a book blog of one's own

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

2012-01-21T14:42:00.000+02:00

Where to start, really? :) I guess most of you are familiar with Wilkie Collins and his mother of all modern English detective stories The Moonstone. I finally read it and, to put it simply, I totally loved the book! Five bright stars for this one!

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London and lived most of his life not far from Oxford Street. His father was a succesful painter, his mother a teacher and an actress. Theirs was a happy marriage and young Wilkie, their first born, had a secure home. He and his siblings were encouraged to read and to paint from an early age. The Collins family also travelled in different parts of Britain and even spent two years in Italy. All this helped to develop Wilkie's imagination.

It seems that Wilkie knew quite early that he wanted to become a writer. His father, however, tried to steer his interests towards a more practical occupation by getting him a job as a clerk at a tea-importer's company. Later his father helped Wilkie towards a career in Law. In 1852 Wilkie Collins passed his final law exams, but he never worked in the profession. He used his knowledge of the law in his writing, though.

The first work Wilkie Collins got published was a short story called The Last Stage Coachman that appeared in a magazine in 1843. His first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850 and was well received by the critics.

Wilkie Collins was good friends with Charles Dickens. They travelled together and many of Wilkie's novels were published in serial form in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Dickens.

Wilkie Collins' domestic arrangements were rather unusual. For a long time he was in a relationship with two women, but did not marry either one of them.

The Moonstone is one of the two most well-known novels by Collins, the other being The Woman in White. I reread The Women in White 2010 & love it, but somehow it took me this long to read anything else by Collins. Boy am I happy that I finally did! The Moonstone is a detective story about the theft of a priceless Indian diamond told in multiple voices of different degrees of credibility. The plot is nicely intricate and the narrators are absolutely fabulous, if I may use such a word in this context! :) My two favorite narrators were Mr. Betteredge (of course! :)) and Miss Clack (surprisingly, but I really loved the way Collins had disguised humour in that insufferable woman's words! ). The main characters, Rachel Verinder, who has just got the diamond as a birthday present, when it disappears, and Franklin Blake, who is in love with Rachel, did actually not touch me so much, but that was only because of Mr. Betteredge's narration set the tone for my whole reading experience and I kept waiting, whether there would be more about him later in the story! (There was :))

The Moonstone was a joy to read from the first page to the last and I must say it should be required reading for anyone who likes a good mystery! So, run, run, run to the library near you to get a copy, if you haven't read it yet! :)

I count The Moonstone towards both The Back to the Classics & The TBR Pile challenges.

Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen

2012-01-10T23:03:00.002+02:00

Many years ago,it might have been sometime during the 90s, I saw an old black and white TV-interview of Karen Blixen. I probably watched the programme, because I had seen and loved the movie Out of Africa (starring Meryl Streep as Blixen and Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton) which tells about Blixen's Kenyan years. Anyway, in the interview Blixen told a story about a letter she had recieved from the King of Denmark as a thank you for a lion-skin she had sent to the king and which she used as a miracle-working device to ease the pain of an injured Kikuyu youth. I was mesmerised by her storytelling, and, as she told the story as a truth, amazed by the story itself! Later I read somewhere, that the story might, in fact, have been imaginary. If it were, it took nothing away from the power of her storytelling. There and then I knew that someday I would read her works -and that I would love her stories! (The story about the letter is published in her story collection Shadows on the Grass, if you want to read it.)

I had always thought that Out of Africa would be the first of her books I'd read. I have actually owned a Finnish translation of the book since, well, probably about since I saw the movie for the first time, but somehow it just never has been the right time to read it. A year or two ago a saw a copy of Seven Gothic Tales on sale and bought it. It still took me this long to read it, but I must say now was totally the right time for this collection of Blixen's stories!

Karen Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885. She married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and the couple moved to Kenya where they owned a coffee plantation. They divorced in 1921 and Karen Blixen stayed in Kenya managing the plantation until the coffee market collapsed in 1931. She then returned to her native Denmark. She died in 1962.

Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 under a pen-name Isak Dinesen, was her first book. I find it interesting that she wrote the stories in the collection in English and not in her native tongue. Her later books were often published simultaneously in English and in Danish.

As the name says the book consists of seven stories. All are set in the 19th-century, most in the first part of it. The stories are set in continental Europe, in Denmark, Germany and Italy. There are noblemen and spinsters, lovers separated and lovers brought back together, there are pirates, bishops and whores, a prioress of a convent that actually is not a convent, a monkey and even a ghost!

I liked all the stories and cannot put one before the other. In most of the stories Blixen uses a narrator who starts the story, but inside the narrative there are more voices, separate tales told by other characters that move the principal story forward. This technique really appealed to me. I remembered the TV-interview and could actually inside my head almost hear Blixen telling the stories I was reading. :) I also loved how the stories in the collection were bound together by one of the main characters of the first story playing a minor role in the last one. There were also some small details that kept popping up in several of the stories i.e. for example talk about bones or about wings and flying. It might just have been vocabulary that Blixen enjoyed using or maybe it all was a clever way of making the different stories to form a nicely matching whole.

Here's a funny little snippet from a story called The Supper at Elsinore:

"The old professor of painting said: 'When I was in Italy I was shown a small, curiously shaped bone, which is found only in the shoulder of the lion, and is the remains of a wing bone, from the time when lions had wings, such as we still see in the lion of St. Mark. It was very interesting.'
'Ah, indeed, a fine monumental figure on that column,' said the Bishop, who had also been in Italy, and who knew that he had a leonine head.
'Oh, if I had a chance of those wings,' said Miss Fanny, 'I should not care a hang about my fine or monumental figure. But, by St Anne, I should fly.'
'Allow me,' said the Bishop, 'to hope, Miss Fanny, that you would not. We may have our reasons to mistrust a flying lady." [p. 208-209]

Seven Gothic Tales is a book I will keep and cherise in years to come. No doubt this will become one of those books I want to revisit every now and then.

I read this book for The TBR Pile Challenge.

My Week in Books 8.1.2012

2012-01-08T14:09:00.005+02:00

This was a nice four day work week, as January 6 is a national holiday in Finland. The week between New Year and Epiphany is usually rather quiet at work, no meetings, less e-mail & phone calls. This year was no exception, but start of the new year also brought an organizational change and instead of being a head of one department I am since January 1 the chief librarian, which means more responsibilities. I am very much looking forward to the new challenges, though, and I am very lucky in that I have a very good staff working in our library.

On the reading front I started the year with the Christmas present from my Dad: All Clear by Connie Willis. As I've mentioned before I read Blackout in November and enjoyed it very much. All Clear continues where Blackout ends and it was every bit as enjoyable as the first part of the story, even though it did turn out to be more tragic than I thought beforehand. These two novels are no funny romps à la To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Read my review of Blackout here.
Read my review of All Clear here.

After reading all four of her time travelling novels I think I should add Connie Willis into my list of favorite authors.

Earlier this week someone tweeted a top ten 2011 fiction list by Foyles' web editor Jonathan Ruppin. I just love Foyles flagship book store at Charing Cross Road in London. It was love at first sight when on one of my earliest trips to London I first visited Foyles and the store has kept its place as my favorite bookstore outside Finland ever since. It used to be a tie between Foyles and the women's bookstore down the street from it, but later the women's bookstore was incorporated into Foyles. Anyway, Mr. Ruppin's list included some very interesting novels and I immediately put on hold the two that interested me most. I got both the next day. The novels are:

-History of a Pleasure Seaker by Richard Mason
-The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood

I have been really itching to start with my 2012 challenges and as soon as I finished All Clear I picked up a book that has been patiently waiting for its turn for quite some time now: Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (=Karen Blixen). This was my first Blixen book, but I have known for years that eventually I will read her & love her writing! To learn how I knew that read my review of Seven Gothic Tales that will be up in a couple of days.

This week I also ventured on a totally new endevour: to read an e-book! I don't own a separate e-book reader, but have the laptop version of Kindle. I have uploaded quite a few free e-books onto it, but have not got around in reading any of them. I simply prefer paper books. However, Girlebooks had available The White Ladies of Worchester by Florence F. Barclay for free. I uploaded it and am determined to make it the first novel I've ever read as an e-book. We'll see how it goes...

All in all this was an enjoyable week. Let's hope the next one is a good one, too!

All Clear by Connie Willis

2012-01-06T18:16:00.001+02:00

All Clear is the final part of a duology by Connie Willis. I read the first part, Blackout, in November and wrote a post about it in the beginning of December. I mentioned in my post that I had asked Santa to bring me All Clear and the good girl that I am :) he honored my wish and there it was under the Christmas tree: a nice copy of All Clear! I started reading my new book during the Christmas holidays and finished the mighty tome (of 793 pages) on January 2. That made All Clear the first book I finished in 2012.

I'm not going to recap the plot of Blackout here. Do take a look at my post on Blackout to learn a bit more about that. I'll just say that All Clear continues exactly where Blackout finished. And as the following is going to be a bit spoilery, if you haven't read Blackout yet but wish to do so, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Blackout ends with the three historians from 2060 being in London in 1940. They have found each other but they are stranded in the past and they don't know why their drops (=their gates back to their own time) don't open.

All Clear follows the destinies of Michael Davies, Merope Ward and Polly Churchill as they try to find a way -not only back to their own time-but to survive in World War II London. Back in 2060 Oxford Mr Dunworthy and young Colin Templer (who is very much in love with Polly) are desperately trying to find a way to save the historians stranded in the past. Not only have the three historians been in WWII longer than expected and don't have any information about where the bombs and rockets will fall, but one of them has a deadline. One of them has done an earlier trip to 1944 and if they don't get back to the future before that, that person will die. Unfortunately it starts to look like time travel itself has disturbed the past and that the travellers are straded for good. What if the time travelling historians have inadvertently changed the outcome of the war?

All Clear was a worthy ending for an interesting story started in Blackout. Sometime towards the middle part of the book I felt that the story dragged a bit, but it definitely did not last long and, oh boy, Willis had quite a few surprises weaved into the narrative before the end! I'll repeat what I said about Blackout that also All Clear is a wonderful piece of historical fiction as well as a worthy time travelling novel. Willis has clearly done her reseach and written a very believable WWII story.

I cannot finish this post without mentioning my favorite characters in this duology: the Hodbin children Alf and Binnie, who enter the story as evacuees in the beginning of Blackout. They are portrayed as total nightmares! If something went wrong, got broken or dissapeared, it was a safe bet one of the two, is not both of them, was behind it. However, as the story progresses they start to play an important role in the narrative (which does by no mean mean that they better their ways :)). While reading All Clear I kept wishing that the story would tell what happened to them after the war and luckily Willis provided a very satisfactory answer to my wish. :)

I have now read all 4 of the time travelling novels Willis has written. There is still a short story called Fire Watch to read. And, of course, there are all her non-time travelling novels to explore. Her novels will surely keep me nicely entertained for a long time to come. :)

In 2012 I Pledge to...

2012-01-03T23:30:00.004+02:00

...complete the challenges I've joined.

...read at least 10 books by LGBT authors or on LGBT themes.

...write more reviews. (I did pretty poorly in this in 2011 & ended up reviewing only a small portion of the books I read.)

...deepen my reading with filling in some gaps in my reading history i.e. READ MORE CLASSICS. (Is there something in the air or why have I read this same thing on a number of other book blogs, too?? ;))

...enjoy reading even more than I did in 2011. I want to find wonderful new to me authors & revisit some of my old favorites (Mrs Dalloway, anyone? ;)). I want to be swept away by great stories and beautiful writing. And I wish to share it all with you, the wonderful book blogging community!

Here's to a beautiful reading year!

My Top 10 Reads in 2011

2011-12-28T23:07:00.001+02:00

Last time I wrote a top 10 post I put the books in reverse order from 10 to 1, but this time I simply cannot! I read quite a few good books, but I can't say which one was the best, the second best etc. Maybe it's a good thing. No book stood out, but there were many I really liked. Some I liked because the writing was so beautiful, some because of the story, some just because! :)

I read quite a good number of books in my own language in 2011, 25 out of 85 reads. 22 of the books I read in Finnish were novels and three were graphic novels or comic books. This was an improvement compared to 2010. I read only 1 nonfiction book the whole year (!), Mind Gym -An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence by Gary Mack with David Casstevens, but that was an amazing read! I also read two excellent books of poetry: If Not, Winter -Fragments of Sappho and The Iliad by Homer. However, I chose to limit my best of 2011 list to novels, and in particular to novels that are available in English. And no rereads either, only novels I read for the first time.

So, here come's in alphabetical order:

Annabel by Kathleen Winter
Amazing story about an intersex child growing up in a remote Canadian village in the 1970s & 80s.

Birdbrain (orig. Finnish title Linnunaivot) by Johanna Sinisalo
A young couple is trekking in Australia when strange things start to happen.

Blackout by Connie Willis
Three historians from 2060 Oxford get stuck in WWII England. The story concludes in All Clear.

Huntress by Malinda Lo
Two girls and a prince travel to the court of the Fairy Queen to save the world. Along the way the girls fall in love with each other. This is Lo's second novel. Her first was Ash, the lesbian themed retelling of Cinderella, which I also read in 2011. I liked the world Lo created for Huntress (which is set some 500 years earlier, but in the same universe, as Ash) better, but warmly recommend both novels.

The Long Ships (orig. Swedish titles Röde Orm: Sjöfarare i västerled & Röde Orm: Hemma och i österled) by Frans G. Bengtsson
Orm, the redhaired viking, sails from one adventure to another all over the known world. Humorous, entertaining, a really fabulous historical novel!

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
A novel about the early years of slavery in America and about love, between men and women and between a mother and her children.

The Name of the Rose (orig. Italian title Il nome della rosa) by Umberto Eco
Medieval murder mystery set in a monastery with an extraordinary library.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
In a world where some magic is real a girl and a boy are set to compete against each other by their enchanter guardians. Only the young ones are not supposed to fall in love with each other...

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult
A beautifully told story about loss and love and gay rights.

Soulless by Gail Carriger
There are vampires and werewolfs in Britain, they are part of the VIctorian society and some of them work for Queen! And then there is Miss Tarabotti, a soulless human, whose touch neutralises the supernatural nature of vampires & werewolfs as long as she touches them. This is a first book in a series. A hilarious, delighful read!

What were your top 10 reads this year?

Christmas & Random Books from My Personal Library: M-O

2011-12-26T22:07:00.000+02:00

I'm back home after celebrating Christmas with my Dad. The weather this Christmas was rather peculiar. After two Christmases with lots -and I mean LOTS- of snow there were no snow in sight this year. That in itself is not unheard of, statistically every other Christmas in Helsinki is snowless, but this time the whole end of the year has been unusually warm, mostly a few degrees above freezing and it's snowed only twice, I think, and even then it was very little snow which melted almost immediately. And today we had a storm with highest winds in a decade! In some parts of the country the storm damaged powerlines and at the moment over 160 000 households are without electricity. Not fun at all. Luckily here we didn't have any powercuts.

Well, Christmas was fun. As I said I spent it with my Dad here in Helsinki. He only lives on the other side of the city, so I did not have to travel far. :) In the evening of Dec 23 we decorated the Christmas tree. I had bought a Bûche de Noël and then late in the evening of the 23rd I realised that I had forgot the cake home! We had to go and get it in the Christmas Eve morning.

Dec 24, Christmas Eve, is when we celebrate here in Finland. After driving to my place to get the Bûche de Noël we went to the cemetery to bring candles to the graves of our loved ones. Later we had a nice traditional Christmas dinner with some excellent 11 year old French wine I had been saving for some special occation, but then decided that this Christmas was special enough. :) Finnish Christmas dishes are pretty heavy, and after the meal both I and my Dad ended up taking a nap! :) I woke up just in time to walk to the beautiful 15th century St. Laurence Church for a midnight mass. Usually we open presents after dinner, but this year we did it only after I returned from the mass. So, we ended the Christmas Eve opening presents and watching the midnight mass from the Vatican on TV.

