I’ve been volunteering at my local library twice a week since the start of the month, shelving and picking books off the shelves to fulfill reservations. Every time I’m there I spot more titles to add to my online wish list. It’s been a convenient excuse to return and pick up books, including book group sets. I was first in the queue for some brand-new releases this month.

Have you been able to borrow more books lately? Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (which runs on the last Monday of every month), or tag me on Twitter and/or Instagram (@bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout).

READ

• Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
• Addition by Toni Jordan [book club choice]
• Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (reviewed below)

SKIMMED

• Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town by Lamorna Ash
• The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals by Patrick Barkham
• Water Ways: A Thousand Miles along Britain’s Canals by Jasper Winn

CURRENTLY READING

• Close to Where the Heart Gives Out: A Year in the Life of an Orkney Doctor by Malcolm Alexander
• A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne
• Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
• Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

CURRENTLY SKIMMING

• Can You Hear Me? A Paramedic’s Encounters with Life and Death by Jake Jones
• Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You, edited by Adam Kay

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

• The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
• What Have I Done? An Honest Memoir about Surviving Postnatal Mental Illness by Laura Dockrill
• How to Be Both by Ali Smith
• Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth
• The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP

• Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
• The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood
• Just Like You by Nick Hornby
• 33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine by David Jarrett
• Sisters by Daisy Johnson
• Vesper Flights: New and Selected Essays by Helen Macdonald
• English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks
• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
• Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzenbrink
• Jack by Marilynne Robinson
• Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward
• The Courage to Care: A Call for Compassion by Christie Watson
• The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

RETURNED UNFINISHED

• Apeirogon by Colum McCann – I only made it through the first 150 pages. A work that could have been very powerful if condensed instead sprawls into repetition and pretension. I still expect it to make the Booker shortlist, but not to win. I’ll add further thoughts closer to the time.
• That Reminds Me by Derek Owusu – I was expecting a memoir in verse about life in foster care; this is autofiction in dull fragments. I read the first 23 pages out of 113, waiting for it to get better.

RETURNED UNREAD

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston – I needed to make room for some new books on my account, so will request this at another time.
• Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell – I realized the subject matter didn’t draw me enough to read 500+ pages. So I passed it to my husband, a big Mitchell fan, and he read it happily, but mentioned that he didn’t find it compelling until about 2/3 through and he thought the combination of real-life and made-up figures (including from Mitchell’s previous oeuvre) was a bit silly.
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami – Again, I needed to make space on my card and was, unsurprisingly, daunted by the length of this 1,000+-page omnibus paperback. When I do try the novel, I’ll borrow it in its three separate volumes!

What appeals from my stacks?

My second choice for Women in Translation Month (after The Bitch by Pilar Quintana) was:

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (2016)

[Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang]

The title character is a sort of South Korean Everywoman whose experiences reveal the ways in which women’s lives are still constrained by that country’s patriarchal structures and traditions. She and her fellow female students and colleagues are subject to myriad microaggressions, from being served cafeteria lunches after the boys to being excluded from leadership of university clubs to having no recourse when security guards set up cameras in the female toilets at work. Jiyoung is wary of marriage and motherhood, afraid of derailing her budding marketing career, and despite her determination to do things differently she is disappointed at how much she has to give up when she has her daughter. “Her career potential and areas of interest were being limited just because she had a baby.”

The prose is flat, with statistics about women’s lives in Korea unnaturally inserted in the text. Late on we discover there’s a particular reason for the clinically detached writing, but it’s not enough to fully compensate for a dull style. I also found the translation shaky in places, e.g. “She cautiously mentioned shop sales … to the mother who’d dropped by at home to make dinner” and “Jiyoung made it home safely on her boyfriend’s back, but their relationship didn’t.” I most liked Jiyoung’s entrepreneurial mother, who occasionally shows her feisty spirit: “The porridge shop was my idea, and I bought the apartment. And the children raised themselves. Yes, you’ve made it, but you didn’t do it all by yourself,” she says to her husband. “Run wild!” she exhorts Jiyoung, but the system makes that vanishingly difficult.