Cultural Wrap Up – May and June 2026

08/07/20261 Comment

In the latest days I’ve been honing the skill of typing with just one hand and fanning myself with sheets of paper with the other. Working from home with no AC when it’s 40ºC or more is a nightmare. Summer has been my favourite season since I was a child, but this isn’t summer. It’s “hellmer”! And we’re only at the beginning of July! Thankfully, the temperatures are now cooling down in the centre of Portugal, and we will have some days of maximum temperatures of around 28ºC and 30ºC, which is perfectly normal and acceptable. Until when? Who knows. All this just to explain why this cultural wrap up is later than usual and why I haven’t been feeling like blogging.

I’m also amidst a reading slump after a good couple of months. So, I don’t have many books to mention in this wrap up of May and June. I watched a couple of TV shows and listened to a lot of music, though.

I read two books in May that I enjoyed. The first one was the poetry collection Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt by the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, whom I only ever heard of because of Arctic Monkeys, as the lyrics of ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ are an adaptation of a poem by him. Various poems focus on harsh realities but present them in a humorous way. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an often heart-breaking coming-of-age novel set in Nigeria that has as narrator and main character Kambili. She lives with her parents and brother. Her father is a violent and controlling man, who is also a religious fanatic.

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Novels That Read Like Fictional Memoirs

10/06/2026Leave a comment

Only rarely do I read non-fiction books and, when I do, it’s usually not memoirs. I tend to gravitate more towards those that explore specific themes. On the other hand, I have appreciated a few novels that almost resemble memoirs, as they usually have as protagonists well-rounded characters whose predicaments feel believable and intricate.

While some of the novels below resemble memoirs almost by accident, that similarity being a consequence of them having a first-person narrator and the focus being on the life of the protagonist, others were certainly written with that likeness being the intention.

Circe by Madeline Miller

If Greek myths were real, Circe by Madeline Miller could certainly be a memoir, as the characters feel incredibly realistic, thanks to the tangibility of their emotions. That is particularly true of the protagonist. Circe, who is the daughter of Helios (the god of sun) and Perse (a nymph), was sent to exile as a punishment for using witchcraft against her own kind. After years of being bullied by her siblings, she learnt to be braver and more independent.

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‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

03/06/20262 Comments

My rating: 4 stars

A coming-of-age story set in Nigeria, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delves into domestic violence, plus the conflicts that arise within families when those who embrace Christianity don’t approve of others wanting to continue to practice their indigenous beliefs. The social aspects of the novel are well integrated within the first-person narration and feel part of Kambili’s growing process, as she must come to terms with the cruelty she experiences.

Kambili lives with her parents and her brother, Jaja. Her mother has recently got pregnant again but lost the baby after her father hit her. Deep down Kambili knows that her father is too controlling and violent not only to her mother, but also to her and her brother as well. Nevertheless, she is still fond of him and wants to please him. They are a wealthy family. Her father is the owner of a biscuit factory and of a newspaper. But he wasn’t rich as a child. He believes he owes everything to have attended a missionary school. Maybe for that reason, he is a religious fanatic, regularly attends mass and makes everyone constantly say prayers.

Her father expects both his children to be the best of their classes. Kambili doesn’t get to forge friendships with her school colleagues, because her father controls the time she takes to get to the car after the end of lectures. The way Kambili tries to normalise the fear and the subjugation that she lives with daily is impactful. She bears the scars of that violence but doesn’t rebel against it. Adichie’s metaphors and similes convey that movingly.

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Books in Stream of Consciousness Worth Reading

20/05/2026Leave a comment

Inner thoughts tend to be unstructured. Our brains are like vessels of ideas that dance and intermingle with one another, thoughts merging in quick succession. Various writers try to mimic that sensation in the entirety or in parts of their novels through a stream-of-consciousness style.

To achieve that non-linear flow of the narrator or the characters’ thoughts, authors tend to jump between memories, overlook clear transitions between ideas, play with the rules of grammar and punctuation (not necessarily breaking them), and repeat the same idea.

Stream of consciousness doesn’t always work for me. Whether some books that were written using this style I cherished, others I either disliked or ended up not having the desire to finish. If you tend to have the same experience, I have five recommendations for you, all by different authors, that prove that the stream-of-consciousness style can be used to great effect.

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‘A Jangada de Pedra’ (‘The Stone Raft’) by José Saramago

13/05/2026Leave a comment

My rating: 4 stars

Agreeing with the opinions of an author should not be a precondition to read their books. We can disagree, totally or in part, with their views and still appreciate their work for its literary merits. In A Jangada de Pedra, The Stone Raft in the English translation, José Saramago’s more Eurosceptic tendencies are evident. He penned an allegory centred around the bond between Portugal and Spain, plus their connection with the non-European countries that have the same official languages. That relationship, for some, sets the two countries apart from the rest of Europe.

For everyone’s surprise, cracks started appearing along the Pyrenees, leading the Spanish and the French governments to convene to try to understand what was happening and which one of them the phenomenon affected the most. The specialists decided that the best thing to do was to fill the cracks with concrete. However, when the entirety of the fissure was filled, it quickly sank in, as the land continued to crack deeper down. Soon, the Iberian Peninsula became separated from the rest of Europe and started floating to the west.

Not long before the cracks started appearing, five people had strange experiences. Joana Carda drew a line on the floor with a poplar stick and mute dogs started barking. Joaquim Sassa managed to throw a heavy stone to the sea. Pedro Orce raised from a chair and felt the Earth shaking when everyone said it wasn’t. José Anaiço was followed by birds. And Maria Guavaira found in the attic some socks that started unravelling. When Joaquim heard about Pedro Orce’s story, he decided to go look for him in Spain. On the way he found José Anaiço, who joined him in his quest. Soon the paths of the five characters ended up crossing.