I had wished for All Clear by Connie Willis and I guess, I had been good, as I got it. :) I also got two vintage nonfiction books about French history.

Christmas Day was spent, as always, relaxing, reading, eating, watching TV, reading, eating, eating, reading... :) Today was a bit more active as we went to play tennis for two hours and that was just perfect after all that Christmas food!

It's been a while since I posted a Random Books post. So, here comes part M-O:

Motherless Daughters -The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman
If I were to make a list of the most important books in my life, this one would be on that list. Edelman, who herself lost her mother to cancer when she was seventeen, interviewed hundreads of motherless women and then wrote this book about what it means to grow up without a mother and how being motherless affects a woman's life. My mother died when I was 16 and although I thought I had recovered from the loss well, 10 years after her death my loss hit me very hard. It was devastating to realise that I could never talk to my mother as one adult to another, that she never got to know the grown up me. It was at that time that I read Motherless Daughters and what a revelation it was! I did not agree with everything Edelman wrote, but it was very healing to realise I was not alone in my thoughts, that it was something that was common to many motherless women. I don't know if I will ever reread Motherless Daughters. It's enough that it sits there on my bookshelf. It's enough that it exists. Edelman's book helped me really grow up and put my loss in perspective. It helped me heal.

The Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme
I have mentioned before that I have a soft spot for novels about nuns.:) If you were to read only one novel about nuns, this could be it (the other candidate for the spot would be In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden). And if we talk about movies then The Nun's Story with Audrey Hepburn as Sister Luke is the number one nun movie ever made!
The book tells the story of a strong-willed Belgian girl, Gabrielle, who becomes a nun in a nursing order some time during the first half of the 20th century. The depiction of pre Vatican II convent life makes fascinating reading and Gabrielle's road to become Sister Luke, her quest to become a good religious, her trials and tribulations, her doubts make an unforgettable story. This is a must reread book for me. :)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
I have already talked about Orlando here and am not going to repeat what I've already written. Suffice to say that Orlando is one of my all time favorite books.

I hope everyone had happy holidays!

My Day in Books

2011-12-23T11:17:00.003+02:00

Danielle over at A Work in Progress posted this fun meme invented by Cornflower Books and I simply could not resist to give it a try myself! I admit I love memes like this. :)

My Day in Books

I began the day with Mind Gym.
On my way to work I saw Zahra's Paradise
and walked by The White Garden
to avoid The Tomb of Zeus.
But I made sure to stop at The Night Circus.
In the office, my boss said, "Birdbrain"
and sent me to reseach The Calcutta Chromosome.
At lunch with Annabel
I noticed Ash
under The Tapestry of Love
then went back to my desk, Blameless.
Later, on the journey home I bought Radiance,
because I have The Night Watch.
Then settling down for the evening, I picked up The Oracle of Stamboul
and studied Einstein's Dreams
before saying good night to The House of Sleep.

Merry Christmas everyone!

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

2011-12-18T00:02:00.000+02:00

"With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me."

"I dream a dream that dreams back at me."

I have been aware of Toni Morrison's work since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. I even have an unread paperback copy of The Bluest Eye stacked away somewhere, but only now have I read my my first Tony Morrison novel, which ended up not being The Bluest Eye, but A Mercy.

A Mercy is a silm novel of just 167 pages, but it is amazing how much Morrison manages to cover in those pages! Set in late 17th century America this is a story about the early days of slave trade and slavery, but not only that. It is also a story about prejudice, religious, class and racial and it is a story about loss and about love, love between a man and a woman and love between a mother and her child.

The plot centers around the farm of an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, one Jacob de Vraak. Jacob is building a great house for himself and his wife and for a while employs a blacksmith, who is a free man of African origins and who also knows something about healing. When Jacob later dies and his wife Rebekka also gets ill, Rebekka sends slave girl Florens, who has fallen in love with the blacksmith, to find him and bring him back to the farm.

The story is told by a set of very interesting characters. There is Jacob de Vraak himself, who feels uncomfortable about slavery, yet accepts a young girl as a payment for a debt. There is Mistress Rebekka, Jacob's wife, who has lost one child after another. There is the Native American Lina, who lost her whole tribe to smallbox, a disease brought to the Americas by the Europeans or Europes as Lina calls them. Sorrow is a girl who had lived her early years aboard a ship and ends up pregnant for the first time when she's hardly in her teens. And then there is Florens. She is the slave girl given to Jacob de Vraak as payment. Florens has "hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady" as she has always insisted on wearing some kind of shoes or other protection in her feet. Florens is also able to read and write. She and her mother were secretly taught by a Catholic priest and when the story is told from Florens' point of view, it is told as written by her with her own grammar and vocabulary.

I have a soft spot for beautiful writing, for beautiful sentences. (See the quotes at the beginning of this post. So beautifully said! Both quotes are from p. 137.) That is why I love the works of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, two of my favorite writers. I fell in love with the writing in A Mercy from the start. It's too early to say whether Morrison might end up up there with Woolf and Winterson in my list of literary favorites, but I have a very good feeling that she might. However, I need to read a few more of her novels first to know for sure.

Here is an a wonderful broadcast "An Evening with Toni Morrison" from the George Washington University, Washington DC. Starting at about 00:30 she reads the first chapter of A Mercy.

Virtual Advent Tour: Declaration of Christmas Peace

2011-12-11T09:16:00.003+02:00

The most important day of Christmas here in Finland is the Christmas Eve. That is when we have our Christmas dinner. That is when Santa pays his visit and brings presents. That is when we visit the graves of the loved ones' who have passed on. And that is when, at 12 o'clock noon, the city of Turku, declares the Christmas peace.

The declaration of Christmas peace is an ancient tradition dating back to the 13th century. In the old times Christmas peace was a 20 day period starting from Christmas Eve when punishment for any crime committed during that time was more severe than during "ordinary time".

There was a horrible fire in Turku in 1827 when most of the town was burned down. Also the document where the declaration of Christmas peace was written on was lost to flames. After the fire a clerk working in the city administrative court wrote the declaration down from memory.

Since 1889 the declaration has been read by a city official from the balcony of Brinkkala Mansion. The square in front ot the house is always backed with hundreds of people and all over Finland people turn on their TVs to watch the declaration of Christmas peace live. The event has been broadcasted on radio since the 1930s, televised since 1983 and it has been possible to watch it live on the net since 2006. Since 1889 the declaration of Christmas peace hasn't had any juridical meaning, but as a lovely tradition it is still going strong.
The declaration goes like this (from the city of Turku's website):

"Tomorrow, God willing,
is the graceful celebration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour;
and thus is declared a peaceful Christmas time to all, by advising devotion and to behave otherwise quietly and peacefully,
because he who breaks this peace and violates the peace of Christmas by any illegal or improper behaviour shall under aggravating circumstances be guilty and punished according to what the law and statutes prescribe for each and every offence separately.
Finally, a joyous Christmas feast is wished to all inhabitants of the city."

Below you can watch the 2009 declaration of Christmas peace. The ceremony always starts with a hymn, lyrics of which are originally by Martin Luther. Then the declaration is read both in Finnish and Swedish, our two national languages. Afterwards the national anthem is sung and the ceremony ends with the honorary march of the Finnish Defence Forces. Actually, taken that it is all about living in peace some of the music sung and played is not very peaceful... That aside, this is a very special tradition.

Don't forget to visit today's other Virtual Advent Tour stops, too!

2012 Challenges

2011-12-08T18:22:00.010+02:00

I did extremely poorly with the challenges I joined this year. I read only one book for the TBR Pile Challenge and two for the One, Two, Theme Challenge. I completely forgot I had signed up for the Year of Feminist Classics!! How could I forget something like that!?! I did rather well with both the GLBT and Historical Fiction Challenges and also with the Steampunk Challenge when it comes to reading, but I failed miserably with reviewing and linking my reviews to the challenge sites. Well, it can only be onwards an upwards from here!

I do love challenges and I want to join some also in 2012. And, really, it can only be onwards an upwards from 2011! Here are some challenges I'm joining for 2012:

The TBR Pile Challenge hosted by Roof Beam Reader

Yes, I did not manage to read more than one little book from the list I made for this year's TBP Pile Challenge, but I love the idea of this challnege and I have more than enough books at home waiting for their turn and waiting and waiting...
The goal of this challenge is to read 12 books within 12 months from one's TBR pile. The books should have been waiting for their turn for at least a year. For more details click the link or the button above.

Hopefully I'll do better with this pile than I did with my choices in 2011:

1. Karen Blixen: Seven Gothic Tales (read 9.1.2012)
2. A.S.Byatt: The Children's Book
3. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (read 19.1.2012)
4. Lewis Crofts: The Pornographer of Vienna
5. Emma Donoghue: Still Life
6. Sarah Dunant: Secret Hearts
7. Madeleine Gagnon: My Name is Bosnia
8. Adolus Huxley: Brave New World
9. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
10. Kate Pulliger: Mistress of Nothing
11. H.G.Wells: Ann Veronica (read 28.1.2012)
12. Simon Scott: Pretty Birds
Alternates:
+Virginia Woolf: Jacob's Room
+Stefan Zweig: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman & The Royal Game

Back to the Classics 2012 Challenge hosted by Sara Reads Too Much

I've been craving for classics for some time now, so, this challenge is just the perfect excuse to read more classics! Like one would need an excuse...

The aim of Back to the Classics Challenge is to read one book from nine different categories i.e. all together 9 classics. Click the link or the button above for more details.

My list:

Any 19th Century Classic: Emile Zola: Women's Paradise
Any 20th Century Classic: Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Reread a classic of your choice: Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
A Classic Play: Aristofanes: Lysistrata or The Parliament of Women or Ibsen: A Doll's House
Classic Mystery/Horror/Crime Fiction: Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (read 19.1.2012)
Classic Romance: Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
Read a Classic that has been translated from its original language to your language -if your native language is NOT English, you may read any classic originally written in English that has been translated into your native language: Homeros: Odyssey
Classic Award Winner: F. E. Sillanpää: Hurskas kurjuus (Meek Heritage) (Sillanpää won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1939) or Ursula Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (Nebula Award 1969)
Read a Classic set in a Country that you (realistically speaking) will not visit during your lifetime: Anthony Hope: Prisoner of Zenda (Set in the fictional country of Ruritania)

Greek Classics Challenge hosted by Howling Frog

As I've already decided on reading Odysseus by Homeros in 2012 there's really no reason not to join this challenge! I'm joining on Sophocles -level (=1-4 books). I might also read Aristophanes and some other playwrites and maybe also some poetry. (Too bad I've read If Not, Winter by Sappho twice already...)

In addition to these challenges I will participate in the LGBT Challenge also next year and will aim to read 10-12 books for the challenge.

Teaser Tuesday 6.12.2011

2011-12-06T10:09:00.003+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm reading A Mercy by Toni Morrison. This beautifully written novel with multiple voices is set in the 1680s America. My teaser is from p. 46. Lina, a Native American servant in an Anglo-Dutch household, is puzzled when a blacksmith, a free man of African descent, arrives to the farm and looks her mistress straight in the eyes.

"An unfanthomable puzzle. Europes could calmly cut mothers down, blast old men in the face with muskets louder than moose calls, but were enraged if a not-Europe looked Europe in the eye. On the one hand they would torch your homes; on the other they would feed, nurse and bless you."

Today is Finland's Indenpendence Day. It's 94 years since Finland's Declaration of Independence. Happy birthday to my lovely country! :)

Blackout by Connie Willis

2011-12-03T22:22:00.002+02:00

Three Oxford historians Merope Ward, Michael Davies and Polly Churchill are eager to get on with their research. All three work on WWII related projects. Merope is going to study the blight of children evacuated from London, Michael wants to study war heroes and Polly the Oxford Street shopgirls during the Blitz. But this is 2060. Time travel is a reality and if you do research on WWII it means you will go there -literally. Only this time, it seems, the three time travellers just might get more than they bargained for. For a reason unknown to them their drops, or places where they should be able to step back to Oxford in 2060, stop functioning and they are stranded in three different places in 1940. Will they be able to locate each other? Will they find a way back -or rather forward- home? And what is going on as time travelling historians should not be able to change history only now there are indicators that something such might be happening... What if something the stranded historians did changed the course of the war?

Blackout is the third novel by Connie Willis I have read. My first was Doomsday Book, which I read in Finnish some time around 1999-2000. Last year I read To Say Nothing of the Dog. All three belong to Willis's time travelling novels and I have enjoyed every one of the three immensely. I like how ordinary travelling through time is made in her books and the idea of being able to do historical research back there and then is very tempting for me. I wish it were a reality! :)

Only a small part of the novel takes place in 2060. Most of it tells about the war years in England (mostly 1939-1940, but we also get a glimpse of 1944). If you don't like scifi but love historical fiction and have read this far of my post :), I must say don't let the time travelling part of this novel scare you away! Blackout is one of the most interesting historical novels set in WWII England I have ever read. Nightwatch by Sarah Waters is still my favorite, but Blackout comes second. My only complain (which is not a real complain at all as I'd love to continue reading about Merope/Eileen, Michael/Mike and Polly) is that Willis did not manage to put the whole story in one book, but ended writing a duology. What starts in Blackout ends in All Clear.

After I finished reading Blackout I would have liked to continue immediately with All Clear. My Blackout was a library book, but unfortunately my library did not have All Clear, at least not yet. I almost bought a copy, but this being the Christmas Season decided to be patient and wrote to Santa instead. :) So, now I hope that Santa will fulfill my wish -and that I will be reading my very own copy of All Clear this Christmas!

By the way, I'm participating in the 2011 Virtual Advent Tour. This is my second participation. Last year I shared with you a very special Christmas memory. We'll see what I my Advent Tour post will be about this year. My assigned date is Dec. 11.

Ash by Malinda Lo

2011-11-20T22:49:00.001+02:00

"'Please,' Ash said, 'I must do this alone. You do not need to concern yourself with me - I know you have more important things to attend to.'
Sadness washed over the huntress's face. 'Ash,' she said,'I would do what ever I could to help you. How can I make you understand that?'
'But why?' she could not help but ask. 'I am no one - a servant in a poor household. What could I give you?'
Kaisa seemed taken aback. 'You don't need to give me anything,' she said. 'I offer because I care for you. I thought you felt the same way.'
'I do,' Ash said, and as she said it she knew that it was true. It frightened her more than the dress did, more than the bargain she had struck with Sidhean. It made her skin flush and her hands feel cold, and she had to look away from the huntress, whose eyes were so green at that moment it was like looking at leaves on a tree. Below the balcony, in the ballroom. the dancers whirled in their dresses that had been spun from ordinary human-made looms." [p. 238]

Set in a medieval-like world where the old ways of greenwitches and tales of fairies are being replaced by the rational ways of the philosophers Ash by Malinda Lo is a retelling of Cinderella with a twist. Aisling, or Ash, looses her mother to illness when she's only 12. Her father soon remarries bringing home to Ash a stepmother and two stepsisters. When rather soon also her father dies, Ash is left living with people who never really liked her. Her stepmother makes Ash pay for her fathers financial losses and Ash is made to work as a servant in her stepmother's household. Life looks very grim and even though years pass Ash doesn't really get over losing her mother. Then she meets the mysterious Sidhean in the large woods near her stepmother's house and also befriends the king's huntress, Kaisa.

This is a world where the leader of the hunters has always been a woman. This is a world where different sexualities are perfectly normal. This is a world where fairies, even if the King has renounced the old ways, do in fact exist. And fairies can grant wishes, only they always want something in return. Ash makes a deal with Sidhean the fairy, but will it keep her from her true love?

