Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami

I had never heard of this actor/comic/writer before I read this memoir. But now I’ll be looking out for him! Throughout this story I kept checking how old I was and what I was doing in my life while all this was happening to this boy. It was shocking to compare my life, lived in comfortable ignorance, bringing up my kids, hanging out with friends, going on nice holidays, all that stuff, while this kid’s little brother was being blown up on the roof of their house. And that was only a sentence, a mere aside to Osamah’s story. I marvel that he survived Iran, and then I marvel again that he managed to make the life he has done for himself here in Australia. I marvel at his resilience, his honesty and his warmth. The memoir is shocking, sad, heart warming and hilarious. It’s written by a charming, intelligent, funny man, who has lived through things we can only imagine. So many adjectives describing this book! It’s a must read.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This is a sweet novel that reminded me a little of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This time the protagonist is not someone with autism. It’s told in the voice of a damaged human being, Eleanor, and tracks her progress as she begins to unpick her personal history and come to terms with what has happened to her and to heal herself. Satisfyingly, this is of course achieved through human connection and friendship. And just to keep things moving, there is a healthy and quite skillfully devised set of unexplained events that gradually unfold. I was genuinely surprised by the ending, which impresses me! I powered through this charming book in just two or three sittings.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

My dad gave me this book when I was about eight years old. I remember struggling to read it, and it did take me a couple of years before I managed it. Rereading now, I’m amazed that I managed it even then! It’s a fascinating insight not into India so much as into the attitudes of the British and colonists. Kipling is wordy and difficult for the modern day reader, used now to plainspeak and plot driven stories. The book itself doesn’t actually have much in the way of plot – the child is recruited by the British rulers as a messenger/spy in their battle to stop the Russians gaining a foothold in Afghanistan. He travels through India as a disciple to a Buddhist lama gathering and disseminating information along the way. The real joy of this book is the characterization, with wonderful rough diamond horse traders and eccentric lamas and bumbling yet somehow highly effective spy masters who can take on any disguise and speak any native dialect. It’s harder work than a modern novel, but a classic.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I’m not all that keen on long family sagas, spanning three or four generations. There’s never enough room for proper character development or any kind of thoughtful analysis or detail around the events that happen. There’s just too much to cram in so the whole thing degenerates into ‘and he did this and then she did that and a year later this happened and another five years later we’ve suddenly all moved on and something else has happened and all the kids have grown up in the meantime …’ But having said all that, I quite enjoyed this book because I knew nothing at all about Korean history or about their relationship with Japan. So this book charts the story of various generations of Koreans who were colonized by the Japanese, moved to Japan, lived through the war (which barely rates a mention in the book!), got involved in running pachinko (gambling) parlours and then all more or less died. The theme of the entire thing is the struggle Koreans had, and possibly still have, with the extreme racism of Japanese towards them, even if they have been born in Japan. So I found it worthwhile reading the book, even though I don’t think it was particularly well written.