Tag: Comment

  • 2017 Favourites

    2017 Favourites

    By some miracle, this year I have managed to read 60 books (I’m on my 60th as we speak and am gunning to get it finished before the New Year). I’m both impressed but not surprised that I managed 60 books this year. While I wrote a dissertation, graduated from university, started working and edited a newspaper at various points throughout the year, I also travelled for four weeks, had surgery and spent a large portion of time horizontal – I think they all balanced each other out. Rather than going through the entire list, this blog just highlights a few of my favourite reads from 2017.

    Favourite Non-Fiction

    In cased you missed it, Animal by Sara Pascoe was my favourite non-fiction read of the year. It’s funny, informative, heartfelt, dark and full of discussions of female sexuality. Can’t recommend it enough. I run through all my 2017 non-fiction reads in my last blog.

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    Favourite Classic

    I read Lolita this year and despite all its disturbing subject matter, it was a really beautiful book. I can’t pick it as my favourite though because that will only trigger yet another existential crisis about the difference between art and artist (of which 2017 has caused MANY). So with that in mind I’m going to pick Don Casmurro, which I read in Brazil, where the book is set and the writer, Machado de Assis, is from. I wasn’t really paying attention when I started reading it and it caught me off guard. One minute I was just having a read and the next I was totally transformed and hooked and weighed down by futility of the human condition (uhoh, another existential crisis is looming). I don’t have much experience with jealousy, but this book made me feel it in a really powerful way.

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    Favourite Play

    I’ve read a fair old amount of plays this year, both for my degree at the beginning of the year and for fun at the end. While Fleabag, the Vagina Monologues, and Tigerish Waters all blew me away with their own unique style, nothing has inspired me more this year than David Ive’s Venus in Fur. I was introduced to the book, play and film by a class and a brilliant lecturer. I wrote an assignment on it, which I did well in, only increasing my infatuation. Then, once I was freelance writer, Natalie Dormer only went and starred in the damn thing and I reviewed it at work. So not only do I have a lot of professional and academic interest in this play, I bloody love the thing too. I’m not sure my year would have been the same without it.

    Favourite Sci-Fi

    Ooh this is so hard to pick because I loved vN so much, and loved writing about it even more, but for the second year running I’m going to have to give it to Chris Beckett. The final instalment of the Dark Eden series, Daughter of Eden, is the only book this year to literally make my jaw drop. Seriously, whether you’re into sci-fi or not, I cannot recommend this series enough.

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    Favourite Contemporary Novel

    This one goes to the most transformative novel I read this year, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This books picks you up and takes you from country to country, city to city, articulates a diaspora I may never myself experience and compels understanding. I’ve got some Adiche on the TBR shelf and I can’t wait to get stuck in.

    Favourite Comedy

    This one goes to the play that made me choke with laughter in bed – Fleabag. I wasn’t sure the humour would hit me given I’d already seen the BBC series, but nope, it got me good.

    Favourite Children’s Book

    I’ve re-read some of the Potter books this year but I’m excluding them from this… which leaves me with one children’s book. Good job I loved it. The Journey to River Sea was as enchanting as everyone said it was. A real adventure story in an already adventurous environment.

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    Favourite Mixed-Genre Book

    The formidable Tigerish Waters by Sophie Reilly. You can read my review here, and I hope you will buy a copy and read it yourself, it is astounding.

    Favourite Self-Published Book

    Does it count that I read my own book again this year if it’s limited circulation of self-publication is to me and me alone? Didn’t think so. In which case it goes to Richard Hopkin’s The Cincinnati Tin Trunk – a historical treasure hunt across America and Europe.

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    Favourite Book in French

    Despite having read Rebecca in French this year and my favourite Annie Ernaux, I’m going to give this category to the Harry Potter books I’ve read in French this year. It has been nothing but a delight having an already loved world transformed into another loved world and language.

    I do have a problem here though, the edition I’ve been reading seems to have been discontinued, meaning if I want to read them quickly I’m either going to have a mix matched collection or to pay waaay more than I can afford. Bookish people, help, what do I do in this situation?

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    Hilary’s Favourite Novel of 2017

    Last but not least is Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek. I love Rebecca so I was ready to love this one, but I got so much more than I bargained for. I just feel that the book was ahead of its time in lots of ways which made an already compelling book a delight to read. I wish I’d known about it a year ago, it could have been a really interesting addition to my dissertation.

    For full pictures of my 2017 reads head over to my Instagram: FictitiouslyHilary. 

     

     

  • Review: The Cincinnati Tin Trunk – Richard Hopkins

    Review: The Cincinnati Tin Trunk – Richard Hopkins

    Those who have been around for the long haul might remember that in my 2016 Favourites I mentioned the first book written and published by my friend Richard Hopkins – Interleaving. It’s now my pleasure to let you know that the second book in what is going to be a trilogy is out now!

