Hello, hello. Nothing to see here. Just me, popping by on October 19th to deliver my September Culture Wrap Up. You nearly got it a couple of days ago but as this delightful website opted to delete the post I wrote yesterday, we’ve now surpassed the halfway-through-October-mark. However, I do think it was worth the wait as September was a classy as heck month for culture for me and I have lots to tell you about.

For a couple of years now I’ve heard people gushing over Sally Rooney novels, obsessing over the BBC adaptation of Normal People, and getting into tit-for-tat arguments over whether her books deserve the celebrity status they’ve been afforded. Whatever people believe, they tend to have pretty strong feelings on Rooney’s writing.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post I’ve found the last couple of months challenging. Oddly enough it’s this period in the pandemic when I should be imbued with optimism that I feel most helpless and overwhelmed. I mention this only to explain why I’m doing a May/June culture wrap up rather than a monthly one which is that I’ve really just not been reading much.

With fiction you’re able to seamlessly blend reality and imagination to produce some kind of truth without the reader knowing quite how much of the actual you they’ve encountered. With memoir, so we assume, everything is as close to truth as it can be.

It must be almost impossible for anyone with even a passing interest in books not to be aware of Candice Carty-William’s Queenie. When it came out back in March 2019 it appeared in the windows of Waterstones in an eye catching display, the cover art printed in four different colours: pink, blue, minty green and orange. I, like many other book obsessives loved it, and had no idea which one to buy.