Four Short Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

Ever since I read Cranford last summer I have known that little by little I will read all the novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. I had no idea she also wrote some short stories until I happend to notice a slim, little volume called Four Short Stories in the library. After reading the text on the back cover I realised this book would be perfect for the Women Unbound challenge.

Four Short Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell includes the following stories:

• The Three Eras of Libbie March
• Lizzie Leigh
• The Well of Pen-Morfa
• The Manchester Marriage
  

The first story in the collection The Three Eras of Libbie March was first published in Howitt's Journal in 1847, a year before her first novel Mary Barton saw the light of day. Lizzie Leigh and The Well of Pen-Morfa were both published in Household Words in 1850. The publisher of this magazine was Charles Dickens. The fourth of the stories in the collection, The Manchester Marriage, was published in 1858, also in Household Words.

All four stories are about women and the trials and tribulations women faced in mid 19th century Britain.The heroines in the first three stories are all unmarried. Libbie March is a single, working class woman, who knows she is not going to marry and who has to try and find a way to live her life without the safetynet of a husband and a house of her own. Lizzie Leigh is an unwedded mother, whereas the heroine of The Well of Pen-Morfa is a women about to get married whose whole life is changed tragically after an accident leaves her disabled for life. Only the heroine of The Manchester Marriage is married, but also this story portrays the position of women in a male dominated society.

After the wonderful lightness and humour of Cranford these were grimmer stories, but not stories without hope and, in some cases, there were even quite a lot of happiness. My favorites were The Manchester Marriage and The Three Eras of Libbie March, but all four stories were well worth reading. Elizabeth Gaskell was, not only able to write (in some cases quite long) novels, but also to use the more compact form of short stories quite effectively. All in all an interesting and enjoyable read!

Four Short Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell was my 6th read for the Women Unbound Challenge. I still have one fiction and one nonfiction book to read to complete the challenge. :)

Teaser Tuesday 26.1.2010: The Library at Night

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 & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participiants can add the book to their to be read lists if they like your teasers!

I have a huge pile of TBR novels from the library at the moment and can hardly wait to read each and everyone of them! :) I'm currently reading two novels, Consequences of Sin, a mystery set it Edwardian England by Clare Langley-Hawthorne and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, a historical novel telling the aftermath of the fall of Muslim Granada in the early 16th century, by Tariq Ali. Both books are firsts in a series. Consequences of Sin introduces Ursula Marlow, an heiress, an Oxford graduate and a passionate advocate of women's suffrage. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is the first book in Ali's quintet of novels tracing the history of Islam. Both seem very good this far. But, in addition to these novels I'm also reading an essay collection by Alberto Manguel called The Library at Night, "a meditation on the meaning and mysteries of libraries through history". My teaser comes from the first essay, where Manguel talks about his own library in a 15th century barn in the French countryside. These sentences are from a chapter on p. 17, where he writes about what he does to new acquisitions to his private library:

"Old and new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned."

Isn't that great? :) I rarely read essays, but I'm really looking forward to reading this book!

In This House of Brede

I read In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden for the first time quite a few years ago. Right after that I also read another of her books about women religious Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy. I liked both books a lot and always intended to read more by Godden, but somehow never did. Then some weeks ago, while browsing the DVD-section of Amazon.co.uk I noticed that they had the movie version of In This House of Brede available. I ordered it. Just after my DVD arrived I also read Danielle's review of Godden's The Greengage Summer. I watched the DVD and liked it a lot, and now I wanted not only to read more Godden, but to reread In This House of Brede. In retrospect it was good I watched the film first, because the story had been changed a lot, really a lot! It had been such a long time since I read the book that I had forgotten most of the details. If I had first reread the book and then watched the flm, I would probably not have liked the film nearly as much.

In This House of Brede is a wonderful book. Set in the 1950's and 60's in the Benedictine Monastery of Brede it follows the life of the community of about 90 nuns during a time when society and also the Roman Catholic Church were changing quite dramatically. The book starts with Mrs. Philippa Talbot, a very successful careerwoman, a widow and a convert to Catholicism, saying her goodbyes at work. She is to enter Brede. Through Philippa, and also through various other sisters and nuns of the Brede Abbey, Godden paints a very realistic and very loving picture of the community. These are flesh and blood women with their strenghts and weaknesses striving towards a common goal. Even though Philippa is in a way the main character of the book, it could also be said that the main characher were in fact the community as a whole.

