Chapter 36: Best of 2009

I cannot believe how fast time has flown! It feels like only yesterday I was sitting in my hotelroom balcony in Portoroz, Slovenia, reading Cranford by Elizabet Gaskell, enjoying the sun and every now and then lifting my eyes from the book and admiring the view towards the Mediterranean, and that was in July! Today, quite a few books (though not as many as I would have liked) later, I'm sitting at home, every now and then shifting my eges from the computer screen towards the window to see if it's still snowing as it has been most of the day. (It is, but it's already so dark outside that I had to walk to the window to take a closer look.)

Here is my top 10 reads for 2009:

10. Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere's Fan. I love Oscar. :) I'm not really into plays, neither in book form nor in the theatre, but I love his witty writing.

9. Gaile Parkin: Baking Cakes in Kigali. I had earlier read Gil Courtemanche's novel about the Rwandan genoside, and let me tell you, it was not a fun read. Parkin's book gave a completely different and much more optimistic view of Rwanda and Kigali, even though it touched on several serious subjects.

8. Sylvia Brownrigg: Pages for You. This is a beautifully written, bittersweet story of a young woman's first love with another woman. I'd highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to read some good GLBT fiction.

7. Tracy Chevalier: Remarkable Creatures. I loved this novel, it was fascinating to learn about the fossile hunters in early 19th century Britain, and it feels almost cruel to rate it only seventh in my top 10 list, but it cannot be helped.

6. Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford. My first ever Gaskell, but surely not the last (I'm actually one story down, three to go with a collection of four of her short stories that I'm reading for the Women Unbound Challenge).

5. Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book. Loved this one, too. I usually like historical novels of this type. Hello, it was about a book!!:) And the modern day setting of Sarajevo after the 1990s war, made me want to read more novels about the Balkans (This book is not only about the Balkans, though.).

4. Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger. It's written by Sarah Waters, of course I liked it! She is one of my favorite authors and I have read all her novels. This is not my favorite, though. Tipping the Velvet is still my no. 1. Waters novel, but The Little Stranger competes for the second position with The Nightwatch.

3. Markus Zusak: The Book Thief. What can I say? I cried twice while reading this book. It is such a touching story.

2. Courtney Angela Brkic: Stillness. Amazing short story collection with stories set in the Balkans in the 1990s and telling stories from all sides of the conflict.

1. Steven Galloway: The Cellist of Sarajevo. This book, in my opinion, is simply amazing. Not only my best read this year, but it went straight into my favorite books ever -list!

Oh, and I did reread both Orlando and The Time Traveller's Wife this year, but I will not include rereads into my top 10 list.

Happy, Happy New Year everyone!

Chapter 35: What's in a Name?

What a nice (and white!!) Christmas I had! It all can be pretty much summed up in two words: eating and reading! :) I had thought to save rereading Orlando by Virginia Woolf until 2010 as it was my plan to read it for the GLBT Challenge. In the end I simply could not wait. Especially not after I finished reading Suzanne Raitt's book Vita & Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf just a few days before Christmas. There is a chapter in the book about Orlando and it helped me read the novel with new eyes. I also read Amir D. Aczel's non-fiction book The Cave and the Cathedral: How a Real Life Indiana Jones and a Renegade Scholar Decoded the Ancient Art of Man. Despite the really stupid name, the book was an interesting read. I also read Clisson and Eugenie by Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, the Napoleon Bonaparte. It seems he liked to avoid getting bored while in military camp by writing. The story itself is very short, but the book contains also information about Napoleon as a writer and info about the reconstruction of the story from various fragments. On Monday I finished Astrid and Veronica by Linda Olsson. I'm now halfway through my suffragette level aim in the Women Unbound Challenge! Which leads us nicely to today's post. I've decided to join What's in a Name 3 Challenge.