And just like in Cinderella there will be a ball for the prince to find a bride, only Ash is not interested in the prince. It's someone else's eyes green as leaves that make her heart flutter and her cheeks flush.

I loved this book. I loved to learn about the world Lo had created and I especially loved the book's fairytale feel and its fresh take on an old story. And the love story was so sweet. Aww! :)

Teaser Tuesday 15.11.2011

2011-11-15T08:10:00.001+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm finally reading a book I have been wanting to read for a long time: Ash by Malinda Lo.

"When the memories came, Ash felt her heart constrict as if she were being bound by ropes so tight she would lose all breath. It hurt in a way she had never felt before, and she did not know how to make it stop." [p. 48]

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

2011-11-13T23:15:00.004+02:00

"Magic," the man in the gray suit repeats, turning the word into a laugh. "This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it. Look around you," he says, waving a hand at the surrounding tables."Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world, and what's worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them. They want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception, because to think it real would keep them up at night, afraid of their own existence." [p. 380]

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern has kept me up late in the evenings and well entertained for the past week or so. When I first read about this novel online I thought it interesting, a book I might want to read at some point, but when I saw the brand new hardback copy in our library, I simply had to borrow it! The book with its black-white-red colour scheme was simply so beautiful! I especially love that the edges of all the pages are dyed black. Dramatic and effective.

The Night Circus is a mysterious circus open only at night. It is also the set for a contest between two, young magicians Marco and Celia, or rather Marco and Celia are forced to compete with each other by his teacher and her father, both of whom are magicians or enchanters themselves. What the enchanters did not take into consideration is that Marco and Celia fall in love.

This is a very visual book. Not only as an object, but also the story is full of lovely descriptions of rooms, circus tents, clothes, people. Everything in the circus is black and white with a splash of red and silver, but there are also descriptions of other locales or scenery full of colour. Morgenstern has a way to paint with words and the pictures she creates are lovely. This is a book I would love to see turned into a film.

This is also a book with a great atmosphere. I liked the fact that it was not clear for a long time whether the circus was a good thing or a bad thing. About half way through I became a bit worried about the ending. I enjoyed the story so much that I started to worry whether the end would live up to the rest of the story. Luckily it did.

The Night Circus is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year. While I was reading it two other novels kept popping into my mind. I kept thinking that anyone who liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, might also like The Night Circus. The Night Circus is set to a later time period (1880s-1900s), but both are books where magic is real. Also, anyone liking Sepulrche by Kate Mosse, might like The Night Circus, as tarot cards are interstingly weaved into the story in both these novels.

Well, I have loads of interesting novels waiting for their turn at the moment! :) I already started Ash by Malinda Lo, a retelling of Cinderella where the girl falls for the king's huntress instead of the prince. Sounds interesting and the first 50+ pages of the novel have set a very fairytalish, medieval atmosphere, which I find perfect for the story.

Teaser Tuesday 1.11.2011

2011-11-01T20:19:00.001+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm finally reading a great classic I've meant to read for a very long time!

"Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded by the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicaple in him." [Moby Dick by Herman Melville, p. 42]

Teaser Tuesday 18.10.2011

2011-10-18T20:32:00.002+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I've been meaning to read something by Haruki Murakami for a long time and since reading The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto earlier this year I've been craving for more Japanese lit. Also, it's always nice to finally be in the mood for a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time. :) Thus, I'm reading Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami.
My teaser is from page 18. The male narrator, who is in love with Sumire, and Sumire, who is about to fall in love with a married woman 17 years her senior, talk about Sumire needing time and experience to become a great writer, and Sumire admits that she does not have any sexual desire.

"I don't know where your sexual desire has gone," I said.
"Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip and forgotten to come home."

Reading in Translation

2011-10-09T00:55:00.006+03:00

What's wrong with me? This week I've borrowed no less than two, that is 2, novels translated into Finnish from English!! LOL :) Yes, I'm joking :), but I do usually try to read books written in English in the original language. All of a sudden I felt, however, that I would like to read more in my mother tongue and, well, that is in fact a very good thing. I often feel I read too little in Finnish. I do have a couple of books by Finnish writers waiting for their turn, but somehow I now felt that it would be nice to read also some translations.

Over here the ratio between translated fiction and fiction written in Finnish is much better than the amount of translated fiction in the English speaking countries. That's one of the perks of Finnish being a small language spoken by only by 5+ million people. :) (The other side of the coin is of course that there're not so many translators who are able to translate Finnish books into other languages.) The translated/original fiction ratio used to be well over 50% in favour of translations, but nowadays, if I remember correctly, it's something like 50/50. Lots of fiction gets translated from English, but also from the Nordic languages (especially Swedish), German, French, Spanish, Russian etc. etc. The Organization of the Booksellers' Associations in Finland publishes monthly "What Finland reads" -lists in various categories, one of which is translated fiction. The latest list I could find is from August and it includes 8 books translated from English and 2 from Swedish. David Nicholls' novel One Day (in Finnish "Sinä päivänä") tops the list followed by the latest translated Sookie Stackhouse novel by Charlene Harris and a thriller by the Swedish writer Jens Lapidus. No 4 is Jean M. Auel's latest novel. As a curious sidenote, Auel is marketed here as Jean M. Untinen-Auel to tell the audience that she has Finnish roots. :) We are suckers for thinks like that. :)

But what about those translated novels I borrowed this week? One of them is Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. I read Ana's review of the book and it was also mentioned in a work-related lecture I attended earlier this week. I loved The Time Traveler's Wife and have been waiting for the right moment to read HFS. That moment seems to be now. :) I'm 1/3 through the book and loving it. Loving the translation, too, so it's all good. :) And the lovely thing is that even though I'm rather fluent in English it's still quicker to read in my own language. So, I'm hoping to get HFS read ASAP. ;) The other novel I borrowed is City of Thieves by David Benioff. It's a novel set during the siege of Leningrad and tells the story of two young men, who to avoid the grim fate of thieves i.e. execution, get a chance to earn their freedom, if they are able to find 12 eggs in a city that is starving and where eggs have not been seen for a long time. I also have at home the Finnish translation of a historical mystery by the French writer Romain Sardou. I've heard great things of this novel set in 1284 in Southern France. Unfortunately it seems that Sardou's novels have not been translated into English.

On other news I'm super excited about a short holiday trip I'm planning for December. I'm going to go to Slovenia (yes, I know, AGAIN :)), but this time to Maribor, the second largest town in the country and the European Capital of Culture in 2012 and I'm going to travel there through Vienna. I'm actually going to fly to Vienna and then continue by train, and at the end of my trip I'll spend one night in Vienna in order to have time to visit the Viennese Christmas Markets! I already booked my flight some time ago and today I booked my accomodation. Only thing left is to buy the train tickets and them I'm all set! My Slovene language course started again this week, so hopefully I will also be able to use a few more sentences in the local language while in Maribor.

But there's still two months until my trip. Before that there will be quite a few busy days at work (this is always the busiest time of the year), a few dance competitions to take part in, and hopefully many great books to read!

ps. And what about the photo in this post you might ask? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything I talked about! Lol! ;) Or it does have to do with travelling. That's the center of my lovely Helsinki photographed from the airplane window on my way back home from France last June. (Click the photo to enlarge)

The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh

2011-10-01T22:26:00.001+03:00

Amitav Ghosh is a prize-winning writer originally from Calcutta, India, whose work, especially the 2008 novel Sea of Poppies, has earned some very positive reviews around the blogosphere. For some time now I have wanted to read something by Ghosh. Sea of Poppies, the first book of a trilogy, would have been the logical choice, especially as I had already read some praising reviews and had also listened to a npr books podcast of Amitav Ghosh himself reading from the book. I actually did borrow Sea of Poppies from the library earlier this year, but did not get into reading it at the time. Then I saw The Calcutta Chromosome in a book store. "A novel of fevers, delirium & discovery" sounded very intriguing. As I'm trying to limit my book buying to the minimun I stayed strong and did not buy the book, I borrowed it from the library instead. :)

The Calcutta Chromosome is a curious book. Partly set in the near future, partly in the 1990s and in the last years of the 19th - earlier part of the 20th century, the novel weaves together people, events and destinies that initially seem unreleted or even random. In the future we have Antar, a clerk working for the International Water Council, who, through his computer, Ava, unearths an old ID card that once belonged to an old colleague of his, L. Murugan. Murugan went missing in 1995 and now Antar decides to find out what happened to him. In 1995 there is Murugan coming to Calcutta trying to find out more about Ronald Ross, a Nobel Prize -winning scientists who studied malaria at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. Also in the 1990s Calcutta are Sonali Das, a famous actress turned journalist, and her young colleague from the Calcutta magazine, Urmila Roy, and Phulboni, a famous writer. And then starting from the last years of the 19th century there are Ronald Ross and some other scientists trying to find what causes malaria. And there is even a certain Madame Salminen, a Finnish head of The Society of Spiritualists and the arch-rival of Mme Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society!

The Calcutta Chromosome doesn't easily fit into any category. Is it scifi, because part of the story is set in the future? Or maybe it's a historical novel? Or mystery? A book about a conspiracy? Aren't there even some paranormal aspects in the story? Ghosh mentions on his website that the novel was described as "a kind of mystery thriller" by the India Times, but I'm not even trying to categorize it! All I'll say is that in The Calcutta Chromosome Ghosh has weaved an intriguing story that keeps you reading on and on.

As this was my first Ghosh I have no idea whether this novel is somehow typical for him, but it surely made me want to read more by him, so much so, that book buying ban or not, a week ago on Saturday I went to downtown and bought myself a paperback copy of Sea of Poppies. :)

Tha Calcutta Chromosome also inspired me to continue with another book set in India, Leela's Book by Alice Albinia that I already mentioned in my Teaser Tuesday post, but more about Leela's Book later.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

2011-09-29T00:22:00.001+03:00

Anne Lister was an upper-class English woman, who was born in 1791 and died in 1840. During her life she kept a journal, partly written in code. Her journals in their entirety run to four milloin words. It was her intention to destroy the journals before her death, but she died prematurely while travelling in Russia and the journals were saved intact at Shipden Hall, her home. It was only in 1887 that John Lister, the last member of the Lister family to live in Shipden Hall, decided to publish some parts of the journals in a local paper. The coded passages were not yet been deciphered and their content was unknown. However, John Lister and his friend, Arthur Burrell, a schoolteacher and antiquarian from Bradford, decided to try and decipher the crypthand passages. What they found out shocked these Victorian gentlemen to the core. In the coded passages Anne Lister described very honestly her feelings towards and relationships with other women. Mr. Burrell said that the journals should be burned, but John Lister understood them to be an important historical document and instead of destroying them hid the journals behind a panel in Shipden Hall. Mr. Lister died in 1933. Some time after the house opened as a museum. Prior to the opening there was an inventory of all the Lister documents, including the journals. They, together with other documents, now made the transition from private to public property. A copy of the key to Anne Lister's code was placed in the hands of Halifax's chief librarian, who kept it locked in his safe. A few people wórked with the journals in the years to come, but they omitted any reference to homosexual activities from any published material. Then in the early 1980s Helena Whitbread, a Halifax local, started working with the Lister journals. It was she who would finally bring to light also the coded passages of the journals. (Source: Introduction by Helena Whitbread in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister)

The journals of Anne Lister are a very important part of not only lesbian history, but women's history in general. The entries published as The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister cover the years from 1816 to 1824. The journals make fascinating reading! The manners, friendships and feuds of a small English town told firsthand by someone who lived there make it all very real. And Anne Lister's honest accounts of her sexual and emotional relationships with women were endearing and hearbreaking, and sometimes frustrating :), and made me realise how similar to us people were back then. You might not like all of Anne Lister's ideas and opinions, she was actually terribly class-concious and held some very conservative views, but if you like your Jane Austen, you will also enjoy reading The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister. And for anyone interested in women's history, and especially lesbian history, this is an absolute must read.

There is also a movie titled The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister available on dvd. It's well worth watching and storyline follows the real journals pretty well, even if the moviemakers have changed some details in the story. The trailer is available on YouTube here.

I read this book for the GLBT Challenge.

Teaser Tuesday 27.9.2011

2011-09-27T07:03:00.001+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

After reading The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh I chose to read another book set in India: Leela's Book by Alice Albinia. With the elephant-headed god Ganesh as one of the narrators and a story inspired by the Mahabharata but set in modern day Delhi, this promises to be an interesting read!

My teaser is from p. 26. Ganesh has just entered the story as a narrator and wants to introduce himself:

"I am Ganesh, elephant-headed god, misshapen son of Lord Shiva and Parvati; beheaded by my father for protecting my mother's honour; abusively given this flippant elephant replacement; too-long-term resident of Kailash, that icy and unfriendly mountain where my family chose to live; befriended only by my faithful Rat (divine vahana, godly mode of transport). I freely admit that my sworn enemy is Vyasa, pedestrian composer of India's too-long epic, a poem called the Mahabharata, every word of which I wrote.
Even as a very young elephant, I could feel words building up inside me, pressing against the end of my trunk, fighting to get out - and all at once I would lose control, as a great trumpeting, ear-popping tirade came shooting out into the air to disturb the concentration of that self-obsessed meditation hillock they called Kailash."

Library Loot 25.9.2011

2011-09-25T15:18:00.004+03:00

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. This week Mr. Linky is at Marg's blog.

My library loot actually consists of two weeks worth of library books. And why is it that books I've reserved tend to arrive if not in pairs then in threesomes? :)

Alameddine, Rabih: I, The Divine
I read about this book on Eva's blog and it sounded so interesting that I put a hold on it the very next day. It is a story told in first chapters, which made me very curious of how such a technique would work in a novel.

Albinia, Alice: Leela's Book
Leela is moving back to Delhi after years living in New York. Her return will unsettle many lives. The book is said to be "a tale of contemporary Delhi that crosses religious and social bounderies, reaching back into the origins of Mahabharata itself". I'm staying in India in my reading after finishing The Calcutta Chorosome by Amitav Ghosh and have just started this book. This far it feels very promising. If you have the elephant-headed god Ganesh as one of the narrators, how it could not be interesting? ;)

Blasim, Hassan: The Madman of Freedom Square
This is a collection of short stories by a writer-filmmaker originally from Iraq, who now lives in Finland.
The collection was published by a British publisher, but I heard just a few weeks ago that it will also be translated into Finnish. Blasim originally wrote the stories in Arabic. The English translation is by Jonathan Wright. From the back cover: "Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readres' expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. ... Together these stories afford us a rare glimpse of Iraq from the inside." This little collection will probably be my next read after I finish reading Leela's Book.

King, Rachael: The Sound of Butterflies
Maybe I read abouth this book in some blog? Don't remember exactly. Anyway, it's a historical novel set in 1903. Thomas Edgar, a collector of butterflies, is asked to take part in an expedition to the Amazon. When he returns, he is a changed man and has been rendered mute by what he has experienced during the expedition. The book is said to be "a story of passion and beauty, of brutalite and murder masked by surface spendour." Intriguing, isn't it?

Kneale, Ruth: You Don't Look Like a Librarian
A must read for any librarian. Just because of the title. When I got the book, I showed it to my boss, and she said to me: "Well, you don't look like a librarian!" :) The book is subtitled "Shattering stereotypes and creating positive new images in the Internet age".

Küng, Dinah Lee: A Visit from Voltaire
A comic novel about an American mother-of-three in Switzerland. She gets a visitor who offers to cure all that is bothering her and her family members and who claims to be the Voltaire, the 18th-century philosopher! Comic novels are not really my cup pf tea, but this sounded so intriguing that I want to give it a try.