Rumer Godden's writing is beautiful. The narrative moves back and forth in time through the thoughts of the individual women and the things they say. For example in the prologue we follow Philippa from her workplace to her arrival in the village of Brede, where she enters the local pub for a glass (or three :)) of whisky to quiet her nerves and to smoke har last cigarettes, before

"What do you ask?"
"To try my vocation as a Benedictine in this house of Brede."

Then there follows a list of the members of the community at the time of Philippa's entrance and next, in the first chapter, all of a sudden it is four years later and Sister Philippa is nearing her Solemn Profession. I did not remember that the book was constructed this way and felt quite cheated when I first thought that Godden jumped so much forward and was not going to tell us in more detail about Sister Philippa's first few years in the monastery, but I should not have been worried. As the story envolved all was revealed in expertly constructed flashbacks.

I loved the way Godden portrayed the sisters and nuns and all the customs of the community. For example in a traditional pre Vatican II Benedictine Monastery the nuns were called Sister before their Solemn Profession and after that the choir nuns were called Dame whereas the claustral sisters were called Sister even after they had made their permanent vows. Also the entrance ceremony when entering into the novitiate was different for a widow entering than for a virgin. Many customs of religious communities were changed after the second Vatican council in the 1960's, and In This House of Brede tells us also about those changes and how different members of the community felt about them.

In my opinion In This House of Brede is the best novel ever written about a religious community. Godden was able to include so much in the story. There really is everything in there, everything you could think a novel trying to realistically tell about a community of nuns could include: difficulties of older vocations and those entering very young, boyfriends and lovers left behind, personal tragedies, the difficulties to follow the hardest vow of them all i.e. the vow of obedience, healthy friendships between nuns and friendships deemed too particular, new members entering, others leaving, economical difficulties, those who have to learn not to be in charge and those who have to learn to be in charge, the world changing outside the walls of Brede Abbey and the Church itself changing. There really is everything in there and still I loved the book so much that it hardly felt enough! I would have loved to read even more about the House of Brede.

In This House of Brede, whose fictional community was based on the real-life Stanbrook Abbey and St. Cecilia's Abbey, was first published in 1969. The previous year Rumer Godden had converted to Roman Catholicism. While writing In This House of Brede she had, for three years, lived next door to an English Benedictine Abbey. The experience changed her life.

I will count In This House of Brede as my first read in the World Religion Challenge.

World Religion & Reading the World Challenges

I have decided to join two more challenges, both of which I originally found through Eva's blog:

• World Religion Challenge 

• Reading the World Challenge

World Religion Challenge is hosted by Bibliofreak.The challenge site is here. The aim of the challenge is to read books (fiction or nonfiction, poetry, religious texts) about different religions. The challenge runs all through 2010 and there are 4 levels of participation. I have chosen to join The Unsheparded Path, also known as The Don't Tell Me What to Do -path. :) That allows me to choose freely how many books I'll read and about which religion(s).I am a cradle Lutheran and have also read quite a lot about Catholicism. So, I guess, I will be reading something about Christianity also for this challenge (I actually just finished my first book for the challenge. In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, but more about that in a review later.), but I will try to use the challenge as a means to read more about other religions. As I will be walking the Unsepharded Path :) I don't want to make too many plans about which books to read. There has been, however, this one book sitting in my bookself for quite a while now that I think would be perfect for this challenge and this challenge would also be a perfecr reason to finally read it. The book is The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah by Karen Armstrong. I might also read something else by Armstrong. Years ago I read her memoir of her years as a sister in a Catholic teaching order and have been thinking of reading more by her ever since, but somehow never did. In addition to The Great Transformation (and maybe something else by Armstrong) I will probably read fiction where religion or themes related to religion play an important role. Possible books (three of which are only available in Finnish] include:

• Rumer Godden: In This House of Brede (just finished this one & will count it as my first read for the challenge) [Catholic Christianity]
• Aaron Hamburger: Faith for Beginners [Judaism]
  
• Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha [Hinduism, Buddhism, eastern & western spirituality]
• Juha Itkonen: Myöhemipien aikojen pyhiä [Mormons]
  
• Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: The Saddelbag [Islam]
• Eila Pennanen: Pyhä Birgitta [Catholic Christianity]
  
• Hannu Raittila: Ei minulta mitään puutu [Laestadian religious movement, Christianity]
  
• Ilia Trojanow: The Collector of Worlds [Islam, Hinduism]
  
• You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction, ed. by Keith Kachtick [Buddhism]
  

These two nonfiction books I have read earlier, but will highly recommend for anyone wanting to know a bit more about Catholicism:

• Elizabeth Kuhns: The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns
• Nancy Klein Maguire: An Infinity of Little Hours: The Trial of Faith of Five Young Men in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order
  

Let's move over to the Reading the World Challenge then. I've been wanting to join some kind of a "reading around the world -challenge" for a while now. Actually I would love to do a challenge where one should read books set in different bordering coutries and in such a way travel all around the world through one's reading, but that would be quite a big undertaking. Reading the World Challenge, hosted by papertigers.org asks the participants to read one book for every continent once a month. See the challenge website here. I have decided to start the challenge this month, but what books to choose that's difficult! Too much choice, all too much! :) Well, the following list is compiled mainly from my TBR list. Maybe this challenge will help me shorten it a bit... I'm hoping  to read maybe more than one book per continent, but we'll see. Here's my list:

Africa:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Thing Around Your Neck [Nigeria]
  
• Faarah M. J. Awl: Ignorance Is the Enemy of Love [Somalia]
• Buchi Emecheta: Joys of Motherhood [Nigeria]
  
• Petina Gappah: An Elegy for Easterly [Zimbabwe]
• Naguib Mahfouz: Before the Throne: Dialogue's with Egypt's Great from Menes to Anwar Sadat [Egypt]

Antarctica:

• Caroline Alexander: Mrs Chippy's Last Expeditions [1914-1915]: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton's Polar-Bound Cat
  
• Beryl Bainbridge: The Birthday Boys
• Vivien Kelly: Take One Young Man
  
• H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness
• Rosie Thomas: Sun at Midnight

Asia:

• Nathalie Abi-Ezzi: A Girl Made of Dust [Lebanon]
• Rumer Godden: The River [India]
  
• Sanjida O'Connell: The Naked Name of Love [Mongolia]
  
• Mahbod Seraji: Rooftops of Tehran [Iran]
• Fan Wu: February Flowers [China]

Australia:

• Wilkie Collins: Ioláni, or Tahiti, as It Was [Tahiti]
  
• Richard Flanagan: Wanting [Tasmania, Australia]
• Janet Frame: Towards Another Summer [New Zealand]
• Apelu Tielu: Forever in Paradise [Samoa]
  
• Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant [Australia]
  

Europe:

• Gurbergur Bergsson: The Swan [Iceland]
  
• Jens Kristian Grondahl: Virginia [Denmark]
  
• Ismail Kadare: The Three-Arched Bridge [Albania]
• Claudio Magris: Danube [Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia]
• Herta Müller: The Passport [Romania]

North America:

• Patrick Chamoiseau: Childhood [Martinique]
• Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory [Haiti]
  
• Elizabeth Hay: Late Nights on Air [Canada]
• Mayra Montero: The Red of His Shadow [Haiti, Dominican Republic]
  
• Luis Alberto Urrea: The Hummingbird's Daughter [Mexico]

South America:

• Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile [Chile]
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Of Love and Other Deamons [Colombia]
  
• Tomás Eloy Martinez: The Tango Singer [Argentina]
• Colin Thubron: To the Last City [Peru]
• Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay [Paraguay]
  

As my very own bonus book for the Reading the World Challenge I shall read The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson.

Empress of the World

My second read for the GLBT Challenge and my first one for the What's in a Name? 3 was Empress of the World by Sara Ryan. Empress of the World is a YA novel about a group of students attending the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth. The narrator is Nicola (Nic) Lancaster, who plays the viola, draws, and works in theatre productions. She wants to become an archeologist and has come to the Siegel Institute to study archeology. Right in the beginning of the summer programme Nic, who has never had "friend friends" only theatre friends or orchestra friends, befriends some fellow students, among them Battle Hall Davies, a beautiful dancer, who seems to be everything Nic is not. The friendship between Nic and Battle grows and they soon move from being friends to being girlfriends.

I wanted to read this book especially for the GLBT Challenge (but it did not hurt that it also fits into the title category of What's in a name? 3 Challenge :)), as I had read quite a few very positive reviews about it. And I see why so many people have loved this book. The story felt very real. The subject matter, teenage same sex relationship, is important. It is essential that young persons whether they are GLBT or straight or wondering about their sexuality have books like Empress of the World to read and fictional characters like Nic and Battle to identify with. But...

I loved How Beautiful the Ordinary, I did not love Empress of the World. It was ok, and as I said, I do see its merits. I guess, I'm simply too old for this book. :) It felt too teenagey for me, but I would recommend it for all my heart to anyone in or closer to their teens than I am!