What's in a Name? is a challenge hosted in 2010 for the first time by Beth F. The aim of the challenge is to read in 2010 one book in each of the six categories chosen by Beth. There should be one book with a name that includes 1. FOOD, 2. BODY OF WATER, 3. TITLE, 4. PLANT, 5. PLACE, and 6. MUSIC TERM. It is not necessary to name the books one is going to read beforehand, but I just could not help myself to make a list of possible novels. These are such fun categories. I thought to make a list of 6 X 5 books, but ended up with 6 X 10! I will not include links to these titles, as it would take too much time to link them all. Here goes:

1. FOOD

-Aimee Bender: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

-Laura Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate

-Joanne Harris: Chocolat

-Joanne Harris: Five Quarters of the Orange

-Lauren Liebenberg: The Volumtuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam

-Kate O'Brien: The Land of Spices

-Gaile Parkin: Baking Cakes in Kigali

-Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: The Guernsay Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

-Rosie Wilde: Life Is Too Short to Frost a Cupcake

-Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

2. BODY OF WATER

-Alessandro Baricco: The Ocean

-George Mackay Brown: Beside the Ocean of Time

-Paulo Coelho: By the River Piedra, I sat Down and Wept

-Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages

-Kate Grenville: The Secret River

-Ha Jin: In the Pond

-Kang Kyong-ae: From Wonso Pond: a Korean Novel

-Joyce Carol Oates: The Falls

-Vita Sackville-West: No Signposts in the Sea

-Virginia Woolf: The Waves

3. TITLE

-Boris Akunin: The Winter Queen

-Bernardine Evaristo: The Emperor's Babe

-Claire Massud: The Emperor's Children

-Issui Ogawa: The Lord of the Sands of Time 

-Elizabeth Peters: The Laughter of Dead Kings

-Kate Pullinger: The Mistress of Nothing

-Anne Rice: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

-Antal Szerb: The Queen's Necklace

-Sue Townsend: The Queen and I

-Oscar Wilde: The Duchess of Padua

4. PLANT

-Alexande Dumas: The Black Tulip

-Anne Dunlop: The Pineapple Tart

-Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

-Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies

-Jaroszlaw Iwanszkiewicz: The Birch Grove and Other Stories

-Katharine McMahon: Rose of Sebastopol

-Deborah Moggach: The Tulip Fever

-L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Windy Willows

-Haruki Murakami: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

-Fan Wu: February Flowers

5. PLACE

-Monica Ali: Brick Lane

-Lewis Crofts: The Pornographer of Vienna

-Steven Galloway: The Cellist of Sarajevo

-Anne Holt: Death in Oslo

-Thomas Mann: Death in Venice

-Yann Martel: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamations and Other Stories

-Domnica Radulescu: Train to Trieste

-Steven Saylor: Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome

-Mahbod Seraji: Rooftops of Tehran

-Angel Wagenstein: Farewell Shanghai

6. MUSIC TERM

-Simon Boswell: The Seven Symphonies: A Finnish Murder Mystery

-Petina Gappah: An Elegy for Easterly

-Rosamond Lehmann: Invitation to the Waltz

-Rosamond Lehmann: A Note in Music

-Rumer Godden: A Fugue in Time

-Linda Olsson: Sonata for Miriam

-Alyson Richman: Swedish Tango

-Joseph Roth: Radetzky March

-Dumitru Tsepeneag: Vain Art of the Fugue

-M. G: Vassanji: The Assassin's Song

That's it. Some of the above I have already read, but maybe some of you will find my suggestions useful.

Yesterday I watched the first two movies of the Millennium-trilogy in a row. I have not read the books yet and had been saving the films for after I had read the books, but then just could not wait with them either. Now I'm reading the last book of the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, as I want to know how the story ends. The name of the third book (as well as the first one) is actually something completety different both in original Swedish and in Finnish translation (I'm reading it in Finnish) than in English.

Chapter 34: Merry Christmas!