Miller, Andrew: Pure
A few years before the French revolution a young engineer is asked to demolish the oldest cemetery in Paris. What starts as a "year of bones" for him, turnes out to become "a year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendships, too. Of desire. Of love..." I have no idea whether I will love or hate this book! We'll see...

Moi, Toril: Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory
I borrowed this classic, because I want to read what Moi says about Virginia Woolf.

Shafak, Elif: The Forty Rules of Love
Ella Rubinstein needs a new challenge in her life and takes a job as a reader to a literary agent. Her first job is to read a novel by Aziz Z. Zahara, a mysterious Scottish writer, whose book tells about the famous 13th-century poet Rumi. Ella is fascinated and starts a correspondence with Zahara. I've been thinking of reading this one for a long time now. Hopefully this time I'll finally get to it!

What treasures did you bring home from the library this week?

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

2011-09-22T01:12:00.001+03:00

I first heard about Banana Yoshimoto back in 1995 when her novel Kitchen was translated into Finnish. I read Kitchen and liked it a lot. It was different from what I usually read at the time. It might also have been the first book written by a Japanese author that I ever read. A year later N.P. came out in Finnish. I read that, too, and liked it, but somehow, after that, I kind of lost contact with her writing. It might have been because after those two no others were translated into my language and back then I usually only read in English books that were originally written in English. Then some time ago, during my three month hiatus from blogging, I was lurking on some of my favorite book blogs and stumbled upon Eva's thoughts about The Lake. The book sounded intriguing and the cover looked so cool :), and I could get it from the library right way. I simply had to borrow it.

I was not disappointed. The Lake is a love story, a story about loss and a story about healing. Chihiro is a young woman, who has recently lost her mother. She spends a lot of time staring out of her window and one day she notices a young man across the street doing just the same. They meet and form a somewhat hesitant relationship. Nakajima, the young man in question, seems emotionally very fragile and soon Chihiro understands that something horrible have happened to Nakajima in the past.

Reading The Lake made me remember all over again why I liked Kitchen and N.P. so much. Yoshimoto is a wonderful writer! Her style is simple and pure, like Japanese architecture, yet very vivid, and in it's simplicity it is also something very familiar to me as a Finn. We too like simplicity. I read her description of the lake and it's surroundings and not only could I see the picture in my head very vividly but her words also made me think about Finnish nature, very different from Japanese landscapes, but somehow I still felt a connection.

With its 188 pages The Lake is a quick read, but you might not want to read it too quickly. It's better to give the story some time. It deserves that. Reading the book slowly makes you appreciate the beauty of Yoshimoto's writing better. She has the enviable skill to say a lot with very few words. I must say that I enjoyed every page of the book. I loved the writing and I think the story was very well constructed. The relationship between Chihiro and Nakajima was portrayed perfectly. This was no sugarcoated romance, this was real life, and yet all the more sweeter in all its angst and hesitations.

After sort of a reading slump I was happy to find such a well-written, engaging novel to get myself back on track with my reading. The only problem is, now I want to read more Banana Yoshimoto and my TBR list is already a mile long... :)

Teaser Tuesday 20.9.2011

2011-09-20T07:05:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I participated in Teaser Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I have read so many praising blog posts about Amitav Ghosh, especially about his historical saga Sea of Poppies and I've been meaning to read something by him for some time now. I even had Sea of Poppies home from the library once, but at that point did not get to reading it due to other more urgent reads. Then his earlier novel The Calcutta Chromosome, subtitled "a novel of fevers, delirium & discovery" started to intrigue me even more than Sea of Poppies and I decided to start my journey to Ghosh's novels from this earlier one published in 1996. This far I'm really enjoying my read. My teaser is from p. 22.

"He remembered it now - he had typed it in himself, just a few years ago.
Subject missing since August 21 1995, it said, last seen Calcutta, India."

ps. I added a 100 Things about Me -page to this blog. Take a look if you want to learn a few more things about me. :)

I'm Back with Some More Books from My Personal Library: J-L

2011-09-18T19:29:00.002+03:00

Well, I totally fell off the blogging wagon this time! It's been almost three months since I posted anything else than updates on my Books Read in 2011 -page. It was never my intention to go on a break, much less for three months and unannounced. Sorry about that, blogger buddies! When I wrote that Teaser Tuesday post back in June I had just started my summer holidays and was actually looking forward to more time for blogging! I ended up getting into kind of a reading slump. I started reading a 500+ page book in Swedish. Finland is a bilingual country and we learn the other official language (in my case Swedish) at school. I speak and write Swedish well enough, but my English is much better, and even though I occasionally read magazines in Swedish I don't very often attempt reading books in that language. This junkster, however, sounded interesting enough that I jumped to the task of tackling it in the original language, especially as it is not available either in Finnish or in English. And I was pleasently surprised as reading the book was much easier than I had thought, until I faced my usual problem with junksters -I got bored of reading the same book day after day and wanted to read something else instead. And then it took a while to find anything that really felt the right choice. Combine that with the fact that during my summer holidays I played tennis like crazy :), spent a week in my summer paradise in Slovenia :) :), and towards the end of my holidays also was back dancing after a three week holiday from practising -and that the weather was mostly lovely- and you hopefully understand why I did not spend much time in front of my laptop blogging.

But, somehow after a while it is so easy to fall off the practise of blogging and that happened to me. After the holidays I simply did not seem to ever have time to write a post. I did find that perfect read after some searching (actually a whole series of them, but more about that later), but still it seemed quite a big task to write about those reads. It was not that I did not want to blog or write about my reading I just simply never seamed to have enough time for that. In the spring I ofter blogged late at night, but that's not very wise if you have to be up at 6.30 next morning! So, now I'm trying to work up a better system for when to blog. Anyway, long story short, I'm back! :)

Here's a few more books from my bookshelves:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The first adult novel I ever read twice. My parents owned two different editions of Jane Eyre in Finnish and after reading one of them I wanted to see if the text was excactly the same in the other. It was. :) I was maybe ten or eleven at the time. I have since read the book also in English. Jane Eyre is one of my all time favorite novels, a book I know I will turn back to also in the future. The funny thing is, and those who have followed by blog for some time might remember this, while I love Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte I hate Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and have not been able, in spite of numerous tries, ever to finish WH.
As you can see from the photo I own a copy of The Great Novels of the Bronte Sisters which consists of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Gray.

Kate. The Woman Who Was Katherine Hepburn by William J. Mann
I'm cheating a bit here. :) I wanted this series to be about books I own and have read. I have not read this biography of actress Katherine Hepburn, said even to be the definitive one, from cover to cover, just browsed it, but it was the only book in English that I seem to own the title of which starts with a K! Anyway, Katherine Hepburn (along with Lauren Bacall) is my favorite actress from the golden years of Hollywood. I own a bunch of her films on dvd and have watched them numerous times and I will also read this biography in the future. And it has been a dream of mine for years now to one day own a pair of tailor-made "Katherine Hepburn pants"! :) That woman had style!

Love Poems by Brian Patten
I bought this little volume in England all the way back in 1989. I did not know anything about Patten or his poetry, but I happened to browse the book in a bookstore and noticed one poem in particular that made quite an impression on me. It's called A Small Dragon and it's still one of my all time favorite poems. I'll leave you today with the poem and a promise that it will not take another three months for me to post again.

A Small Dragon by Brian Patten

I've found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it's damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can't provide.

It made a nest among the coal,
not unlike a bird's but larger,
it is out of place here
and is quite silent.

If you believed in it I would come
hurrying to your home to let you share my wonder,
but I want instead to see
if you yourself will pass this way.

Teaser Tuesday 28.6.2011

2011-06-28T00:48:00.001+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

My teaser comes from Annabel by Kathleen Winter.

"After the service, Jacinta, Treadway, the uncles and aunts and Thomasina moved to the font, and Reverend Taft asked the parents to name the child.
'Wayne,' Treadway said.
It's the last moment, Jacinta thought, of my daughter's existence." [p. 62]

Random Books from My Personal Library: G-I

2011-06-26T00:46:00.001+03:00

It is Midsummer Day here in Finland and Helsinki is very quiet. Everything is closed and many locals have travelled to their summer cottages and left the city for tourists. :) I'm here, though. I'm so not a summer cottage person! Yesterday, Midsummer Day's Eve, which is a public holiday, was also the first day of my summer holidays and I and a friend played tourists and took a little cruise in the evening to see the traditional bonfires on some of the islands just in front of Helsinki. The weather was nice, we met a nice American lady onboard and had interesting conversations with her, and the bonfires and the sunset looked beautiful. It was a very nice evening!

Now I have four weeks of freedom to look forward to! :)

Here are three more books from my shelves to continue with my Random Books series. It's titles starting with G, H and I this time, one of non-fiction, poetry and science-fiction each.

Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism by Margaret H. McFadden
This is a book I read with great interest as soon as it was published back in 1999. As some of you might remember I have an MA in History and the themes discussed in this book are spot on what I'm most interested in when it comes to women's history: the networks and connections and friendships that formed between women's rights activists across borders during the first wave of "feminism". I write "feminism" because the word became common usage only later. Anyway, I'm not going to go to that discussion here. :)
For me Golden Cables is one of the fundamental works about the 19th century women's movements. What makes it extra interesting is that McFadden used Finnish Alexandra Gripenberg as one of the examples about women well-connedted in the international women's movement. And the title of the books comes from the words of another Finn, Alli Trygg-Helenius, spoken at the 1888 meeting of the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
I first read about this edition of Sappho's poetry in Amanda's post on her blog The Zen Leaf and immediately wanted to buy myself a copy. This book includes not only the smallest fragments of a few words, but in addition to Carson's translations the original Greek versions are included. Because so few of Sappho's poems have survived, only one in its entirity, If Not, Winter makes intriguing reading. One cannot help but wonder what has been there between those bits and pieces that have survived the centuries. I love this book and it will surely be one that I will return to regularly in years to come.

The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett
Illyria, is a city state founded as a refuge from the religious fundamentalism that swept away the nations of the 21st century. It is a place of logic and reason, but maybe Illyria is just as judgemental and close-minded in its belief in rationalism than the faith-based societies surrounding it... Illyria uses humanlike machines, syntecs, for various lower ranked jobs and there are also syntects built for sex. George Simling's problems start when he falls in love with Lucy, a syntec sex worker. When Lucy shows signs of primitive conciousness, a malfuncion from the point of view of the Illyrian authorities, her silicon mind should be erased and reset, but for George that would be murder. He choses to flee Illyria with Lucy and together they enter the religious Outlands where Lucy has to pass as human as robots are there seen as demonic abominations. I really enjoyed this book. Beckett's alternative Europe was inventive and intriguing and the questions raised in the story about the boundaries of humanity made one think.

Teaser Tuesday 21.6.2011

2011-06-21T07:30:00.002+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm reading Robert Fagles' wonderful translation of Homer's The Iliad. My teaser is from page 134.

"And Helen the radience of women answered Priam,
"I revere you so, dear father, dread you too-

if only death had pleased me then, grim death,

that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child,

my favorite, now full-grown,

and the lovely comradeship of women my own age.

Death never came, so now I can only waste away in tears.""

What are you reading?

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

2011-06-20T00:17:00.000+03:00

I never intended taking a six week break from blogging, but somehow it just happened. I was very busy at work in May. Then in the end of May/beginning of June I spent 10 days on a combined dance competition and holiday trip in England and France. First I took part in the British Open Championships in Blackpool with Mr. Dance Partner and then I continued to Paris to watch some tennis. It was a great trip! We did well in the competition (got into the 25 couple quarter final out of 155 couples) and Paris, well, Paris was as fun as ever. :) But all that resulted in my not blogging at all for all these weeks. I have been reading, though! :)

Undoubtedly my best read during these past six weeks was a reread. I had been thinking of rereading all Sarah Waters novels in chronological order, but when the members of my reading group chose The Night Watch as our May read, I was more than happy to start the rereading not from Tipping the Velvet after all, but with this wonderful novel set during and after WWII. First time around Tipping the Velvet was my favorite and The Night Watch a close runner-up and I was excited to see what I would think of the book when reading it the second time.

I surely was not dissapointed! The first time I read The Night Watch back in 2006 I loved the character of Kay most -and I still did. :) But I think I was able to appreciate the structure of the book more this second time around. In five years I had forgotten a lot of the plot, but still remembered enough to realise how brilliantly Waters really had plotted the story. The first part set in 1947 sets a lovely, bittersweet tone, and I really could not get to the end fast enough to relearn where it all began in 1941. For those of you, who have not read The Night Watch, as you might have already guessed, the storyline moves backwards from 1947 to 1944 and finally to 1941.

What I loved the most, however, was the writing. Waters has a great eye for details. That's something she has in common with another one of my favorite authors Sofi Oksanen, allthough their books otherwise are very different. All in all, I could praise The Night Watch all night long, but I'll just add one more thing: of all the novels I've read dealing with war, the bombing scenes (or the scenes depicting the moments after a bombing) in The Night Watch are the most impressive.

Now I'm planning on taking Tipping the Velvet with me when I go for holidays. (Tipping the Velvet and the Robert Fagles' translation of The Odyssey :))

I'll leave you tonight with a quote from The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk. This is how The Night Watch effected me:

"Novels are second lives. Like the dreams that the French poet Gérald de Nerval speaks of, novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing." [p. 1]

Library Loot 1.5.2011

2011-05-01T19:42:00.000+03:00

I did pretty well with the previous library loot I posted about. Only one book went back to the library unread, so, here's hoping that this one is going to be another good loot! Four out of six of the books are in fact novels I have had my eye on for quite some time and decided on finally borrowing, two (the two first ones from left in the picture above) were surprise finds. I'm pretty excited about all these books and cannot wait to get reading them. If only there were more hours in a day...

Mercy at Midnight by Lois Hoadley Dick
This is a historical novel about Mathilda Wrede (1864-1928). She was a Finnish noblewoman, who become a prison visitor and dedicated her life to helping prisoners and improving the conditions in prisons. It is always interesting to read a novel about Finland or about someone Finnish by a non-Finnish author. Yes, we Finns are always curious about what others think about us! :)

Ravel by Jean Echenoz
This small book by the reknown French author tells the story of the ten last years (1927-1937) in the life of composer Maurice Ravel. I already read this one and it's wonderful! This was the first book by Echenoz I've read and I simply loved his style.

The Night of the Mi'raj by Zoë Ferraris
I have read so much good things about this book and also about her next one City of Veils that it's high time I borrowed this one. I actually had City of Veils at home earlier this year, but decided that I want to read The Night of the Mi'raj (Published as Finding Nouf in the US) first. Both Ferraris' books are murder mysteries set in Saudi Arabia.

Electricity by Victoria Glendinning
This is a novel set in Victorian England. Electricity is still something new. Charlotte Mortimer marries a young engineer who is commissioned to wire the country estate of a gentleman. This novel is said to bring to light "the Victorian era as a time of scientific discovery, spiritualism, and shifting relations between the sexes." Sounds interesting!

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
If there is somewhat of a theme when it comes to all other books in my loot (women's place, women's rights or if not that then historical fiction) Stamping Butterflies is something completely else. Grimwood is one of my favorite SF writers. I've especially enjoyed his Pashazade-Effendi-Felaheen -trilogy. I guess I'm a sucker for a well crafted alternate history story anyday and his worlds are brilliantly crafted. Stamping Butterflies starts with someone attempting to assassinate the US president. The assassin is caught, but who is he? Is the answer perhaps to be found somewhere else in time altogether? This novel is said to weave together cultures thousands of years apart and to paint a portrait of a ruler and an assassin, both locked inside each other's dreams. Very intriguing!

Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn
Connie Callaway is torn between whether to stay with the law-abiding suffragists or join the militant suffragettes when during a family holiday she is introduced to cricketeer Will Maitland. This is said to be a "deeply affecting story of love, sacrifice, suffrage and country cricket" set in the second decade of the 20th century. The time period and the fact that Connie is working for women's suffrage got me interested in this novel. I almost bought myself a copy, but then noticed that our library has one, so borrowed it instead. I have very high expectations for this novel, so we'll see whether it lives up to them or not.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire of The Captive Reader and Marg of The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. If you want to join Library Loot, Mr. Linky is at Claire's blog this week, just click here to get right there.

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

2011-04-25T22:16:00.001+03:00

I've spent today, the last day of the Easter holidays and a beautiful spring day at that, scooped up inside with first one and then another book. Yes, I should have at least gone for a walk. Yesterday I did in fact plan, if somewhat halfheartedly, to go running today, but actually I do not feel quilty for not venturing out today. Both books I finished reading today were very nice reads and after taking part in a dance competition in Tallinn, Estonia on Saturday and taking the boat back home yesterday I felt like being compately lazy today was the right thing to do! :)

The first book I finished today was Ever After by Sandra Freeman, a sequal to her earlier novel The Other Side which I read back in March. I'm planning on reviewing both novels in a later post. Today, however, I would like to talk about the other novel I spent most of today reading: Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay.

What drew me to reading this book in the first place was the fact that it was about a ballerina. Though dance sport became my thing, the first dance style I ever loved was ballet. And even though I stopped taking ballet classes when I was 15-16 years old and moved over to dance sport, to standard and latin american dances, I've always kept my interest in ballet, too. I love watching ballet and I love reading novels about the world of ballet. Thus, it was with high hopes I requested Russian Winter from the library.

Russian Winter tells the story of Nina Revskaya, a former star of the famous Bolshoi Ballet. Now old and ill, forced to spend her days in a wheel chair, she decides to auction her remarkable jewellery collection. During the process her past starts to catch up with her.

I liked this novel very, very much. The story moves between the past (mostly late 40s - early 50s Stalinist Russia) and the present and is told not only by Nina's reminiscences, but also from the point of views of Grigori Solodin, a Russian professor who owns a piece of amber jewellery that seems to belong to a set owned by Nina Revskaya and who's own history may be intertwined with the famous ballerina's, and of Drew Brooks, a young associate director at the auction house about to auction the Revskaya collection. Drew's Russian-Finnish ancestry was a nice surprise for me as a Finn, although it also provided the one bit of the narrative I found hard to believe. In the novel Drew's Russian grandfather, after he's released from a forced labour camp somehow manages to enter Finland unnoticed. Drew's future grandmother then finds him walking along a road and offers him a lift and a place to stay. That something like this would have happened in Finland just a short time after a war against the Russians seems very unlikely, but I do give the author her literary freedom of course. :)

I loved all the stories told in this novel. Though I must say, I might have liked Grigori Solodin's story even more than Nina Revskaya's. All in all this was a great read. It was also refreshing to read a partly historical novel about Russia that was not about the revolution or the second world war, but set in the years before and after WWII.

Here's a picture I took from my hotel room balcony towards the city centre in Tallinn.

Teaser Tuesday 12.4.2011

2011-04-12T19:08:00.005+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm reading The Tea Lords by Hella S. Haasse. This is the first book I've ever read by this famous Dutch author and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. My teaser is from p. 54. Rudolf Kerkhoven arrives in the Dutch East Indies i.e. Java. The year is 1871.

"Never in his life had Rudolf felt such profound relief as when the Telanak dropped anchor in the roadstead of Batavia. The long sea voyage, so eagarly anticipated as a gripping adventure, had turned out to be exceedingly tedious: 107 1/2 days of being confined to the cramped spaces reserved for passangers on deck and in the midship, cheek by jowl by a motley assortment of individuals whom he could not imagine ever consorting with of his own free will."

Can you imagine over 100 days at sea?!

Random Books from My Personal Library: D-F

2011-04-10T23:23:00.006+03:00

Continuing the series of posts introducing some random books from my bookselves:

Daughter of Amun by Moyra Caldecott
This is a historical novel about the female farao Hatsepsut who ruled Egypt c. 1479-1458 BC. I bought this book many years ago, then completely forgot all about it! I love Egyptology and really anything to do with Ancient Egypt and hope to finally read this book this year. Daughter of Amun is one part of Caldecott's Egyptian sequence, which also includes a novel about Tutankhamun and his wife called Tutankhamun and the Daughter of Re and another book about Akhenaten called Akhenaten: The Son of the Sun. Daughter of Amun is the first book in this series. This novel was originally published in 1989 and then republished in 2000 with the name Hatsepsut: The Daughter of Amun. My copy is a 1989 paperback.

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf dedicated Orlando to Vita Sackville-West and after reading Orlando for the first time in my early twenties I wanted to read something by the writer the book was dedicated to. I found a copy of The Edwardians in the Helsinki University Campus Library and simply loved the writing as I had loved Woolf's writing in Orlando. The Edwardians has a very clever beginning with Sackville-West pondering what would be the best point to "interrupt into the life" of her hero. It is one of my alltime favorite beginnings in a novel. :) The Edwardians is a story about Sebastian and Viola, brother and sister with an aristocratic background. The time: July 1905. I loved this story so much that I later bought myself a copy.

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey
I very seldon read fantasy novels. Somehow the maybe most typical fantasy world of dwarfs, elfs, and human warriors has never appealed to me much. (I even found Lord of the Rings boring, sorry LOTR fans! ) But every now and then I find a fantasy novel or a novel with fantasy elements that I like. The Fire Rose is one such novel. In 1905 Rosalind Hawkins, a medieval scholar from a fine Chigaco family, is forced to cut her education short and take a position as a governess in San Francisco, when it turns out that before his death her father has speculated away the family fortune. Rosalind's employer Jason Cameron turns out to be very mysterious. He doesn't allow Rosalind to see himself and communicates with her through a speaking tube. Cameron is in fact an alchemist, who has attempted the old French werewolf transformation, only something went wrong. This was a very nice read, a bit different take to the beauty and the beast story.

Yesterday I visited the National Library. I hadn't been there for a while and had managed to put my card into such a good place that I could not find it at all! I had to pay 5 euros for a new one. That's 2 euros more than in the public library. Anyway, I love the National Library and have many fond memories of many, many hours spent there during the years I studied for my university degree, so I was happy to pay to get a new card. I ended up coming home with ten books, mostly women's studies / history of women, plus a few books about literature. Add those to all the novels I have borrowed from the public library and I think I'm in deep trouble... ;)

Library Loot 8.4.2011

2011-04-08T23:42:00.003+03:00

It's been a while since my last Library Loot post and this one shoud actually be called Half a Library Loot :) as I also got a couple of Finnish novels I had reserved. As those novels, unfortunately, are not available in English I will concentrate on the English language novels I borrowed this week. I will also feature one novel I borrowed a bit earlier.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian
I'm yet to read anything by this Nobel Prize for Literature winner and when I noticed this slim book of stories on a self at work today I just had to take it home with me. I love the name of the book. :) And the cover is very beautiful, too.

The Tea Lords by Hella S. Haasse
I learned about this Dutch writer while spending a week on a study trip in the Amstardam public library in 2008 and have been thinking of reading something by her ever since. It was really the name of this novel caught my eye. This is a story set in the Dutch East Indies and takes place between 1873-1918. The book is said to transport the reader "to the East Indies, into a colonial culture that rests on the quiet submission of the host population, the orderly haughtiness of the colonists and the back-breaking work done by both; a world with its own rich, distinctive scent". I borrowed this a few weeks ago, but wanted to mention it here, because it seems really interesting. I'm trying to manage and read the book before the loan period ends next week as somebody has reserved it.

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay
This book just came out also in Finnish translation (and I like the Finnish cover much better than the cover of the English paperback edition I have at home), but I decided to read it English. It tells the story of Nina Revskaya, who once was a star of the Bolshoi Ballet in the Soviet Union. Now old and infirm and living in Boston Nina has hidden dark secrets for decades. When she decides to auction her jewellery collection Drew Brooks, a young associate director of the auction house, and Grigori Solodin, a Russian professor, find themselves facing a life-changing literary mystery. I'm always interested in books that have anything to do with ballet. It was the first dance form I ever fell in love with (at the tender age of 7 :)) and I took ballet lessons for almost 10 years before I moved on to ballroom dancing.

The Declaration by Gemma Malley
"My name is Anna and I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't exit. But I do. It's not my fault I'm here. I didn't ask to be born. But that doesn't make it any better that I was. They caught me early, though, which bodes well" Those sentences printed on the back cover totally bought me over. The story is set in 2140. By having her Anna's parents have broken the rule about not having any children and now Anna must pay for her parents disobedience.

Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Márai
Who was it that mentioned this slim novel on her blog recently? Ah yes, it was Eva on her library loot last week. This novella seemed something I, too, wanted to read, so I put a hold on it. It is a story about what happens when the love of Esther's life returns twenty years after leaving her.

I'm still reading The Lost Kings by Bruno Hare and am really enjoying the book. I also started readingnd Gym, a really wonderful book by Gary Mack & David Casstevens about mental training. But if I indend to read The Tea Lords before it's due date, I really should put those books aside for a few days and concentrate on Haasse...

What was your best library find this week?
To join Library Loot visit Marg's blog The Adventure's of an Intrepid Reader.

Teaser Tuesday 5.4.2011

2011-04-05T07:46:00.001+03:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

My teaser is from p. 23 of The Lost Kings by Bruno Hare.

"I was going to him in order to sell a collection of rare and beautiful watches so that I could follow the trail left by another, valued so far only by death. It felt marvellous."

Random Books from My Personal Library: A-C

2011-04-02T21:43:00.002+03:00

What a lovely Saturday! I spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon reading the last 300 pages of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. What a brilliant book!

Now I've already started with The Lost Kings by Bruno Hare. It promises to be "a stirring tale of adventure and derring-do set on the far frontiers of [the British] empire". We'll see how I'll like the book.

But let's move to today's post. I have been thinking for a while that it would be nice to start a series of posts and have now come up with two ideas actually. I will start today with random books from my personal library. In this series I will feature books from my bookshelves, but only such books I have not already posted about. Most will probably be books I have read pre book blogging, but there might also be some I have read since I started this blog and have not reviewed or talked about yet. And to make it all even more fun (at least for myself:)) I will choose books in alphabetical order. In this first post in the series I'll introduce three novels titles of which start with A, B or C.
Let's get rolling then:

A:
Affinity by Sarah Waters

Set in 1870s London Affinity begins with Margaret Prior starting her charitable work as a prison visitor. In Millbank prison she meets inmate Selina Dawes, a disgraced spiritualist, and little by little becomes infatuated with her. But is Selina a genuine spiritualist and an innocent victim or a fraud and quilty of the crimes she is accused of? Does she love Margaret or is she just using her for her own purposes? Does magic and ghosts really exist?

This was Waters second novel after the fabulous first one Tipping the Velvet and while I enjoyed reading Affinity I thought it seemed a typical second novel, not quite as good or interesting as the first one. Later I saw the BBC adaptation of Affinity and loved it. I have been thinking that maybe I should reread the book. I have the feeling I'm going to like it more the second time around.

Waters is one of my favorite authors. I have read and own all her five novels. Waters visited the Helsinki Book Fair a few years ago and I was lucky enough to get my copy of Fingersmith signed by her!

B:
Boating for Beginners by Jeanette Winterson

Another favorite author, another second novel! Winterson's first novel was the kind of autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Boating for Beginners was published only three months after Oranges. Winterson calls it comic book with pictures (there are some funny Assyrian-style drawings in the book) and says it was never intended as a second novel. Boating for Beginners was very much an atypical read for me, but it was also funny and innovative and clever.

Boating for Beginners is a surreal retelling of the Book of Genesis. And the name of the novel? In the book Boating for Beginners is a successful pleasure boat company run by a little, fat man called -you guessed it- Noah! :)

Hmm, if I reread this, would it qualify as another Mesopotamia novel for the One, Two, Theme Challenge? :)

C:
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

The "indomitable product of the Victorian age", Amelia Peabody, starts her Egyptian adventures with this novel. What follows is book after book of mummies and villains and archeological excavations. There is already 19 books in the series that spans from 1884 to the 1920s.

I've enjoyed every one of Peters' novels I have ever read. When it come to the Amelia books I especially enjoy the humour, and the setting, mostly Egypt, is a huge plus. Also, I love how Amelia and Emerson's son Ramses grows from a really annoying, extremely precocious brat to a dashing hero of the later novels.

Well, that was it this time. I'll continue with the next installment (D-F) next week. Now I'll retreat back to reading The Lost Kings.

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

2011-03-28T22:36:00.000+03:00

As I've mentioned all too often :), all 2011 I've been rather behind with reviewing the books I've read this year. All in all it has never been my policy to review all the books I read. Firstly some of the books I read are not available in English and secondly sometimes I just don't feel I have enough to say about the book or simply don't feel like writing a review, and that's fine. :) When I started this blog back in 2009 I stated that I will only talk about books I like. I must admit I have not quite lived up to that, but maybe that was a bit unrealistic to say in the first place, because, even though I have never had any qualms to drop a book I don't like at any point, it's just natural that there have and will be books that I, for one reason or another, do finish even if I didn't especially like them. This year, however, there have been books that I liked quite a bit and have had every intention to review, but have not had the opportunity to do so yet. The first book I finished this year was one such read.

I actually started reading The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton during the Christmas holidays. In the picture of me taken at Christmas I posted at the bottom of the post here, you can see The Tapestry of Love on the table.

The writer of The Tapestry of Love, Rosy Thornton, is the author of four novels, first one of which was published in 2006. Her latest, The Tapestry of Love, was published in hardback in July 2010. The paperpack came out in October. I was kindly given the novel by the author.

The Tapestry of Love is about a year in life of Catherine Parkstone, a 40-something English woman, who moves to the Cévennes mountains in France in order to start a new life as a tapestry maker and a seamestress. Life in a tiny community, however, is not always easy, neither is living in a foreign country, or starting a business.

I found The Tapestry of Love a very adult story. Catherine has a very civilized relationship with her ex-husband and her reaction to her sister's romantic entanglement with the man she herself is interested in is (at least outwardly) rather remarkable. While reading the novel I also realized that I hardly ever read books with middle-aged, close to fifty-year-old women as main characters! It was thus high time to diversify my reading that way, too.

I really enjoyed reading The Tapestry of Love. I especially liked the way the author described how Catherine little by little found her place in the little community she has chosen as her home and how her relationships with her neighbours developped. And Thornton's writing is simply charming, or what do you think about this lovely passage from page 301:

"She placed a jar underneath the tap, opened it up and waited. Nothing happened at first, but then, with creeping slowness, a bubble began to form in the mouth of the nozzle. It wasn't the anonymous pale gold of shop-bought honey but a rich mahogany brown, translucent, smooth and thick as caramel. The bubble fattened and swelled until she thought it would separate itself into a single round globule but, when the tension finally broke, it did not wholly detach but drew with it as it fell a thin tail of honey, a fine thread which gradually strengthened into a drizzle.
Catherine put a finger under the stream and watched it coat her skin, then pulled away and sucked her finger, closing her eyes and letting the honey dissolve on her tongue. It tasted of woodland."

Wow, say I. That is luscious, and sensual, and beautiful. I like a good plot, and The Tapestry of Love has one, but I love beautiful writing, and there is plenty of that in the book. This was the first Thornton novel I read. It will most certainly not be the last.

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 3

2011-03-17T20:44:00.002+02:00

This is the long overdue (I seem to be saying that a lot lately -will try and better my ways :)) third and final part of my book sales posts. Here goes...

