Hi all and welcome to another post! It’s a little late, but I thought today I’d talk about some of the books I’d like to read in January – as picked by mini-golf.
Every month I play a mini-golf game to decide what I’m going to read and you can see the video below to watch me play!
The books I ended up picking this month are:
Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? – depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can’t be normal.
But if she’s so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?
Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.
I’ve had this one for a while, thanks to Bloomsbury for sending me a copy! I don’t read a lot of non fiction but this one sounds really interesting and it’s only short, so not too daunting even though I picked this for the prompt outside of my comfort zone.
Jamie Rambeau is a happy 11-year-old non-binary kid who likes nothing better than hanging out with their two best friends Daisy and Ash. But when the trio find out that in Year Seven they will be separated into one school for boys and another for girls, their friendship suddenly seems at risk. And when Jamie realises no one had thought about where they are going to go, they decide to take matters into their own hands, and sort it all out once and for all.
As complaints at school turn into a rooftop protest against the binary rules for the local schools, Jamie realises that if they don’t figure out a way forwards, they might be at risk of losing both their friends forever.
I then chose to pick Jamie, which I recently received from the publisher Hachette – thank you to them! I’m so excited for this one, and I’ve actually already started reading it. I picked this one out for less than 300 pages.
Abandoned on the Mumbai railways, Ajay has grown up with nothing but a burning wish to be a journalist.
Finding an abandoned printing press, he and his friends Saif, Vinod, Yasmin and Jai create their own newspaper: The Mumbai Sun.
As they hunt down stories for their paper, the children uncover corruption, fight for justice and battle to save their slum from bulldozers.
But against some of the most powerful forces in the city, can Ajay and his friends really succeed in bringing the truth to light? Not to mention win the most important cricket match ever …
I then picked out Ajay and the Mumbai Sun for brown cover (let’s pretend this is more brown than orange….). This one was sent to me by Chicken House and I’ve already read this one!
Most days, Ellie Pillai is somewhere between invisible, and not very cool – and usually she’s okay with that. But suddenly, Ellie feels different. Maybe it’s the new boy at school who makes her brain explode into rainbows every time she sees him (and also happens to be going out with her best friend), or maybe it’s her new drama teacher, the one who seems to have noticed she exists. Suddenly, her misfit style, her skin colour, her songwriting and all that getting lost in the music in her head seem to be okay too. Because maybe standing out isn’t a bad thing after all.
The next prompt was more than 400 pages, and I picked Ellie Pillai is Brown, which I’ve also already read on audio and it was super cool, including songs in the audiobook! Thank you to Faber and Faber for this one.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha hasn’t seen her sister June for two years. And now that a calamity is about to end the world in nine months’ time, she and her mother decide that it’s time to track her down and mend the hurts of the past. Along with Aisha’s Chinese boyfriend, Walter and his parents (and Fleabag the stray cat), the group take a roadtrip through Malaysia in a wildly decorated campervan – to put the past to rest, to come to terms with the present, and to hope for the future.
And last but not least was Mark pick – my boyfriend picked for me to read The Cats We Meet Along the Way, which was sent to me from Guppy Publishing.
What are you planning to read in January?
-Beth
May your shelves forever overflow with books! ☽
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