In honour of the beginning of my 28th year on this planet (I know, I don’t look a day over 21!) I tried a variety of books – poetry, essays, a play, it all happened in August!
To see more about the books I loved and hated this month, click here.
My Top Three:
“Darwin’s friend and colleague George Romanes said although women were the losers intellectually having five ounces less brain, they were better at soft furnishings and disappointment.”
This is an absolute corker! I picked it off my shelf one afternoon and devoured it in a couple of hours and it had me laughing out loud at almost every page. Fleming calls out the centuries-long misogyny that has condemned brilliant women to ‘the dustbin of history’ in the form of a short graphic novel, full of witty illustrations. My only wish is that this 128-page gem had been twice as long!
This is a beautiful, heartbreaking story of people desperately hiding from pain and loss; their fears and struggles going unnoticed by others around them. At the core of my love for this author is how she portrays these common, everyday struggles, through an unusual metaphor. In the Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it was food. In this book, it’s numbers. I loved the simple creativity of it – from Mr Jones wearing numbers round his neck to illustrate his mood, to Lisa wearing a zero made from an IV tube as a way of expressing the pain of her mother having cancer. I think I might now be a little bit in love with Aimee Bender.
TW – sexual abuse
I first came across Rupi Kaur when her photographs of a woman on her period were removed from Instagram, kicking off a public backlash against the company for considering a menstruation to be inappropriate. After reading a little more into her background and her work, this book went straight onto my TBR, and I wasn’t disappointed.
milk and honey is a powerfully raw and beautiful collection of poetry that’s well worth the short time it takes to read. Divided into four sections, this book examines pain, love, loss, abuse and healing; and I found it to be a very inspiring read, solidifying the belief that we, as women, need to unpick the beliefs we are fed about our bodies and learn to love them as an act of self-completion.
On the menu for September:
You can see all of my choices and reviews by following me on Goodreads, let me know what you’re reading so I can get inspired!
NB. Some of my reviews do include spoilers, so please check the top of the post for a warning before reading.
Martha Is 
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