    “Readers are taken on a historical treasure hunt”

    It’s always nice to be able to give a friend’s projects some airtime, and it’s even nicer when I really enjoyed the book. The Cincinnati Tin Trunk is like Interleaving in many ways, and totally different in others. I’ve talked before about how my relationship with historical fiction has been a bit rocky, but Richard’s books are a really great way to ease yourself into history – by literally immersing yourself in the past. Inspired by the life and work of a real nineteenth century Dutch photographic Assistant, Nicolaas Henneman, the novel follows the journey of one twenty-first century historian’s physical, literary and photographic quest to learn more. Together with Tom, his wife Libby and adult daughters, readers are taken on a historical treasure hunt across the US, Holland, France, the UK and back again.

    Both a product of its time (2016 – yikes!) and a captivating exploration of early photography, nineteenth century life and migration The Cincinnati Tin Trunk can’t help but take you on a walking tour of Henneman’s life. Like Interleaving Richard drops you into London, both then and now, and guides you around the places that you might otherwise not have noticed. The book is both a form of escapism and a reminder that every story have many sides, some of which still need to be uncovered.

    Despite the fact that the characters are all new in this second instalment of the trilogy, it does what all good middle trilogy books do – it leaves you pondering about the third. Once again the profits from the book are going towards charities that help homeless people in London. Both Interleaving and The Cincinnati Tin Trunk are available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format, so check them out if you’re interested!

    The book I reviewed last week (Tigerish Waters)  is also giving its profits to charity – Christmas presents with a side of social justice anyone?   

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  • Is Fertility Awareness a Teched-up Disguise of the Rhythm Method? #Periodically 16

    Is Fertility Awareness a Teched-up Disguise of the Rhythm Method? #Periodically 16

    I first heard the phrase “Rhythm Method” in a Religious Education class at my all-girls catholic high school. It was discussed alongside actual birth control methods like the pill and condoms, and I detected a tone of skepticism in the voice of my teacher. I have a vague memory of dropping the phrase at home one day and my dad going on a “it doesn’t work” rant, which ended, as I recall, with him threatening to demonstrate something involving a banana and a condom…

    So off I pottered on with my life, knowing that the Rhythm Method, which involves using the dates of your previous cycle to forecast the fertile and infertile days of the next, was an unreliable load of rubbish.

    Then something happened. I read an article by Holly Grigg-Spall that talked of Daysy and the Fertility Awareness Method. A year or so later the Natural Cycles phenomenon began. When I first heard about it my family and I agreed that it was the Rhythm Method in disguise, teched-up and glorified anew – it was a dangerous response to the sudden rejection of hormonal contraception that was going to end in a lot of unwanted pregnancies.

    That is until I learnt how the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) was different from the Rhythm Method. While the Rhythm Method looks retrospectively at past cycle dates, FAM looks for markers of fertility within your current cycle. Tracking Basal Body Temperature (BBT) can flag up the temperature increase that occurs around ovulation. There are other markers too. Getting very familiar with your cervical fluid can be a huge indicator of fertility, testing your urine for luteinizing hormone (LH) even more so.

    I remain very nervous about how FAM is being depicted as this completed project. “Here it is, go forth and only multiply if you want to,” has been the attitude. I think it is still early days and that FAM should be treated as a step in the right direction, not a finite solution to a huge problem. So far in my own experience with FAM I’ve found that I’m less likely to take my BBT reading at the correct time than I was to take the pill on time. It is still super at risk of human error. This is before you consider the fact it can take around six years for a menstrual cycle to get, well, cyclical after menarche and without considering health conditions that can morph FAM data.

    Now a leaked memo from the White House suggests that as effective teen-pregnancy prevention programs (contraception) are being subsidised, abstinence based, sex risk and Fertility Awareness methods are being suggested as alternatives. I think that a big part of what the White House, and supporters of FAM within the Catholic Church, have got wrong, is that the sudden focus on FAM and the recent turn away from hormonal contraceptives is not because we are worried about our consciouses, souls or honour – it’s about wanting more. We want to choose when and if we do or do not have children and we want that choice to be free from the life-changing side-affects that often come with mainstream methods of hormonal birth control. FAM is still birth control. Those using it to avoid pregnancy are still looking for a contraceptive, they are simply asking for more. Having observed the changes in my own body when I was on and off of the pill(s), I am now acutely aware of how my body changes throughout my cycle. If that can stop me getting pregnant (if I could have sex, that is LOL) then of course I’m going to exploit that.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: knowledge of self is powerful.

    This week I attended the opening of Period Piece at the Science Gallery in London. It’s on over the weekend too if you want to check it out, but it was a excellent platform for talking about why Femtech is changing things by using old ideas in new ways. Period Piece is a multi-media art piece that incorporates biometric data, like BBT, while touching upon political and religious events, like the papal ban on the pill in 1968.