When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.
They recognised in each other a sense of frustration that chasing career progression had not led to personal fulfilment. “Over a drink in the pub one evening, we started to sketch out what our ideal lifestyle might look like,” they said. “We knew we wanted to own a business in Shaftesbury that would allow us simple pleasures such as walking to work and feeling properly rooted in our town.”
Inspired by an old photograph at the pub, they decided to set up an independent bookshop together. Today, they are part of a growing number of female friendship duos who have similarly decided to follow their dreams of running bookshops that cater to local communities, women and under-represented minorities.
Bibimbar’s owner, Ina Jungin Lee, took over the restaurant in 2012 and, in the years since, she’s built a mini-empire of restaurants, bars, and other Korean food businesses in San Francisco. A Korean immigrant, she came to San Francisco for graphic design in the early aughts with no particular sense of purpose. But over the years she’s become laser-focused on her goal of spreading Korean culture through food and drink — and she’s brought her entire family from South Korea to join the cause. Now, whether at her Valencia Street snack spot BoBop or her Excelsior hideout for house music and soju Korner Store, she’s firmly pursuing that mission.
In essence, the novel is about individuals, how they feel and think and change and in doing so shape the world they live in, even if they only do so in small ways. But Catton’s characters resemble the figures in Greek tragedy, people enmeshed in systems whose attempts to commandeer their own fates inevitably end in tears and blood. It may upset readers who were certain they knew what kind of resolution was coming, but that is surely Catton’s point. Hubris will always get you in the end.
Underneath the spangly surfaces of country music, there’s a lot of messiness and injustice. In some ways, the genre has been more upfront about that in recent years, especially for women artists; in some ways they have not. The range of acceptable personas for a country singer may have expanded, but personas still dominate, and as Stephanie Clifford shows in her thought-provoking and entertaining new novel “The Farewell Tour,” life for a female country singer can still be, to put it mildly, constricting.
Heartburn the book is a comedic and gently sad account of the dissolution of a marriage, and in turn the dissolution of a life. It’s bittersweet enough that only a romantic could have written it, and vicious enough that the romantic must have been both extremely mean and extremely funny. Also, the food is great.
It is in the gap between present and future, where outcomes are not yet determined, that Jenny Odell enters with her paradigm-destroying new book, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.” This grand, eclectic, wide-ranging work is about the various problems that swirl out from dominant conceptions of “time,” which sometimes means history, sometimes means an individual lifetime and sometimes means the future.
Taking a numerical approach to the natural world – as in Simon Barnes’s History of the World in 100 Plants, for example – is a handy way to carve off a manageable slice from a potential plethora of examples. There are, for instance, nearly 10,000 bird species worldwide. In his new book, naturalist Stephen Moss wisely chooses just 10, but in doing so tells the story of the long relationship between birds and humanity – and it has mostly been a disastrous one.