Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

Ohmygod.

I had never heard of this book until I saw a picture on Twitter of the handful of new Penguin English Library editions that had been published this month. I bought it based on 2 things 1- that gorgeous cover and 2- that it was about a woman and how much she loved her garden. For like 3 years I have been a casual gardener, but this year I have really *really* got into it to the point now that I have way more plants and flowers than what can realistically fit in my tiny ex-pit-terrace house and it is looking amazing and I love it.

Elizabeth and her German Garden takes the format of a year's diary of an eccentric aristocrat living in Germany as she wrestles with the estate's neglected grounds in an attempt to tame and mold the thorny wilderness into the garden of her dreams. The garden is her escape from her three unlikely children, surprisingly introduced out of the blue, and her tempestuous husband nicknamed The Man of Wrath. Elizabeth does not appear to enjoy a happy marriage and though she seems fond of her kids (April Baby, May Baby and June Baby) it does appear that she only had them because it never really was an option not to. The book documents her struggles with her household staff (not so much struggling *with* them, as struggling to care about them at all), her interactions with friends and her general attitudes to life and society of the time, particularly the role of women. It's funny, satirical, but makes excellent points about the expectations of women by men and society, their expected behaviour, function and apparently abundant intellectual limitations.

This skinny little book is exactly what I hoped it would be. It's billed as autobiographical fiction, but I can't imagine there is an enormous amount of fiction in there. I felt like I just completely understood Elizabeth, I felt I had found A Me in a previous life, a real kindred spirit. As she's lovingly describing her plans and designs for the garden, for the various flowerbeds and landscaping, I could honestly see it all unfurling in my head- the pansies carpeting the rose beds, the shady corner with the fir tree, the spring bulb bed with muscari and hyacinth, tulips and crocus. I loved how philosophical Elizabeth was about trial and error, about learning from her mistakes.

Aside from the lush, soothing garden talk, I adored Elizabeth herself. She was such a smart, demanding woman. I loved how uncompromising she was, how she refused to be ordinary, much to her husband's frustration. I assume he allowed her 'idiosyncrasies' due to the isolated, rural nature of their location...or perhaps her idiosyncrasies is why they moved to the middle of nowhere in the first place. I found myself constantly nodding along with Elizabeth and her musings. A few choice quotes that I think we can all agree make Elizabeth One Of Us:

"If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction?"
"It is much easier and often more pleasant to be a warning than an example"
"The people round here are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceptionally eccentric, for news has traveled that I spend the days out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever see, me sew or cook"

I think this is going to be an annual re-read for me, perhaps at the beginning of Spring to get me in the garden mood. How can you not love a 19th century woman that decides to pretty much ditch her husband and her kids and live a reclusive, blossom and bee filled existence of drinking tea and reading books in the garden? She is my hero.

This is Going to Hurt, by Adam Kay

Wow. For 95% of this book, I was imagining how I’d write it up; praising its hilarity, its pace, its wit. I was going to do a big paragraph about how much I loved all the Harry Potter name swaps. I was going to gush about how Green Wing this whole book is in its absurdity and farcical “you couldn’t make it up” vibes… about how entitled some of the British public are. How stoic, how bonkers how utterly unfit for walking the Earth unsupervised and being allowed to operate heavy machinery. I was going to talk about how the author definitely knows how to regale his audience with almost Keaton-esque timing…It’s all in here. But the last entry, the last major incident that Dr Kay deals with in his career as an ObGyn senior registrar is chilling to the point where all of the funny, human warmth of the other 250 pages kind of feels distant and like it happened in a different book. I think the last 5 pages of this book is going to haunt me forever.

What starts off as a hilarious but illuminating peek behind the curtain into the operation of NHS hospitals becomes a very sobering biography of a beloved institution on the brink of collapse- a diary of a man with a scalpel and a wipe-clean hoover desperately trying to keep things running in a system that seems designed to make everything grind to a bloody, crunching halt. Not because of these greedy, workshy doctors that won’t turn up for a Saturday shift and are only in Medicine for the special parking space and the rivers of cash, but because there are simply not enough doctors to do all of the things that need to be done so that people don’t die. The ratio of work to sleep/home/sustenance sounds like something out of a PoW camp. The normal rules of workload, work/life balance and being awake enough to function simply do not apply and it is both horrifying and fascinating.