Ox-Tales Earth, Air, Fire and Water
These are four little volumes of original short stories published in Great Britain in support of Oxfam. If some of you are not familiar with Oxfam it is (to quote their website) "a confederation of 14 likeminded organizations working together to find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice". I'm very exited about these little books, as there are some really interesting writers that have participated in the project. The writers include Kate Atkinson and Hanif Kureishi in Earth, Alexander McCall Smith and Kamila Shamsie in Air, Jeanette Winterson and Lionel Shriver in Fire, and Hari Kunzru and Michel Faber in Water to name just a few of them.

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed: Wolves of the Crescent Moon
What really sold this novel to me was the earily beautiful front cover! And also the fact that this is a novel set it Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a story of three outsiders -a Bedouin, an orphan, and a eunuch- who all try to make their lives in the city. It is said to be a novel of "great moral consequence about a deeply traditional society confronting the modern world". The book, which is Al-Mohaimeed's debut novel, was banned in Saudi Arabia.

Lauren Liebenberg: The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Isn't that a delicious name for a book? :) This is a story set in the late 1970s. Nyree and Cia are two little girls living on a farm in what was then Rhodesia. Their whole world consists of the farm until their orphaned cousin Ronin arrives and the idyll of their childhood is gone for ever. The back cover tells us that the girls childhood was "seductive", it was "laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Sounds very intriguing to me!

Ann Weisgerber: The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
I was very pleasantly surprised to find this award-winning novel also being on sale. The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is set in 1917 South Dakota. Rachel Dupree with her husband and children is one of the few black families in the West. She wants to give her children a better life, but she also knows that her husband would never leave their farm. This is said to be "an unforgettable novel about love and loyalty, homeland and belonging.

As I said, this concludes my book sales posts. I've bought a few books after the sales, but am actually trying to limit my book buying a bit. I have two holiday trips to look forward to next summer and I've but myself on a budget because of that. :) Luckily there is no shortage of books to read either at home or in the library! I'm still reading The White Garden and after listening to a very interesting BBC World Book Club podcast with Umberto Eco as a special guest talking about his 1980 bestselle The Name of the Rose I had the urge to finally read the Finnish translation that has been sitting on my book shelf since 1996! (I've seen the film made of the novel twice, so I know the general plot, but a book is always a book) I guess it is more than high time I finally read the novel.
By the way those BBC World Book Club podcasts should come with a warning: BE AWARE THESE PROGRAMMES MAY CAUSE SERIOUS INCREASE IN YOUR TBR-LISTS :)

Teaser Tuesday 15.3.2011

2011-03-15T07:21:00.000+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

Even though I was enjoying Alamut by Vladimir Bartol I started to feel I needed to read something completely different before going back to it. This often happens when I'm reading a long story. Alamut is only little less than 400 pages, but still I got impatient. I guess, it has to do with my having all too many unread books at home just now, what with going grazy at the book sales and all that! :) Well, I abandoned 11th-century Persia first for a 19th century boarding school for girls in Olivia by Dorothy Strachey and then continued with start of the 20th century Paris with The Other Side by Sandra Freeman (I will write more about both of these two soon) and now I'm reading one of my book sales finds, namely The White Garden by Stephanie Barron.

Stephanie Barron is actually known for her Jane Austen mysteries of which I have read 1 or 2 many years ago. The White Garden, however, is something quite different from those. Landscape designer Jo Bellamy finds a mysterious notebook in a garden shed in Sissinghurst Castle. The notebook seems to be written by Virginia Woolf. This quote is from page 86:

"Do you know when Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse?"
Jo shook her head.
"The day before your notebook starts - March twentyeight, 1941."

I Found a New Favorite

2011-03-07T23:23:00.002+02:00

Today at work I spent about an hour looking for a cd-player I had ordered and that should have been delivered but somehow had not reached my department. In the end I did find it from more or less where it should have been in fact, though I am 100% positive it was not there when I looked for the first time! Then at home I spent another long while looking for the receipt I got when I bought my laptop last September as the laptop suddenly stopped working & I need to get it fixed. Luckily there is a two year guarantee and thank goodness I did find the receipt in the end.

When it comes to books I am always on the look out for interesting reads and after a period of not being in the mood for mysteries I have lately started to read them again. I have always liked mystery series set in the past and with strong female characters. An exotic-to-me location has also always been a plus. I think I have mentioned more than once that I'm a fan of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody -series. Other mystery series I have enjoyed include:

Nell Bray -mysteries by Gillian Linscott. Nell is a suffragette, need I say more...:)
Mary Russell -mysteries by Laurie R. King. Sherlock Holmes married!!
Roma sub rosa -series by Steven Saylor

The list could go on and on.

Now I have found a new favorite: Jade del Cameron -mysteries by Suzanne Arruda. I have read the two first (Mark of the Lion & Stalking Ivory) in the series and as you can see from the photo I already have numbers three and four waiting for their turn.

The series starts at the end of WW1. American Jade del Cameron has spent the war attached to the French army as an ambulance driver. When a dying fighter pilot asks her to find his missing half-brother and investigate his father's death Jade cannot say no. Soon after the war has ended Jade travels to colonial East Africa. Officially she works for a travel magazine, but she also tries to find answers to the pilot's last wishes.

I simply loved Jade from the start! :) There were, however, some things in the first book that I had my reservations about.Even though I did like Jade she felt almost too modern for the time period. Also I felt that the story would have worked quite well without the supernatural aspect. There was also all too much talk about guns and hunting for my liking, but I did like many other things in the book and I absolutely wanted to read more about Jade, so as soon as I had finished the first book I went and bought the second one.

In the second book Jade continues to work for the travel magazine. She wants to photograph elephants and arranges a trip to Mount Marsabit with her friends. While there they discover mutilated elephant remains. It seems some Abyssinian poachers are in search of ivory and slaves, or it might be something even more sinister...

By the second book I did not mind that there were some supernatural aspects, it seems to be something the writer wants to incorporate into the narrative. Also, Jade did feel modern, but not too modern. I liked the second part of the series quite a bit. And it seems there might even be a sort of master criminal causing her trouble from one book to the other! That's definitely a plus. :) And there might also be some romance in store for Jade in the future.

In addition to a wonderful main character Arruda has created an interesting supporting cast. I've also enjoyed the way she writes about the society in 1920s colonial Africa and the way she describes various African cultures.

Suzanne Arruda has a great website, if you want to learn more about her work and 1920s Africa.

Teaser Tuesday 22.2.2011

2011-02-22T20:59:00.005+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm reading the great Slovenian classic Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. It is a historical novel set in 11th-century Persia and was originally written in 1938 as an allegory to fascism. The novel has been translated into many languages. It has even been inspiration for two video games! It is an adventure story, a love story, and most importantly a story of political extremism, but my teaser is a funny, little snippet from page 24:

On one of the riverside rocks lizards were sunning themselves. Their backs shone like emeralds.
"Look how pretty they are," Miriam said.
"Ugh, I can't stand them. They are vicious."
"Why?"
"They attack girls."
Miriam and Sara both smiled.
"Who ever gave you that idea, child?"
Halima was afraid that she'd blurted out some inanity again, so she answered carefully.
"My former master told me, 'Watch out for boys! If they jump over the wall and break into the garden, run away from them, because they keep a lizard of a snake under their shirts and they'd let it loose to bite you.'"

I fear the story will soon get much more serious. Too bad I cannot read it in the original language, but the English translation seems to be excellent, very enjoyable to read.

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down -Two Reviews

2011-02-20T20:37:00.005+02:00

Finally I have an opportunity to post! I still have one books sales post to write, but as I'm totally lagging behind in reviewing the books I've read this year, I'll start with two reviews. (I'm also totally lagging behind in visiting all your wonderful blogs, but I hope to remedy that very soon, too. :))

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

I read numerous Agatha Christie mysteries while growing up. Back then they were sort of transitional books. When the books in the library's children's department started to feel too childish Christie's mysteries were for many the first adults' books they read. Christie's mysteries are also useful when as a non-native speaker one wants to start reading books in English. So, I first moved towards adults' books with Christie and then again moved onwards towards reading books in English by reading her mysteries. By the way, reading Christie in other languages works, too. :) The first and only novel I've ever read in Italian was a Christie mystery.

It has, however, been a long while since I read anything by Christie. When choosing themes for The One, Two, Theme Challenge, I ended up choosing Mesopotamia as one of my themes. As we are supposed to read both non-fiction and fiction, Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia immediately came to my mind as a possible fiction choice. I'm not quite sure whether had I read it before, I think I had. I had seen it on TV, though, as part of the wonderful Hercule Poirot series starring the brilliant David Suchet. I had never before reread a traditional mystery (I don't really count The Woman in White as a typical mystery). Even though I was not hundred procent sure if I had read this one before, I did remember parts of the story and I had always thought that as a hindrance for really enjoying rereading a mystery. I was willing to give this book a chance, though.

I was not dissapointed. Murder in Mesopotamia is set in 1930s Iraq. Something is not quite right at an archeological dig in Hassanieh, and when the worst happens Hercule Poirot, who is travelling in the area, is asked to investigate. In this book the narrator was not Captain Hastings, but Amy Leatheran, a nurse appointed to take care of Mrs. Leidner, the wife of the archeologist heading the excavations in Hassanieh. I'm a great fan of Poirot. He's my absolutely favorite private detective, and I enjoyed Nurse Leatheran's comments on the little Belgian a lot. :)

Reading Murder in Mesopotamia put me in the mood for more Christie and especially more Poirot stories. It would be great fun to read all Poirot's cases in chronological order, but that might be a bit too great a challenge to incorporate into all my other reading. I might read some more Poirot stories this year, though. And I have another Agatha Christie mystery (sans Poirot) for The One, Two, Theme Challenge, namely They Came to Baghdad, waiting for it's turn.

This was my first read for my Mesopotamia theme in The One, Two, Theme Challenge.

Grand Slam by Samantha Brenner

Unfortunately this supposedly satirical lesbian romance set in the world of professional tennis has been my most dissapointing read this year. The story follows former corporate lawyer Stephanie Alexander during her year of being the girlfriend of first one and then another professional tennis player. I love tennis and I am an enthusiastic follower of especially women's professional tennis, and so, I was pretty excited to find a novel set in that world. However, this book did not live up to my expectations at all. The narrative was in parts incoherent and would have needed quite a bit more editing and the satire was mostly lost on me. For example Stephanie's thoughts on her first tennis player girlfriend Sydney Foster were often so mean that I started feeling sorry for Sydney and that surely was not the effect the writer was aiming for. All in all a huge dissapointment. :(

I read Grand Slam for The GLBT Challenge.

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 2

2011-01-30T22:05:00.001+02:00

Here's the second batch of books I bought at the sales. Part three will hopefully follow shortly. If you have read any of these books, it would be nice to know, what you thought of them.

Stephanie Barron: The White Garden
Sixty years after Virginia Woolf's suicide landscape designer Jo Bellamy arrives to Cissinghurst Castle to study the famous White Garden created by Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West. While there Jo makes a stunning discovery. She finds Virginia Woolf's last diary and the first entry in the diary is dated the day after Woolf killed herself! This sounds very interesting. I hope to read this novel very soon.

Gail Carriger: Soulless
This book actually was not on sale, but I bought it at the same time as my sales loot. I have been looking for interesting steampunk novels to read as I'm participating in the Steampunk Challenge. I did make a short list of five novels earlier, but I have a feeling there might be some books I missed that would suit me better than some of those on my list. I first saw Carriger's Alexia Tarabotti novels in a book store at the Madrid airport, but restrained from buying any there. (You see, I do have some selfcontrol sometimes! :)).
Alexia is a Victorian spinster without a soul and when she accidentaly kills a vampire Queen Victoria sends Lord Maccoon, a werewolf, to investigate. This seems like a really funny read.

Lucy Dillon: The Ballroom Class
This is a story of three couples who join a ballroom dancing class. I've been eyeing this book for a long time. It's the ballroom dancing part that interests me, but I'm not quite sure if it otherwise is a book for me. I hope I'll be proven wrong.

Katie Hickman: The Aviary Gate
Sixteenth-century Constantinople, the Topkapi harem, and English merchant looking for his lost love... This historical novel sounds very promising.

Alyson Noël: Radience
This was another book not in fact on sale, but bought at the same time as the sales loot. Radiance is a YA novel. The story is told by Riley, a dead girl who is "just settling into a nice, relaxing death", when she learns that afterlife is not quite what she expected. Instead of eternity of leisure she is assigned a job as a Soul Catcher and sent back to earth to try and get a ghost stop hunting an English castle and move on to the afterlife. This is the first book on a series about Riley and her curious teacher Bodhi.

Teaser Tuesday 25.1.2011

2011-01-25T08:45:00.004+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I've been terribly busy with both work and dancing this past week and will continue to be so for a few more weeks, so I'm afraid I will not be able to post as often as I would like to. I will try to get the remaining two parts of Going Grazy in the Books Sales posts up soon, though, and hopefully at least one or two reviews, too, but just in case I go a bit missing in action during the coming weeks, know that everything is just fine. I promise to be back posting more regularly after the two first weeks of February.

I finished reading Mark of the Lion, a historical mystery by Suzanne Arruda a few days ago. I liked the book, but that's all I'll say now, as it's one of the two books I hope to review soon. :) Mark of the Lion was not on my original list for the books I want to read for the Historical Fiction Challenge, but I think I'll count it towards the challenge as it surely qualifies for it.

After Mark of the Lion I started another challenge book: Grand Slam by Samantha Brenner. This book actually is on my list for this year's GLBT Challenge. :) All too often I read books that qualify for some challenge I'm participating, but that I have not listed in my book lists. Not that it matters really, but anyways. :) Grand Slam is a lesbian love triangle set in the world of professional tennis. As a huge fan of tennis, when I found out about this novel, I simply had to get it! However, about 1/4 down the story my inner jury is still out on the book. I love the tennis tid bits, but am undecided on some other aspects of the story. We'll see how it turns out. My teaser is from page 94. Lawyer-turned-realtor-turned "professional girlfriend" Stephanie Alexander's relationship with tennis champion Sydney Foster is not going smoothly:

"Sydney, I'm dead-tired and this is not open to discussion. You have two choices -put your clothes on and stay here or put your clothes on and go home."

What are you reading at the moment?

Teaser Tuesday 18.1.2011

2011-01-18T07:33:00.002+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

I'm fast falling into the "read-too-many-books-at-once" trap this January. I would like to read all my library loans and my new acquisitions simultaneously! This means that while I'm still only 1/3 into Pinkerton's Sister I got impatient and wanted to read a shorter book before continuing with the junkster. I was in mood for a nice historical mystery with a likable and maybe a bit unconventional heroine. I seem to have found just such a book in Mark of the Lion by Suzanne Arruda. I'm almost half way through this mystery set in 1919 in colonial Africa and enjoying the book very much. Young American Jade del Cameron, who rode an ambulance in the Great War and can kill a hyena with a clean shot, is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sleuths. :) My teaser is from page 67. Jade has just suggested Lord Colridge that she would like to join a hunting party trying to eliminate a hyena problem.

"'You forget, sir, that I was raised out west. I'm accustomed to hunting.'
'We are not going after rabbits, Miss del Cameron,' he exclaimed with a snort.
'When I was sixteen, a mountain lion took some of our stock. We lost several lambs.'
'And I suppose your father took you along on the hunt, did he?'
Jade looked directly at the aristocrat until he felt the weight of those emerald eyes boring into him. She kept the tone of her voice very factual, careful to omit any trace of bragging. 'No, sir. My father was gone at the time. I took out that cat myself.'"

As Mark of the Lion is first in a series I'm already looking forward to reading more about Jade's adventures in the future.

