Monumenta 2014: The Strange City

This year The Grand Palais has invited Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov to exhibit at the annual Monumenta exhibition. The nave of the Grand Palais is an enormous space to work with and to curate an exhibition that can effectively make use of its grand volumes. Previous artists have done it fairly well. This year's 'Strange City' installation has been partitioned off into various parts, taking the visitor through a journey of differently-themed sections, each meant to inspire introspection into the human condition.

Places: Parc Zoologique de Paris

After renovations that lasted four years, the Paris Zoo finally re-opened its doors again last month. I took my son and a friend last Friday.
We had pre-booked our tickets online to avoid long queues but it was a surprisingly quiet day.
The zoo has undergone a €164 million overhaul which has turned it into a theme park-like space that's been sub-divided into five biozones: Madagascar, Amazon-Guyana, Europe, Patagonia and the Sahel-Sudan - the single largest area in the zoo, and home to the animals of the African Savannah. We saw all of the big cats but missed out on the white rhino though - which was of particular interest to the boys because of it endangered status.
The zoo has been completely rebuilt and now looks less like your average zoo, and more "like Jurassic Park", as my son put it.

Books: RED INK by Angela Makholwa

Title: Red Ink
Author: Angela Makholwa
Published: 2007
Genre: Fiction

In a word: gripping. I love watching the TV show Criminal Minds, and reading Red Ink was like watching an extended show of it. Angela Makholwa writes boldly about the violence that is at the centre of her crime novel. She's descriptive and does not shy away from the details of the blood and gore. In the same way that I cannot turn away from Criminal Minds, I could not stop reading.

Books: THE HAPPINESS PROJECT by Gretchen Rubin

Title: The Happiness Project
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Published: 2009
Genre: Memoir

I finally read Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project. It has been on my kindle for a while, but I felt that it would have been a better read in paperback - but in the same breath I could not bring myself to pay for a paperback copy having already downloaded the ebook. It is one one of the most useful and enjoyable books I have read this year.
It is part memoir, part self help. The author spent a year exploring what is is that makes people happy and testing out whether putting into practice some of her readings could help her become happier. I know, it sounds all really navel-gazing and very much like a self help book. It wasn't any of those. Not really. Rubin has researched her subject extensively and takes some esoteric philosophical debates and breaks them up into digestible chunks to be applied to your everyday life.

# Bring Back Our Girls

The tweet that started the online campaign for Nigeria's government to take action, and bring home the more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants on April 14 finally has the World talking.
In praise of social media, the petition has now overshadowed reports on the wars in Central Africa and Syria, and the crisis in the Ukraine. Finally the World is paying attention.
Emboldened by the inaction of the Nigerian government, the militants have acted with impunity once again and abducted eight more girls.
This story is heartbreaking in more ways than one can imagine: not just in the families' frustration over the government's  lack of active response, but in the future that these girls face if they are not found. Adding my voice in one small way to a petition that needs the World's action.

Books: AMERICANAH by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Title: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published: 2013
Genre: Fiction

I have been sitting on this review for a while. Writing it feels like being unfaithful in some way. Here goes: I was disappointed. I loved every single one of Chimamanda Ngozi's books. A friend gave me a copy of Purple Hibiscus when it was first published, and since then I have read and re-read the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck; have sunk my teeth into Half of a Yellow Sun - eagerly waiting for its release now that Biyi Bandele has had the genius to make a movie of it; and like everyone else that is a fan of Adichie, I eagerly anticipated the release of Americanah - especially since it promised to also tackle that 'hair issue'.

French May Day Blues

My muguet and a single rose are on the dining room table in water, thanks to hubby. He was out early this morning and came back bearing gifts and bonheur - happiness. The selling of flowers, without a permit, is permitted to the general public only on this day. It is a tradition, along with the marches around the world on this International Worker's Day.

I was watching the France24 debate and once again astounded at the conflict the French go through each time one of their large national conglomerates fails - thus requiring being sold off to another (often foreign) conglomerate - and the debates that this raises each time.  Business reason and good economic sense fail and instead make room for a sentiment of nationalism based entirely on the nostalgia of an economic power of yesteryear, what one analyst called a form of "nostalgianomics".