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Cultural Wrap Up – March and April 2026

06/05/2026Leave a comment

If you are a regular reader of my blog (thank you!), you may already know that this year, once every two months, I’m writing a cultural wrap up, summing up all the books that I read, films and TV series that I watched, and the music I listened to the most. Throughout March and April, I read four books and decided not to finish another one. Plus, now that I finally have broadband internet at home again, I also got to watch some films and a TV series.

Are you curious to know what they were?

In March, I took part in Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy. My choices fell on a short story collection and two novels, though one of them I only finished in the following month. Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire is set during the Covid-19 pandemic and revolves around three characters – Evan, his son, and Grace. The detailed writing style and the heartfelt characters make the book absorbing, despite it not having an action-packed plot. The collection of short stories Dance Move by Wendy Erskine touches on the theme of memory, as the past of the characters keeps intruding on their present.

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Books with Unreliable Narrators

22/04/202622/04/20262 Comments

Fiction books do not tell a real story. All readers know that. However, when immersed in a compelling, believable tale, we almost forget that the characters and their actions are just the product of the writer’s imagination. Authors indeed tend to want to achieve a feeling of authenticity, structuring the plot and crafting characters in a way that makes readers feel that the fictional story is true. Nevertheless, they can also decide to make readers question the tale’s “fictional veracity”.

That can be achieved by using unreliable narrators. Not all first-person narrators can be considered unreliable, though. For them to be untrustworthy, we must have reasons to believe that what they are telling is not entirely “true”. They may have the intention of hiding actions, may have prejudices that cloud their judgements about other characters, or just couldn’t have possibly witnessed all the events narrated.

When thinking about unreliable narrators, there are four books that immediately come to mind and that I would recommend.

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Authors I Have Complicated Relationships With

15/04/20262 Comments

One of the elements of a book that tend to catch our attention as readers is the writing style. When we like a book by an author, we tend to believe that there’s a huge possibility that we will also like all their other books if we find their premises appealing, because the prose will be similar. That is not always the case, though. There are various reasons why a specific book may not work for us that are not connected with the style of the prose or with the subject matter. Sometimes the characters may not be as believable as we would like, other times the structure of the narrative may not be compelling, or the author may just have embraced a different style from the one we first encountered.

For a variety of reasons, there are at least four authors that I’m always unsure whether I’ll like their books or not, since, although I previously cherished one (or more) of them, others I just couldn’t stomach (I may be exaggerating here).

Ian McEwan

Not only did I love the first book that I read by Ian McEwan, Atonement, but it’s also one of my favourite books of all time. So, nothing could have prepared me for the uncertainty that I now feel every time that I decide to read one of his books. Although I cherished reading Saturday, Sweet Tooth, The Innocent, Nutshell and The Cement Garden, I was disappointed with The Children Act, The Child in Time, On Chesil Beach and First Love, Last Rites. On paper, the premises of these novels and collection of short stories were promising, but either the characters’ predicaments ended up being too tedious, or the plot didn’t develop in a gripping or smooth way.

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‘The Hand that First Held Mine’ by Maggie O’Farrell

08/04/20262 Comments

My rating: 4 stars

Maggie O’Farrell is such an effective storyteller that her novels tend to feel like sorcery. It’s therefore unsurprising that my expectations are sky high when picking up a book from her back catalogue, any little less successful detail becoming too noticeable, like the not always flawless pacing in The Hand that First Held Mine. There’s still plenty to love in this novel, though, such as the fascinating characters, who face believable struggles, the mysterious plot and the gripping prose. This is a story about trauma and motherhood, developing in two different time periods that gradually fit together as the pieces of a puzzle.

In a late summer in the mid-1950s, Innes, a 34-year-old art dealer, critic and journalist, is driving somewhere in the area between Devon and Cornwall when his car breaks and he has to look for a garage. That’s when he comes by the almost 22-year-old Alexandra, also subsequently known as Lexie. He is immediately mesmerised by her, thinking that she could be in a painting. She has been sent away from university, because she used a door reserved for men when walking out of an exam. When asked to apologise, she refused, since she hadn’t done it on purpose and there was no door for women. She is now planning to go work in London. Sometime later, based on their first short interaction, Innes manages to find the place where Lexie moves to in the British capital.

The other strand of the plot is set in present time and follows Elina and Ted. They have recently had a baby. Elina wakes up confused during the night, wondering why the baby isn’t inside her anymore. She remembers being pregnant but can’t recall the actual birth. Her lack of memory stems from her having almost died. Ted witnessed everything and it still haunts him. Parenthood is affecting their relationship greatly. Moreover, Ted also starts feeling a sense of disconnection from his past, like his scant memories from his childhood not matching the idealised version that his mother has. He feels that his parents were never there.

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Favourite Book Series

01/04/2026Leave a comment

I’ve recently grown tired of book series (particularly the ones that are sequential), either because the ones that I had already started reading didn’t go in an appealing direction, or the ones that I thought I may be interested in at first didn’t feel as captivating anymore to want to devote a significant amount of time to them. Nevertheless, I read a few impressive ones over the years.

Book series shine when they manage to create a bond between the readers and the core elements of the narrative, in order for us to want to return for more. The characters have to be either relatable or fascinating. The plot needs to be gripping. The setting should be well depicted. Plus, the writing needs to suit the story and leave us impressed. Achieving all this not only in one, but in various successive books is not an easy feat.

I can’t say that I have ever read a book series comprising only books that I fully loved, but there are some that I relished reading and that I was always eager to return to.

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