Sara Ryan has also written a companion book to Empress of the World, The Rules for Hearts, which follows Battle's life four years after the summer at the Siegel Institute.

Mailbox Monday 18.1.2010 & What I Am Reading Now

I confess, at the moment I'm in the middle of reading all too many books! But it's fun! :) The only negative thing was that I did not finish rereading Mrs. Dalloway in time to participate in the first leg of the Woolf in Winter group read. I could have written about the book based on the previous times I have read it, but I rather reread it first and share what I think of it this time around. I promise to post about Mrs. Dalloway later. It is, after all, one of my all time favorite books.

I'm still reading the Amnesty International short story anthology Freedom. I first borrowed it from the library, but these are hard stories to read in a row, so after maybe 4-5 stories I just had to take a break from the book. I absolutely wanted to read all the stories, though, so I ended buing the anthology in December. Now I'm slowly working my way through it. As I'm also working through The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and Four Short Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell. Both books I like, Atwood has once again spun an intriguing tale set in the future and Gaskell's short stories are very interesting portraits of women and women's life in the mid 19th century, but somehow there has all the time been some book I want to read even more then these two!

Another book I've been reading is the final part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. I own the whole trilogy, but took kind of a shortcut with the two first parts: the books have been made into movies in Scandinavia, and I have the first two movies on DVD (the third film has not been released yet) and after watching them (Noomi Rapache is just perfect as Lisbeth!:)) I'm yearning to find out how the story ends! Actually, I have all the time thought that the books might be just a bit too much for me and I must say that I do find the third book sometimes hard to read because of the violent things happening. Somehow for me it's  more difficult to read about violence than watch a DVD (and when watching a DVD, it is very easy to fast forward if the going gets too tough ;)).

Danielle over at A Work in Progress posted about The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden a fortnight ago, and reading her review made me think that I would really like to read more Godden. Also, I had during the holidays ordered the movie version of In This House of Brede and got it just the day before Danielle posted about The Greengege Summer. I read both In This House of Brede and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy quite a few years ago. I'm actually sort of collecting novels about nuns and religious sisters and those both fall into that category. Funny thing is that In This House of Brede is, in my opinion, one of the best novels about nuns and religious life ever written, but I do not own a copy myself. (I'm going to remedy that very soon, though! :)) Well, after reading Danielle's post & watching the In This House of Brede -movie I absolutely wanted not only to read more Godden, but to reread In This House of Brede. I got both The Greengage Summer and In This House of Brede, and also a third novel of hers called The River from the National Repository Library through ILL. The NRL is just great! And their service is very quick! Often you get your books in 1-2 working days. When I got my books I was busy reading Mrs. Dalloway for Woolf in Winter and a novel (not available in English) by the Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad for one of my two reading groups, so on my way home from work that day I thought just to take a little peek into In this House of Brede during the metro ride. Well, I got totally hooked! I simply could not put the book down! Yesterday I finished the Kjaerstad novel, and now I'm free to transport myself to the Benedictine Abbey of Brede again! It's been such a long time since I read the book for the first time that I had totally forgotten the wonderful way Godden's story moves backwards and forwards in time. I'm really, really loving the way she writes and the way she portrays the lives of the nuns.

Mailbox Monday is a weekly event hosted by Marcia of The Printed Page.

Last week sales began in the bookstores over here. I went to the my favorite bookstore "just to take a look"  and ended up buying these three books, two novels and a nonficion book:

• Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski. My first ever Persephone book! It is a story set in post WWII France. Hilary Wainwright returns to France in order to find a child lost five years ago in 1943. Is the child really his? Does he want him? The novel was first published in 1949 and it's said to paint a brilliant picture of a country deeply divided after the war.
• Girl in a Bule Dress by Gaynor Arnold. A famous Victorian novelist Alfred Gibson (who resembles Dickens) is dead and his wife has not been invited to the funeral. This is the story of the wife, Dorothea, who is "not content to be remembered as a mere footnote when the official Life of the great man comes to be written." The novel was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2008.
• The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants by Anna Pavord. I bought this book mainly because it was so cheap and so beautiful, the illustrations are really lovely! It's about botanical history, how plants came to be called and grouped the way they are today.

