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Dr Mia Uys

@sabookworm

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- just a feminist obsessed with the lives of fictional characters 🇿🇦
- historian & writer 📜
- CR: Family Friends

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Officially Dr Mia Uys 🥳🥂📖

Four years of research in scattered archives across our country trying to piece together a political and cultural history of our national zoo - a story of animal exhibiting, trading, breeding and so much more.

I love this job so much but damn this was hard 😆. I wanted to quit many times but @marco_saieva and my Dad were having none of it. 🤣

I could never have done it without the support of so many incredible friends and family members. Thank you ALL!

💖💖💖 by @sabookworm

MID-YEAR READING STATS! 📖💛

Books read so far: 27

Favourite read: It has to be The Correspondent which just won the @womensprize 🏆

Longest read: Middlemarch with 848 pages !! (Yes, it’s absolutely worth it)

Favorite classic: Tess of the D’urbevilles - what an incredible writer and a heartbreaking love story.

Biggest surprise: how much I’ve enjoyed the two memoirs I’ve read: Mother Mary Comes to Me and Famesick - I can highly recommend them both.

A new release I haven’t read yet: Land by Maggie O’Farrell!! I’m so excited to read it soon.

Most anticipated second half of the year release? I mean this year is just insane: a new Elisabeth Strout, Anne Patchett and Barbara Kingsolver? I cannot wait for them all.

Favourite new author: I read another book by Katie Kitamura (Intimacies) which I loved and I am now planning to read Separations as soon as possible. 😍

Please share your mid-year stats with me - are there any books here that would make your list? x by @sabookworm

Life is so much better when you’re reading 💖💖

#reelsofbookstagram #bookishlife #bookishlifestyle #dancingonmyown by @sabookworm

“The moral of the story is that you can’t escape history. You can’t cut yourself adrift and pretend it has nothing to do with you…. My grief was not that special.”

I LOVED this book!! 💓💓

In her most personal novel yet, Taipei Story is about Lily, a Chinese American college student who spends the summer in a language program in Taipei. She is hoping to connect with her culture and family only to quickly discover that true belonging has little to do with language and words. ✍🏼

While it explores the challenges of trying to master a language and immersive yourself in a new city, it also uses Lily’s perspective to explore some of the history of Taiwan, China and southeast Asia in general which I loved.

In an interview, Kuang stated that her novel is about “gently, but also cruelly, deflating that diaspora fantasy little by little, until by the end, Lily realizes there’s no genuine version of her that never left China.” She is left with trying to figure out her own authentic relationship to this place and her family.🫶🏼

Through this very singular POV this novel explores so much: history, connection, family, belonging, identity, grief and more. It is a pleasure to read and will certainly leave a lasting impression. It is a whirlwind journey that is so immersive you feel you’ve traveled with Lily to Taipei, and in some way, you’ve been changed by the end as well.✨

What did you think, friends? 📖📖 by @sabookworm

“I forget who people are, just as I forget who or what myself is. I forget, when I talk to you, that you are my mother, I forget, when I talk to you, that you are my father. To remember it would feel like looking directly at the sun. We have to forget, almost constantly, that we love anyone or life would be intolerable.”

When I was about half way through this novel I was so unsure about how I felt, but it had a really satisfying last third, and by the end I had to admit it’s kind of genius. 💓

It’s a novel unlike any you’ve read before: an unsuccessful actor in his thirties is paid to sit inside a black leather bag during university lectures as part of a psychological experiment - a reimagining of a real 1967 experiment undertaken by Charles Goetzinger at Oregon State University.✍🏼

From there, the author builds a world of unconventional intimacy and online opportunism, exploring the pressures of masculinity and the precariousness of trying to make a life out of creative work.

There is plenty of satire, particularly in the novel’s treatment of academia and the ways people attempt to commercialise unusual experiences. The funniest moments in the book exist in the interactions between the narrator and his best friend Claudio, an online gamer with millions of followers who sees potential in monetising “Black Bag” for lost men.

Over time our narrator finds such freedom in his anonymity that he begins to question: “what am I without Black Bag? Some pitiful and unremarkable man going around, doing things. Shameful.”

This novel seems to ask whether we can ever escape the performances demanded of us by modern society. What does intimacy and connection mean in a world driven by commodification?

Not my favourite from the shortlist, but I’m still so glad I read it. 🌟🌟📖📖

Friends, what did you think?? by @sabookworm

Me for the next 3-5 days 🥰📖

Sophie Standing There is one of my most anticipated reads for the year! Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is one of my all time favourite reads with one of the best depictions of mental health in fiction.🤎

I know very little about this besides the fact that the protagonist works as a sound technician for literary festivals and that it’s about loneliness and unlikely connections - I’m already obsessed! 🫶🏼

Tell me friends, are you excited for this one? Xx by @sabookworm

“And I feel that a man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe.”💫💫

I finally got around to reading this American classic! I had a busy work period so reading this took me a couple of weeks. It felt similar to reading Middlemarch earlier this year which also took me a while but was so worthwhile in the end. The more time I spend after finishing this book, the more brilliant I think it is.

This story is rooted in both the writer’s personal autobiography (his own maternal great grandfather, Samuel Hamilton), and biblical allegory. Set in his hometown, Salinas Valley, in California, it deals with themes of brutality, coming-of-age, love, familial obligation, and the old battle between good and evil. Often labeled his most ambitious novel, Steinbeck claimed, “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”✍🏼

It is certainly a lot more accessible than a lot of other classics out there, and at the bottom line is that this is just a really good story. It has stood the test of time with its It ambitious plot, wonderful characters and themes.