Chapter 33: A Review and a Challenge

I just cannot believe this! I spent good amount of this afternoon writing reviews of some of the books I have read lately, went to sing some Christmas carols (leading to Christmas there are these "most beautiful Christmas carols" sing-alongs in many churches), came home and thought to finish this post in a few minutes -and all the reviews had disappeared!! :( I really don't know what happened. I'm quite sure I saved the draft. But gone they are, and now I don't have time to rewrite them all. I'll just write one review now and post the two others in another post.


I started reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery weeks and weeks ago. And I loved it. I loved the precocious words of 12-year-old Paloma Josse, a girl who has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday as she believes that people are "programmed to believe in something that doesn't exist, because we are living creatures; we don't want to suffer. So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that that is why life has meaning." Paloma is afraid that she is going to start believing that, too. 


I also enjoyed reading about Renée, the concierge of the Parisian apartment building where Paloma lives. Renée is working very hard to be an ordinary concierge while in fact she is nothing but, or rather she does not match the conventional idea of what a concierge should be like. Renée is very widely read and loves culture and the arts.


The book is full of wonderful sentences and passages.It is really beautifully written. My copy is now full of little, purple post-it slips to mark some of my favorite passages. Somehow the writing style is also very French. I would love to be able to read the book in original French, but, alas, I'm not.


This far, all good. Right after I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog I gave it five stars in Goodreads, but when I think of it now, I must say that today I would probably give one star less. I loved the writing, I loved the characters, also the other characters in addition to Renée and Paloma, but I simply hated the ending! It was odd. I felt like somebody had said to the writer that ok, the book is long enough, now finish it up. The ending came from nowhere and left me feeling cheated. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for surprising endings, this time it just simply did not work for me, not at all.


Some of the best parts of the book were Paloma's "profund thoughts". I'll finish this short review with one of those. Food for thought for us all:

"But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?" [p. 124]

Last but not least something totally different: Inspired by Amanda from the Zen Leaf I have desided to take up a personal reading challenge for 2010. Lately I have read so much in English that I've kind of fallen behind when it comes to reading Finnish writers. Thus I promise myself to read more Finnish authors in 2010. My aim is to read 20 books, both new releases and older novels I have not yet read. I'm pretty excited about this personal challenge! I even made a simple banner just for myself! :)

Chapter 32: Teaser Tuesday 1.12.2009

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event 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 participants can add the book to their to-be-read -lists if they like your teasers!

I've been alterating between 4-5 books lately. First I started with the Amnesty International short story collection Freedom. I really like the idea that each story is based on a different article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Also, the list of authors participating is pretty impressive: Ali Smith, Pettina Gappah, Nadine Gordimer, Henning Mankell, Rohinton Mistry, Paulo Coelho, Banana Yoshimoto, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie etc. etc. etc. But, these are hard stories to read, because of the subject matter. After five stories I needed a break. I turned to something much lighter and finished first The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig and then Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen. After those two fun reads I was ready for something more serious again, but did not want to go back to the short stories just yet. I got The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood from the library and started reading that. And then I also got Bluestockings by Jane Robinson, a nonfiction book about women's fight for university education in Britian that will be one of the books I'll read for the Women Unbound Challenge. I started reading Bluestockings in the metro on my way home from work and found it so interesting that I did not want to save it for until I had finished some of the other books I'm reading. And in addition to that I had been half way through The Elegance of the Hedhodge for some weeks already!

Well, I did finish The Elegance of the Hedgehog on Sunday evening. It's a lovely book, but I 'll talk more about it in a review later. After finishing it I was down to three books I was reading. That is a pretty usual number. As my library loot last week included so many wonderful choices I just had to throw one more novel into the mix: Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. Soon, however, Remarkable Creatures proved so captivating that I'm now 1/3 through and will consentrate on it alone for now.

My teaser is from page 97:

"I looked for a long time in silence, circling the table to inspect the skull from every angle. It was still entrapped in stone, and would need much attention from Mary's blades, needles and brushes - and a good bit of hammering too."

I will count Remarkable Creatures as one of my Women Unbound reads. Happy reading, everyone!