July: Germany, South Korea and England
Read: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (Germany), The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher by Ahn Do-hyun (South Korea), Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (England) ‘A novel pullulating with a kind of anti-life’ - this is how the blurb advertises The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and this was my mum’s birthday present to me - a book, it goes on to say, filled with ‘horribly memorable images.’ And this from a woman so squeamish that she recently went to watch the latest Shaun the Sheep movie, Farmageddon, knowing that it would be a safe option with only ‘mild’ violence. Admittedly, IMDB records one moment of sex and nudity, one moment of violence and gore, one profanity and three frightening and intense scenes, but I’m not sure the comical moment when a farmer and some sheep push the hapless detectives off a cliff are quite in the same level as the grimness served by Grass, but my mum says that she can handle things in books that she could never handle on screen whereas I feel that it works the othe...