I found it refreshing to have a female “anti-hero” of the story with Cathy who Steinbeck himself describes as “a monster”. She is such a nuanced, complex person, and I just found her fascinating. My favourite characters were Lee and Samuel Hamilton - who shared so much wisdom and insight throughout the whole novel.

There hasn’t been a single classic that I’ve read over the past few years that hasn’t left its mark in various ways. The same can be said for East of Eden.

I know this book is all over the internet at the moment, I’d love to hear your thoughts? And yes of course, I’m so excited to see this series brought to life with the incredible Florence Pugh! 🎥📖 by @sabookworm

“It’s folding their underpants, or doing the shopping, getting their favourite pasta sauce, even if you don’t like it. It’s stacking the dishwasher together at night, and emptying it in the morning. It’s being bored by, and besotted with, the person you chose…It’s hundreds of tiny choices that say yes, we are in something, together. Even when it’s hard, or unglamorous. But, my god, it’s yours.” - I love this quote about marriage!💛💛💛

I think it’s really challenging to write a love triangle that feels real and not overly sentimental or cheesy. I thought this was handled so brilliantly - it had all the aches and pulls of the conflicts of first love and second chances, but it also explored the ways in which getting swept up in the past can sometimes prevent us from embracing the beauty in what we have.

In this novel we follow Nora and her long-term partner Robin who proposes out of the blue even though they had decided that they would never marry. Then, on the night of their engagement party Nora’s childhood best friend Bren turns up at her door after twelve years abroad. Cue the tension and an emotional rollercoaster! The narrative switches between all three perspectives which I think really helped make the story feel immediate and believable. ✍🏼

It explores secrets, familial obligation, mental health, grief, and of course the many versions of love that exist.

I often think about this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.” I think that beautiful captures this story.

I can highly recommend this if you’re looking for an easy well written read, especially something lighter and romantic. I really enjoyed it! ✨🫶🏼📖 by @sabookworm

BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST RAMBLINGS ✨🏆

I read and loved John of John, The Renovation & May We Feed the King! I would love to see them all on the shortlist. I would love to see Strout there too but I’m doubtful. I found Switzy too sad but from the sections I did read I could tell it was going to be stunning. The shortlist needs a funny / weird one which why I’ve chosen Black Bag & from the reviews I’ve read recently it seems as though The Disapearers by Marlon James is the book to beat this year! I can’t wait to read it soon.

What are your thoughts ?? xxx by @sabookworm

Hi friends!! I’m finally back with a reading update 🌟📖🌸🌟

I completely forgot to talk about May We Feed The King which was another Booker prize Longlist that I enjoyed a lot! The review is on my page.

Please share your reading updates with me ✨✨✨ by @sabookworm

Hi friends! I’m back with some mini-reviews after lecturing history to first-years for seven weeks! 🫶🏼🤍📖

The Renovation: This was a hypnotic, lyrical but very bleak read about a woman whose bathroom renovation inexplicably becomes a Turkish prison cell. She has moved to Italy with her husband and her father, and the novel explores her relationship with both, as well as her changing relationship with the country she has left behind.

“As with childhood’s magic frontiers, there was no way to travel back once you had left.“

I thought the portrayal of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s was particularly eye-opening, capturing the strange, difficult reality of watching someone slowly lose their sense of the world.

“What do people injured by the past want? Relics of monuments of their pain? Some erasing wave of amnesia? Both impossibly at once?”

The Vivisectors was a strange and abstract book about a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation. It might not be for everyone, but it totally worked for me as the crisp first person narration just drew me in immediately:

“Everything was calm and in its place except for me - I was violent and ungainly and on the move without knowing quite where I was going, or what I wanted. I was human and I hated it.”

There’s something wonderfully unsettling about the city and its inhabitants, and the book has this dreamlike, slightly feverish quality that kept me hooked. To be fair, give me any kind of campus novel and I am obsessed.

Skin contact: A really enjoyable easy read about a couple who decide to open their marriage. I loved the sections of the books from their perspectives but it jumped around with quite a number of side characters who I just wasn’t that interested in. There are some remarkably perceptive and beautifully drawn observations on human nature, grief and relationships. For example:

“To love someone is such a private experience. It is impossible to communicate what is lovable about the other person. If pressed you find yourself listing off silly things they do, reducing them to a series of oddities or compulsions, little fragments. Little gems.”

CONTINUED by @sabookworm

Why do we record the past? What compels us to try and remember?

“To make us confront, one day, what we have lost.”

As a historian who loves everything about the magic of the archive, I was absolutely captivated by the first third of this book. Here, we follow a curator who specialises in styling historic buildings and who has been tasked with a new project. They have clearly suffered from a recent loss, and this job – to commemorate the 750-year anniversary of a former palace – gives them a new point of focus. 👑📜

I loved the crisp inner voice of the curator and the short chapters, which created an atmospheric and engaging read. I wanted much more from this perspective in comparison to when the book jumped back in time to discuss the King whom this curator decides to commemorate. He is very unlike many of the kings we often read about – reluctant, indecisive, and seemingly uninterested in power.

In neither era is there any dialogue as such; instead, speech is reported, overheard, rumoured, italicised. From my perspective, that is because the curator is still narrating this story even when we are reading about the King’s period, and they are using the archive where they can but are also filling in the gaps where needed. This allows a sense of mystery to pervade through the entire book, which I can acknowledge must frustrate some readers, but in the profession of history is very much part of the job.

On a sentence level, you cannot fault this novel. In its execution, I wanted more. In its clear passion for history and the art of historical reconstruction, I loved and appreciated it. 🫶🏼🫶🏼

Tell me friends, what did you think?🤍🤍🤍 by @sabookworm