Idea Smith > Recent Status Updates

“A great satisfaction in growing old - one of many - is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes.”

What a great book to start on the cusp of a new year as I sit with the reality of my mortality & ageing!

I continue to read in horrified fascination. Now I’ve learn to skip the overly indulgent metaphors, the pages turn quickly. This book makes Kerala sound like a toxic garbage dump.

I wonder if this book feels distasteful because I’m Indian and wince when white people fetishize yoga, basmati rice and haldi doodh but also do so in a shallow, plastic packaged way. Because that’s what this book does to Korean culture.

What a pointless chapter, all crushed peanut shells and incestuous voyeurism. At least it was short.

This chapter’s recipe is Spring Onion Pancake which sounds like a Korean version of Uthapa. This is my favorite part of reading about food (and my only reason to read this book) - that it shows hidden connections and parallels in human civilisations all over the world.

I read ‘A New Life’ which is about a young woman’s journey into adulthood set in the backdrop of Bengal’s first partition in 1947. A sweet coincidence as today is the anniversary of Bengal’s second partition in 1971 and the formation of Bangladesh.

Shallow, shallow, shallow white woman about exotic Asia.

The first chapter unpleasantly drips with meaningless metaphors. The second chapter offensively draws me in and leaves me a bit sickened. I can see why this won a Booker and that’s not to say I like it.

From a whimsical travelogue to a humorous ghost story to a partition tale, this is a really unusual collection of short fiction.

What a deceptively quiet book!

What a serendipitous selection!

I don’t know about the rest of the Pratchett-loving world by this lack of chaptering is really getting to me.