I’m worried now that writing this so soon after finishing the book (within 30 minutes) has made me err on the side of glumness, so I just want to reiterate what a (and I do not use this phrase lightly or without a trace of self hatred) laugh out loud book this is. I read half of it in one sitting, sat in a plastic chair in the King’s Mill Hospital A&E waiting room, watching the giant, rusty, beloved behemoth that is the NHS in motion. I marveled at the smiley, efficient nurses as I tried to stifle snorts about the likelihood of French holiday homes, or hold in a horrified WTF face at the “degloving” story. But I was always, always amazed at the commitment, the proficiency and the sheer iron will of Adam Kay and his colleagues, who soldiered on long after any normal person would have understandably collapsed in a snotty, tearful mess. These people are superheroes that don’t even realise they are extraordinary.

I urge everyone with eyes to read this. Partly because it’s painfully funny, partly because it’s pretty much the whole of human experience wrapped up in scrubs and then bled on. Mostly though, because nobody could read this, this dispatch from the frontline of an NHS hospital and fail to recognise what an asset it is, what a good thing we have here and how ESSENTIAL it is that we protect it. Nobody could read about these men and women repeatedly jeopardising their own home lives and happiness for the wellbeing of total strangers and not feel compelled to defend and protect the NHS and all who sail in her with their last, gurgling breath. READ IT!!

Smile, by Raina Telgemeier

Does anybody capture the anguish of being a teenage girl as perfectly as RT? I don't think so- the frenemies, unimaginably annoying younger siblings, the desperate attempts to seem grown up, to seem cool, burgeoning boy issues, school-yard politics...The surprise attacks that the 13 year old body launches- sudden boobs, sudden hips, sudden spots; everything at once, and at the time when you feel like the ugliest, freakiest, weirdest little specimen to ever don a backpack and attempt to survive state school.

Smile, like Sisters  is very much an autobiography. Book Raina (like real life 1980s Raina) needs braces to correct her overbite- monstrous headgear on top of everything else weighing on the middle-school mind. After the traumatic trip to the orthodontist "let's make a mould of your mouth by filling it with this disgusting pink guk" (been there), Raina has an accident on her way home from a Girl Scouts meeting, knocking out her front two teeth. Impossibly self-conscious anyway, she dreads to think what her friends will say about her teeth. This fall is the beginning of 5 years of tooth related trauma that will see her up to the end of High School.

Best visual representation on anaesthetic ever?

Not the best book for the tooth-squeamish. Thinking about some of the procedures (reattaching, root-canalling, removing and rearranging) made me feel a bit sick. Teeth (the loss, damage, otherwise defacing) of teeth is the thing that makes me shiver more than anything else in the world. Other than that, anybody who has even been a teenage human will be able to relate to this in some way. Even if you managed to escape braces and have never knocked out teeth. Smile does a really good job of illustrating just how toxic female friendships can be, especially at school, and especially friendships that seem to have gone on for too long to ever feel like you can break it off. Raina's friends that she moved up to High School with are catty and unsupportive and take every opportunity to laugh at those they see as weaker than themselves. It's all about insecurity. Making others feel worse to drown out the noise of your own inferiority complex.

Who hasn't had a friend that they secretly wanted to punch in the mouth?

I love the message of this book; it's okay to feel marginalised and to worry about what people think of you, because without that, you'd never get to that moment where you realise it doesn't matter and your 'friends' are idiots and you're just going to be yourself because you're brilliant. You have to go through the fear and the self consciousness and the feeling inferior because that's how you learn that You. Are. Awesome. And yes, being a teen is hard; it's excruciating and unfair and it seems like these embarrassing injustices will never end. But it's the time that you begin to form your personality properly. You start to see what you're genuinely good at, who makes you happy, what makes you special. Which makes it all worth it.

That thing where you stand up for yourself and continue to be awesome for the rest of time.

I love Raina's work- it's so honest, so charming and so full of character, and so distinctive. The graphic novel world has celebrated a brilliant new talent comprehensively enough, but it's also gained a proper classic, role model character at the same time. Love it, would recommend to anyone and everyone, whether they like Graphic Novels or not.