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 1

2011-01-16T23:26:00.003+02:00

This week, more exactly on Thursday morning, the sales started at the largest book stores in Helsinki. And Friday was my pay day. Dangerous combination, as you can certainly imagine! ;) I worked quite late on Friday, but could not keep away from the sales, so instead of heading home I took the train downtown and went to see the bargains at my favorite book store. And of course I could not just take a look, I had to buy a few - well quite a few - books. But it did not end there! On Saturday I visited the store again, and ended up with another pile of books. And I should be saving money, not spending it on so many books! Well, as a friend of mine reminded me once, after I had bought some clothes from a sale, it would have cost me quite a lot more had I bought all those clothes, and this time all those books, at their original price. I quite like my friend's logic here! ;)

I'll divide this book sale buys post in three parts and start with some classics:

Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen): Seven Gothic Tales
Ever since I saw an old interview with Karen Blixen on TV some years ago I have intended to someday read something by her. She was a veritable master story teller. She also had quite an interesting life. I'm looking forward to reading at least some, if not all, of these tales later this year.

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
I actually already had a copy of The Moonstone somewhere, but this Oneworld Classics edition is much more reader friendly than the one I already had. The Moonstone has been said to be the first modern English detective novel. A tale of thwarted love and a stolen diamond, and it's written by Wilkie Collins! What more could one want from a book?

Olivia Manning: The Levant Trilogy
I read The Balkan Trilogy as a teenager, but have not read this one yet. This historical novel continues the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle started in The Balkan Trilogy, but now the story moves from Europe to Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria. The time period is WWII. Hmm, it might be a good idea to reread The Balkan Trilogy before I read this one...

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Summer Will Show
I read this wonderful historical novel set in Paris during the 1848 revolution in 2009 and am happy to have my own copy now. Summer Will Show tells the story of Sophia, who joins her enstranged husband in Paris after the death of their children and falls in love with her husbands sometime mistress Minna. The book was originally published in 1936.

Part 2 will follow in a few days...

Three Good Reads

2011-01-14T00:17:00.001+02:00

I was really bad at reviewing the books I read in November and especially in December. I did not even write anything about a book that ended up being on my top 10 reads in 2010 list! Well, to remedy that at least to a certain degree I've decided to write sort of mini-reviews of three books, two novels and a graphic novel, I read (mostly) in 2010. Mostly in 2010, because I started the graphic novel in 2010, but finished it just a few days ago. Anyway, here comes:

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

This YA novel has been talked about all over the blogosphere. I don't often read YA lit, but some of the rave reviews made me curious and I borrowed the book from the library. I must say I was not dissapointed. In general I liked the book. I liked both Nick and Norah, and theirs was a sweet story. I absolutely loved how sexual orientation really was a non-issue for both of them and in the book in general. I've never been to clubbing, so the club and music scene portrayed in the book was alien, but interesting, to me. However, I don't think I have ever read a book with more swearing in it than in Nick & Norah's Infinite playlist! I don't usually really even take notice, if there is some swearing in the book I'm reading, but this time it really annoyed my quite a lot. So, not a five star read, but in the end the posivites clearly make up for the one negative thing. And if I ever come across the movie made of this book, I will most definitely want to see it.

The Fixer and Other Stories by Joe Sacco

This is the graphic novel I started last year by reading the first, long story. There are also two other stories in the book, and those I read only after the New Year. Sacco's stories tell about Bosnia and especially Sarajevo during and after the war in the 1990s. The first story The Fixer is a good introduction to the history of the conflict and a powerful narrative about the insanity of war. I learned quite a lot from this story. Soba tells the story of a young Sarajevan man trying to pick up the pieces of his life after the war. This was my favorite of the three stories in the book. The last story is Christmas with Karadzic, where a group of Western journalists are following a lead that Karadzic is going to attend Christmas mass at a certain church. Sacco's stories are not pretty, but they are powerful, they are important. I liked this book very much.

The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson

It has been my intention to write a separate post about Winterson's fiction and why I like her writing so much, but I haven't had time to really think about the post yet. I can tell, however, that I fell in love with her writing from the start of the first book by her I ever read. I have since read most of her books written for an adult audience. I even own most of them, but somehow I had not read The PowerBook even though a copy had been sitting in my bookself for a few years. Maybe I was saving the book for the right moment, savouring the thought I had some wonderful writing there waiting for its turn. The PowerBook is a both a novel and collection of stories with a twist. The stories overlap and in the end one is not quite sure what is fiction written by the main character and what is "reality". I also loved the idea that the main character does not want to reveal their gender, and it really takes quite many pages until one is sure whether the main character is a man or a woman. I totally loved The PowerBook, and will definitely reread it at some point.

Here's a humorous quote from my favorite story within a story in the book:

"Tulips, every one - and hundreds more - each distinctively different, all the same. The attribute of variation thet humans and tulips share.

It was Key of Pleasure and Lover's Dream that I carried from Sulyman the Magnificent to Leiden in 1591. To be exact I strapped them under my trousers...

'Put it this way.'

'No. I'll crush them when I rest.'

'Put it this way...'

'No. I'll crush them when I pray.'

'Put one here and one here...'

'No! It will look as though I have an evil swelling.'

Well, where whould you store a priceless pair o bulbs?

That gave me the idea.

In the same place as a priceless pair of balls.

Yes! Yes! Yes!" [p. 9-10]

Yes, Winterson does humour perfectly! ;) The PowerBook was my 8th favorite read in 2010.

Library Loot 6.1.2011 & Giveaway Winner

2011-01-06T17:37:00.001+02:00

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted my Marg of The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader and Claire of The Captive Reader. Mister Linky is this week at Claire's blog.

I have tried to be pretty prudent in my borrowing and book buying these first few days after New Year, as I still have quite a few books from my previous loot waiting for their turn. Still, I wanted to get a good start with the challenges I'm participating this year and most of the books above will qualify for one challenge or another. There are 6 library books and 2 new purchases I'm going to introduce here. Let's start with the library books:

Jean Bottéro: Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia
When I was a university student majoring in history, my main interest was 19th century -early 20th century, only later have I become more and more interested in older history, and by older I mean really old, I mean millenniums BC, I mean Egypt and Mesopotamia. This book is an easy to follow account of one of the oldest known religions, the religion of Ancient Mesopotamia. I'm reading this at the moment, alternating between this book and Pinkerton's Sister, and I'm totally enjoying both books, and I have already learned some fascinating stuff about the ancient Mesopotamian culture. I'm reading this book for the One, Two! Theme Challenge, and I have a hunch that Mesopotamia as a theme might get an upgrade in my list, especially as Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia wasn't even on my original list.

John Dickinson: We
My mood for some scifi continues. This is a psychological thriller as well as a science fiction novel about a man sent from Earth to a far away icy moon on the fringes of the solar system on a no-return mission. On the lonely station manned by only four persons he has to confront some truths he has never even suspected. Sounds intriguing, and the layout of the text is very reader friendly.

Carolyn Graves-Brown: Dancing for Hathor. Women in Ancient Egypt
This, too, is nonfiction for the One, Two! Theme Challenge, and judging by the contents the book covers well different spheres of women's life in Ancient Egypt.

Mary Hooper: At the Sign of the Sugared Plum
This is a slim YA historical novel telling the story of young Hannah, who is excited for her first trip to London. She is to go and help her sister, who runs a sweetmeats shop. Only this is AD 1665 and the Plague is threatening London. This might end up being one of the books I'll read for the Historical Fiction Challenge. Yet another book that is not on my original list.

Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man
Some more science fiction and a veritable classic this time. This is the story of Karl Glogauer, time traveller and an unlikely Messiah in Palestine in AD 29! Cannot wait to read this!

Adam Thirlwell: Miss Herbert. An Essay in Five Parts
I noticed this book at work and was intrigued. It says in the spine that this is "[a] book of novels, romances and their translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents and accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles and illustrations." Who could resist that?? The book also contains Thirlwell's translation of Mademoiselle O by Valdimir Nabokov.

That was the last book of my library loot, but I also have these two new books of my own:

Daisy Goodwin: My Last Duchess
I had a coupon giving me 20% off of one purchase from Stockmann's departmant store, and I actually decided to buy something else than a book, but, well, you know how it goes. :) I ended up buying this historical novel. This is a story of a rich New York heiress, whose mother is determinate to marry her daughter into the English aristocracy. It's set in 1890s, a time period that is always a plus for me. My Last Duchess is Goodwin's first novel.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. Ed. by Helena Whitbread
Anne Lister was an independent, landowning woman, who lived 1791-1840. She loved women and kept an honest diary, written partly in code, where she wrote also about her love life. Lister's diaries are an important part of women's history. It's great that Virago has made them easily available with this new paperback edition. I will read this book for the GLBT Challenge. There is also a nice British drama film made last year based on the diaries.

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Last but not least, earlier today I draw the winner of my signed copy of Purge giveaway. Thank you everyone who showed interest in this amazing novel! The winner is Judith of Leeswammes' Blog from The Netherlands. Congratulations Judith! I hope you will enjoy the book as much as I did. I have already contacted Judith and the book will be on its way hopefully already tomorrow.

Teaser Tuesday 4.1.2011

2011-01-04T22:12:00.000+02:00

Last call to enter my giveaway! :) On Thursday, January 6, at noon my time (Eastern European Time = GMT + 2 hours) I will draw the winner's name from a hat. :) To enter click the button above and leave a comment on the giveaway post.

I'm on the look for the perfect design for A Book Blog of One's Own. :) The pink phase did not last long. This silvergray colourscheme feels better to me, but what do you think? I'd love to hear your comments.

Here's my Teaser Tuesday post for this week:

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers
Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

My first teaser for 2011 is from Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth:

"The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got old very fast. That was how the second paragraph of The Princess and the Goblin - one of the books Alice remembered best from childhood - started, and, though certainly never a sweet little creature (sweet!), Alice felt she was as one with Princess Irene when it came to getting older very fast. She was - she felt on the bad days - the cowering soul locked in a darkened room, a soul rotting from within, a withered thing." [p. 22]

Life According to Literature, Take 3 & Some Wishes for 2011

2011-01-03T21:39:00.002+02:00

I tried to resist, but could not. This is my favorite meme, and here comes take 3. :) See the previous editions here and here.

To answer the following questions I'm using only books I have read between June 18 - when I posted take 2 of this meme - and December 31, 2010. Click on the title to find more info on the book.

Describe yourself: The Woman in White

How do you feel: Revolution

Describe how you currently live: Ice Land

If you could go anyway, where would you go: Summer in Baden-Baden

Your favorite form of transportation: Landing

Your best friend is: The Holy Machine

You and your friends are: The Birthday Boys

What's the weather like: Chaos and Night

You fear: The Small Hand

What is the best advice you have to give: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Thought for the day: Tell It to the Bees

How I would like to die: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

My soul's present condition: Purge

Well, from Purgatorio of take 1 to Purge. I don't think I have advanged much. ;)

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I am very bad at keeping any New Year's resolutions and usually don't make any. There are, however, a few things, in addition to my reading goals, I would like to achieve in 2011. Maybe it will help to write them down here. :)

-Most of all, I would love, love, love :) to achieve the dancing goals I and Mr. Dance Partner have set for this year.

-I would like to finish at least two of the stories I have been writing for (what feels like) ages now.

-I would like to dedicate some time regurarly for learning Slovene, and hopefully to participate in a language course in Slovenia during my summer holiday.

-I really should take care of getting enough sleep during the week.

-I will keep my chocolate consumption to minimum. :)

More Challenges

2010-12-29T21:17:00.000+02:00

There are so many interesting reading challenges popping up all around the blogosphere just now! It's hard to resist joining all too many of them, but I'm trying to choose a manageable number I will have a chance to finish, too. I've alreadty posted my lists for the TBR Pile Challenge and the One,Two, Theme! Challenge. Here come's my reading lists for the GLBT Challenge, the Historical Fiction Challenge, and the Steampunk Challenge. Both GLBT & Historical Fiction Challenges run from January 1st to December 31st. The Steampunk Challenge actually started already in October this year and will run until October 2011.

GLBT Challenge

Even though there is no required amount of books to read I have made a list of 12 books that I hope to read for this challenge in 2011:

1. Avery, Ellis: The Teahouse Fire
2. Boock, Paula: Dare Truth or Promise
3. Brenner, Samantha: Grand Slam
4. Daggett, Gina: Jukebox
5. Donoghue, Emma: Slammerkin
6. Garden, Nancy: Annie on My Mind
7. Jansson, Tove: Fair Play
8. Koja, Kathe: Under the Poppy
9. Murakami, Haruki: Sputnik Sweetheart
10. Sappho: It Not, Winter
11. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister ed. by Helena Whitbread
12. Strachey, Dorothy: Olivia

Historical Fiction Challenge

My aim is to read 10 books (Struggling the Addiction -level):

1. Vladimir Bartol: Alamut
2. A. S. Byatt: Children's Book
3. Moyra Caldecott: Daughter of Amun
4. Emma Donoghue: Slammerkin
5. Sarah Dunant: Sacred Hearts
6. Ken Follett: Fall of Giants
7. Richard Harvell: The Bells
8. Kathe Koja: Under the Poppy
9. Hilary Martel: Wolf Hall
10. Kate Pullinger: Mistress of Nothing

Steampunk Challenge

I aim to read 5 books.

1. Meljean Brook: The Iron Duke
2. Cassandra Clare: Clockwork Angel
3. Kate Elliott: Cold Magic
4. William Gibson: The Difference Engine
5. Michael Moorcock: The Dancers at the End of Time (an omnibus of 3 novels)

Can't wait to start reading books for these challenges! :)

ps. There's still time to enter my giveaway.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

2010-12-26T21:37:00.001+02:00

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day are all public holidays in Finland. As I also took Dec. 23rd off I've been enjoying a nice four day Christmas break here. I spent the 23rd rather tightly with a book, namely Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. I just could not put the book down!

Revolution is a story of two girls, two centuries apart. Andi Alpers is a brilliant, but deeply troubled and emotionally scarred teenager from Brooklyn.

    "I wish I could stop messing up but I don't know how. What is it that mends broken people? Jesus? Chocolate? New shoes? I wish someone could tell me. I wish I had an answer. Once I asked Nathan what the answer was. I thought he might know, considering all he's been through, but he told me I would have to find it for myself. That everybody has to.
     I reach into my bag, take out my bottle of Qwellify and gobble three. That's my answer. Take enough Qwells and I forget the anger and the sadness. I even forget the question." [p. 136]

Andi reluctantly accompanies her Nobel Prize winner, DNA scientist father to Paris for the winter break. Her father, together with his historian friend G, is doing some tests on a heart said to be the heart of Louis-Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. G is also planning on opening a museum and among the artefacts he has gathered at his place Andi finds a journal of a young girl, Alexandrine, written in 1795 and depicting the girl's life from 1789 onwards.

    "Liberty. The marchers had shouted it over and over again, all night long. They'd carried banners with the word writ large. Was this liberty? If so, I wanted no part of it. I was free now, yes. Free to pin silly cockades to my hat. Free to sing daft songs. Free to go back to Paris and starve.
     On the palace steps, a man mopped up blood. Two more swept up pieces of glass. The jagged shards made an ugly music as they were dumped into a bucket.
     I heard the tune and knew it - it was the sound of my dreams shattering." [p. 208]

Revolution is a well-written, gripping, heartbreaking, wonderful novel. It is contemporary. It is historical -and it is something else. :) I had a hunch of how the story would develop. Then I thought my hunch was wrong and felt actually quite happy with it. In the end I was right (and happy with that, too), but you just have to read the book yourself to know more. :) Just three more words: loss, music, love.

This was the first Jennifer Donnelly book I read. It will certainly not be the last.

Below is a picture of me my Dad took with his phone on Christmas Eve. :)

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T11:24:00.002+02:00

My favorite Christmas picture book is The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me. It tells the nativity story from the donkey's viewpoint. The story is written by Jeanette Winterson and the printed version is beautifully illustrated by Rosalind MacCurrach. The story is also available online on Winterson's official homepage here.

