Netflix movie!), so I want to get started on his critically acclaimed Remembrance of Earth’s Past (地球往事) Trilogy ASAP. I also have a signed copy of The Supernova Era that I got at Forbidden Planet right after it came out in October last year with all intentions of reading it immediately. Alas, it is still waiting on my bookshelf, perhaps I’ll read that one too…it really depends on how long this Quarantine thing is going to go on for!

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Another Uni book, but again it’s one I’m interested in as I read Weight (a retelling of the myth of Atlas) when I was a kid and enjoyed it, so I’m intrigued to read something else by Wintersonson. Also, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman (anyone else just love this word?) aka a coming-of-age novel about a young lesbian growing up in a Pentecostal Community.

The City of Words by Alberto Manguel

Uni required reading. There is a quote somewhere in this work that will be the subject of an essay I have to write so I feel like I should read the whole (or most of) this book to get the gist of the subject and maybe find more parts to quote from. The City of Words was originally a lecture that was turned into a book.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I recently read Between the Acts for Uni, and I am rather intrigued by Woolf’s writing style, which is famously challenging due to her use of stream of consciousness. Also while studying another text, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters it was claimed that Montagu was part of the inspiration of the main character in Orlando, which is cool and the other part being Woolf’s female lover Vita Sackville-West. Orlando has also been described as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’ by Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicholson, which sounds absolutely romantic.

I clearly have a lot of reading ahead of me, and I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this eclectic mix of books, reading may just be the only thing to keep me sane in these coming weeks of Quarantine.

Let me know in the comments what books you’ll be reading during Quarantine and whether you have read any of these books.