Merry Christmas, blogger friends!

Teaser Tuesday 21.12.2010

2010-12-21T22:55:00.005+02:00

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page
Be careful not to include spoilers

Share the title and author too so that other Teaser Tuesday participients can add the book on their TBR lists, if they like your teasers!

Last week I started enthusiastically reading Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope. It is the first of his Palliser novels and is set in the 1860s. After The Woman in White I craved for more Victorian fiction and thought Trollope would satisfy that craving. For ca. 150 pages he did, but then somehow I became tired of the story. I did not care much for one of the characters and found another one a bit irritating. In the end I gave up. Not for good, but for now. I wanted to read something else, something with more...something, almost anything really, after a chapter on fox hunting! I took a good look at my book piles and decided on Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. I'm only 50 pages into the book, but I'm liking what I've read this far. My teaser is from page 26 (little more than 2 sentences this time):

"Most of the teachers at St Anselm's will tell me I'm a genius. That I can do anything, be anything. That my potential is limitless and I should reach for the stars. Nathan is the only one who calls me dummkopf and tells me to practise the Sarabande in Bach's Lute Suite in E Minor five hundred times a night if that's what it takes to get it through my thick skull. And it's such a relief I could cry."

ps. There is still time to enter my giveaway. Click the button below to go to the giveaway post.

One, Two, Theme! A Very Geeky Reading Challenge

2010-12-20T00:23:00.007+02:00

Alexandra from The Sleepless Reader and Joanna from It's All About Me have come up with a very interesting idea for a reading challenge. One, Two, Theme! -Challenge will run from 1 January until 31 December in 2011. The purpose of the challenge is to read books, both fiction and nonfiction, on various themes. Every participant should choose at least three themes. For the first theme you only have to read one book, for the second two, for the third three etc. From your second theme up, at least one of the books chosen should be fiction and one nonfiction.

I first learned about this challenge through Alexandra's blog some weeks ago and immediately wanted to join. Choosing my themes have, however, taken some time. Here, finally, they are. I'm aiming for at least six theme blocks, so will post my tentative lists from which to choose the books for six different subjects. The lists include also books I have already read, if I think that those books might be of interest to someone else who might want to choose the same theme. Here goes:

1. Vietnam
For this theme I will read The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb. This is Gibb's upcoming novel. I've read all her previous books and really like her writing. Sweetness in the Belly was one of my top reads a few years ago and I have been rather impatienly waiting for her next book. The Beauty of Humanity Movement will be published in March 2011.

2. Mesopotamia
I'll read Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie as my fiction book for this theme. The nonfiction book will be one of these:

Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia by Zainab Bahrani
Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archeologers, and Monuments in Mesopotamia by Brian M. Fagan
Babylon and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat
From Mesopotamia to Iraq: A Concise History by Hans J. Nissen
Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization by A. Leo Oppenheim
Ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians by Virginia Schomp

3. Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic Era
I've always found Napoleon Bonaparte a fascinating figure, but have actually not read much fiction featuring him. I hope to improve on that by choosing this theme. And I might even upgrade this theme highter up on my list in the end.

Fiction:

The Napoleon Series by Max Gallo (The Song of Departure, The Sun of Austerlitz, The Emperor of Kings, The Immortal of St. Helena)
Vienna Waltz by Teresa Grant
The Josephine Bonaparte Trilogy by Sandra Gulland (The Many Lifes and Sorrows of Josephine B.; Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe; The last Great Dance on Earth)
The Napoleonic Trilogy by Patrick Rambaud (The Battle; The Retreat; The Exile)
The Wellington and Napoleon Quartet by Simon Scarrow(Young Bloods; The Generals; Fire and Sword; The Fields of Death)
Désirée by Annemarie Selinko

Nonfiction:

Napoleon & Josephine: An Improbable Marriage by Evangelina Bruce
Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769-1799 by Philip Dwyer
Venus of the Empire: The Life of Pauline Bonaparte by Flora Fraser
The Last Years of Napoleon: His Last Years on St. Helena by Ralph Korngold
Napoleon in Egypt: The Greatest Glory by Paul Strathern
Terrible Exile: The Last Days of Napoleon on St. Helena by Brian Unwin
Napoleon: Man of War, Man of Peace by Timothy Wilson-Smith
Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamovski

4. Books about, or by writers from, the region of former Yugoslavia
This is a long time reading interest, but there's still quite many novels about former Yugoslavia I have not read. I'll also include here books by writers from the region, even if they don't write about the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Fiction:

Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
My Nime is Bosnia by Madeleine Gagnon
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Guarding Hanna by Miha Mazzini
Pretty Birds by Scott Simon
Stilness by Courtney Angela Brkic

Graphic Books:

The Fixer and Other Stories by Joe Sacco
Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Bosnia 1992-95 by Joe Sacco

Nonfiction

Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm
Questions about Slovenia
Slovenia and the Slovenes: A Small State in the New Europe by James Gow and Cathie Carmichael

5. Egypt
One geographical area more! Egypt, especially Ancient Egypt, is another subject that has more or less always interested me. I saw the British Museum's Egyptian collections when I was just seven years old and it was love at first sight. I remember my Mom feeling uncomfortable among the mummies, but I was fascinated! I even thought to study some Egyptology while at the university and even sat on a few lectures, but I didn't ever take any exams on the subject. I have, however, read quite a few nonfiction books about Ancient Egypt, and then there is Elizabeth Peters and her one of a kind heroine Amelia Peabody! This challenge will be a good reason to read the one Amelia book I still have sitting unread in my book shelf.

Fiction:

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany
Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben
Any of P. C. Doherty's mysteries set in Ancient Egypt
Any of Christian Jacq's books set in Ancient Egypt
The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) by Naguib Mahfouz
The Heretic Queen, Cleopatra's Daughter and/or Nefertiti by Michelle Moran
Mamur Zapt mysteries by Michael Pearce
Any of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries or any other of her mysteries set in Egypt
Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger
Any of Wilbur Smith's novel's set in Egypt
The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Nonfiction:

The Keys of Egypt: The Race to Read the Hieroglyphs by Lesley Adkins
Anhenaten: King of Egypt by Cyril Aldred
The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter
Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter Reformation by Aidan Dodson
A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Amelie Edwards
A Passage to Egypt: The Life of Lucy Duff Gordon by Katherine Frank
Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt by Carolyn Graves-Brown
The Golden King: The World of Tutankhamun by Zahi E. Hawass
Exploring the World of the Pharaohs: A Complete Quide to Ancient Egypt by Christine Hobson
In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of Tutankhamun's Tomb by Daniel Meyerson
Splendor That Was Egypt by Margaret Alice Murray
Ramesses: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh or Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh by Joyce Tyldeslay
Howard Carter And the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun by H. V. F. Winstone

6. Nuns and Sisters
Since my late teens/early twenties I have been very interested in religious life, not as an option for myself, but as a life choice in general. I have read lots of books, mostly fiction but also some nonfiction, about nuns and sisters. There are many more books out there, though, so I thought to choose this as one of my themes, too. The list below is long (I have already read many of the books there), but I hope it will also serve others, who maybe want to read some nun books. :) And can you believe how many mystery series there are where the sleuth is a nun or a sister? Just take a look below. Many!

Fiction

Going In and Life Class by Jenny Newman (one should start with Going In, as Life Class is a sequal to it)
Body & Soul and/or Sacred and Profane by Marcelle Bernstein
Secret Hearts by Sarah Dunant
Black Narcissus, In This House of Brede and/or Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden
Marietta in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme (together with In This House of Brede this is a must read for anyone wanting to read some nun-fiction (no pun intended:))
The Convent by Panos Karnezis
Amata Means Beloved by
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
Frost in May by Antonia White

Nonfiction:

Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong
Nuns by Marcelle Bernstein (a classic study)
The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns by Elizabeth Kuhns
New Habits: Today's Women Who Choose to Become Nuns by Isabel Losada
Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia by Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Unveiled: The Hidden Life of Nuns by Cheryl R. Read
Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary by Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,Monroe,Michigan Sisters

And this book is not about nuns but monks, but it is such a treat that I'll list it here as an extra :) : An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order by Nancy Klein Maguire

Mysteries:

Quiet as a Nun by Antonia Frazer
A Nun in the Closet by Dorothy Gilman
A Force of Habit by Christine Hilger
Farewell to the Flesh by Gemma O'Connor
The Nun's Tale by Candace Robb

Mystery Series:

Sister Pelagia mysteries by Boris Akunin
Sister Joan mysteries by Veronica Black
Sister Frevisse medieval mysteries by Margaret Frazer
Christine Bennett mysteries by Lee Harris
Sister Agnes mysteries by Alison Joseph
Sister Mary Helen mysteries by Sister Carol Ann O'Marie
Sister Mary Teresa mysteries by Monica Quill
Sister Cecile mysteries by Winona Sullivan
Sister Agatha mysteries by Aimee and David Thurlo
Sister Fidelma mysteries by Peter Tremayne

Phew! That's a long list! There are at least two, maybe three more challenges I want to join, so stay tuned for a few more challenge posts in the coming days.

The 2011 TBR Pile Challenge

2010-12-15T07:08:00.000+02:00

Here we go! One of my favorite, if not the favorite, times of the blogging year is here: The time to decide which challenges to do next year! I've already decided to join a few challenges and have been compiling my book lists. I'll be posting various challenge posts in the coming days, but I'll start with a very useful challenge: The 2011 TBR Pile Challenge hosted by Adam at Roof Beam Reader.

I'm very good, I mean v-e-r-y good, in adding books to my TBR pile. However, I'm not so good at reading the books I've bought. All too often, no matter how interesting the books are, they are left waiting while library books take priority in my reading. Books from the library have to be returned, my own books are not going anywhere, so they wait for their turn, and wait, and wait... :) Joining this challenge is the perfect reason to read some of those books that have been sitting on my bookshelves for longer than a year.

The goal of the challenge is to read 12 books from one's TBR pile during 2011.

The books must have been on your bookshelf or TBR list for at least 1 year. That means they cannot be published 1.1.2010 or later. Two alternate books are allowed.

To join this challenge go to Roof Beam Reader.

This is my list:
1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell
2. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
3. Tomb of the Golden Bird by Elizabeth Peters
4. The Laughter of the Dead Kings by Elizabeth Peters
5. Olivia by Dorothy Strachey
6. Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
7. Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth
8. Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon
9. Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman & The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig
10. The Future is Queer. A Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. by Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel
11. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
12. An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

Alternates:
+Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon
+And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander

Which one should I read first?

Virtual Advent Tour: A Christmas Story

2010-12-13T06:44:00.002+02:00

Once upon a time, approximately 1980 + a few years since certain events in a little town of Bethlehem, there was a little family, father, mother and a daughter (let's call them Dad, Mom and Tiny Bit), living in a little suburb on the edge of a city in a country somewhere in the northern parts of the so called Old Continent. As it was customary in those parts Christmas in this little family was celebrated on the Christmas Eve and as it is customary all over the world this family, like all others, had their own Christmas traditions they followed faithfully year after year. Firstly, on the 23rd: bring in the tree & decorate. Secondly, on the morning of the 24th: Dad: roast the Christmas ham, Mom: sleep late, Tiny Bit: try not to disturbe either Dad or Mom.

During this particular Christmas everything had gone according to the plan. Came Christmas Eve afternoon the tree sparkled in the living room, the delicious scent of Christmas ham hovered around the house, and as always, the little family had walked to the beautiful St. Lawrence Church to lit candles on the graves of their loved ones. When they returned Dad stopped in front of the garage and said he needed to check something. Mom and Tiny Bit left Dad at the garage door and slowly walked around the house admiring the Christmas lights on their and their neighbours' back yards. Dad was not in when they entered and Mom expressed her surprise at him taking so long checking whatever it was he wanted to check in the garage.

Then the door bell rung. Mom and Tiny Bit looked at each other. "What an earth..." began Mom. "Did Daddy forget his keys?" asked Tiny Bit. "No, I don't think so", said Mom all puzzled. Tiny Bit went and got the door.

And there he stood! No Disney version of Mr. Claus, but Dad dressed in rubber boots, wearing his fur coat inside out, fur hat on his head and with a beard made of cleaning cotton adorning his face in a proper old fashioned Father Christmas style! Tiny Bit was flabberghasted! Mom was totally speechless!

"Ho, ho, ho! Are there any good and nice children in here? said Dad/Father Christmas in a proper Santa Claus -style. "Yes", Tiny Bit managed to say. She was still staring at her father and hardly believing her eyes. "So, this is why it took you so long to return from the garage! Mom exclaimed. She was starting to laugh. Tiny Bit joined her and soon they were both laughing so hard that tears of joy were pouring from they eyes. "I cannot believe this! I can-not be-lieve this!" Tiny Bit said time and again between bursts of laughter and all the while Dad stayed coolly in his role and started picking up presents from his basket and delivering them to his daughter and his wife.

When all the presents had been delivered and the special Father Christmas had done his job and they had laughed so hard that their sides hurt Tiny Bit hugged her father tightly and proclaimed with authority: "You were the best Santa ever!"

Giveaway: A Signed Copy of Purge by Sofi Oksanen

2010-12-06T18:34:00.006+02:00

Update January 6, this giveaway is now closed. And the winner is... Click here. :)

The holiday season is almost here and I know that many secret -and not so secret- Santas are already hard at work. :) During the latest Helsinki Book Fair in the end of October I was lucky enough to purhcase two signed copies of Purge by Sofi Oksanen. I'm giving one of them to one of you!

I want to keep this very simple. If you want to participate in the giveaway, just leave a comment here with your e-mail address (so that I have a means contacting you, if you win). I will choose the winner on January 6th by using the age old random technique of writing the names of all participants on slips of paper and pulling one of the slips out from a hat. :) This giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere.

a book blog of one's own

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen

My Week in Books 8.1.2012

All Clear by Connie Willis

In 2012 I Pledge to...

My Top 10 Reads in 2011

Christmas & Random Books from My Personal Library: M-O

My Day in Books

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Virtual Advent Tour: Declaration of Christmas Peace

2012 Challenges

Teaser Tuesday 6.12.2011

Blackout by Connie Willis

Ash by Malinda Lo

Teaser Tuesday 15.11.2011

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Teaser Tuesday 1.11.2011

Teaser Tuesday 18.10.2011

Reading in Translation

The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

Teaser Tuesday 27.9.2011

Library Loot 25.9.2011

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

Teaser Tuesday 20.9.2011

I'm Back with Some More Books from My Personal Library: J-L

Teaser Tuesday 28.6.2011

Random Books from My Personal Library: G-I

Teaser Tuesday 21.6.2011

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

Library Loot 1.5.2011

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

Teaser Tuesday 12.4.2011

Random Books from My Personal Library: D-F

Library Loot 8.4.2011

Teaser Tuesday 5.4.2011

Random Books from My Personal Library: A-C

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 3

Teaser Tuesday 15.3.2011

I Found a New Favorite

Teaser Tuesday 22.2.2011

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down -Two Reviews

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 2

Teaser Tuesday 25.1.2011

Teaser Tuesday 18.1.2011

Going Crazy at the Book Sales Part 1

Three Good Reads

Library Loot 6.1.2011 & Giveaway Winner

Teaser Tuesday 4.1.2011

Life According to Literature, Take 3 & Some Wishes for 2011

Top 10 Reads of 2010 & December Wrap-Up

More Challenges

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Merry Christmas!

Teaser Tuesday 21.12.2010

One, Two, Theme! A Very Geeky Reading Challenge

The 2011 TBR Pile Challenge

Virtual Advent Tour: A Christmas Story

Giveaway: A Signed Copy of Purge by Sofi Oksanen