Teaser Tuesday 12.1.2010

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 & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participiants can add the book to their to be read lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser today is from an old favorite, a book I'm reading for the umpteenth time, a book that is one of my all time favorites, and is written by my favorite author. It is the book I know the two first sentences of by heart: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I'm rereading Mrs. Dalloway in order to participate in the Woolf in Winter group discussion, though probably I will not finish my reread in time (I must read another longer book for a book club meeting this week). We'll be discussing Mrs. D. starting from January 15th. 

And the teaser in this case just have to be from the very beginning of the book :) :

" Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. "

 Happy reading everyone! 

Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

When I joined the Women Unbound Challenge and decided to go for the suffragette level, I thought that reading the three nonfiction books required would be the real challenge inside the challenge for me. If we talk about reading purely for fun, I read mostly fiction and sometimes nonfiction about history. I do borrow quite a lot of nonfiction from the library, but most often I only browse or skim the books, read a snippet from here, another from there. Well, I do admit that my nonfiction choices for the challenge have been well within my comfort zone: first one was about my favorite writer and the second one is about history, but still this far my "challenge within a challenge" has gone a lot more smoothly than I expected. My first nonfiction book for the challenge Vita & Virginia was really interesting and so was also my second! My second nonfiction book read for the challenge was Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education by Jane Robinson.

Jane Robinson is a British writer and lecturer, who specialises in writing about social history from the women's point of view. In addition to Bluestockings, she has written half a dozen other nonfiction books that would all very well qualify for the Women Unbound Challenge. Read more about Jane Robinson here.

Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education tells the story of higher education for women in Britain from about the mid 19th century to the 1930s through the experiences of the women, both teachers and students, themselves. It is a well written, informative book that is very readable. It reads almost like a (good:)) novel. The stories of the pioneering women educators and their students are captivating. While reading you are transported into a world of cocoa parties and chaperones, eccentric entrance interviews, scholarly triumphs and tragedies, supporting and not-so-supporting parents, wonderful teachers, who secretly paid their poor female students university education, and bigoted professors, who when seeing that in the lecture hall only women were present, said "As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today." [p. 69]

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in women's history, women's rights or the history of education.

GLBT Mini-Challenge no 1: Importance

This year's GLBT Challenge, or Challenge That Dare Not Speak Its Name, hosted by Amanda and Jen, will include monthly mini-challenges. This month's mini-challenge is about importance. Participients are asked to tell with a few words why this challenge or this issue is important to them.

Why do I think that the GLBT Challenge/the GLBT issue is important?

1. As long as there is even one person on earth, who thinks that homosexuality is an illness and/or a sin, educating people about the issue is important.

2. Love is love. Whether it is between two women, two men, or a man and a woman, love should not be silenced, nor ridiculed, nor persecuted, but cherished and celebrated.

Finnish Classics Part 2.

Back in September I wrote a post about some Finnish classics. It was my intention to post part 2 soon after part 1, but then I got too busy preparing for the upcoming Finnish 10-Dance Championships and forgot all about part 2. Well, better late than never! Here comes part 2, and in tune with my participating in the Women Unbound Challenge it is all about women writers! I must say, though, that it's such a pity not more Finnish novels have been translated into English...

1. Three Novels by Aino Kallas

Aino Kallas (1878-1956) belonged to a well-known intellectual family. Her father Julius Krohn was the professor of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. Aino published her first work at the age of 19. In 1900 she married Oskar Kallas, an Estonian scientist. The couple lived first in St. Petersburg, Russia (Finland at the time was a Russian Grand Duchy), then in Estonia and later in Great Britain after Oskar Kallas was appointed Estonia's ambassador there. Later still the Nazi-occupation of Estonia forced the Kallas to flee to Sweden. Her last years the widowed Aino Kallas lived in Finland. She wrote both poetry and prose. Three Novels is a collection of her three most famous novels, the most famous being, perhaps, The Wolf's Bride, which is a werewolf story. The other two short novels in the book are Barbara von Tisenhusen and The Pastor of Reigi. All three novels tell about illegitimate love and are also called The Eros Trilogy. Her writing is inventive and beautiful, but I must warn you, there are no happy endings in these stories. The stories were first translated into English between 1927-1930 and then again 1975.

Read more about Aino Kallas and her work here.

2. The Moomin books by Tove Jansson. These are children's book classics (but even adults read them:)) made really popular all again in the 1990s, because of a Japanese cartoon based on the moomin characters. Tove Jansson (1914-2001), belonged to Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. Both her parents were artists, and all the children in the family chose artistic professions. Tove became an artist, an illustrator, and a writer. Her life partner was graphic designer Tuulikki Pietilä. The Moomin books, first of which, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945, tell about the lovable moomin trolls (who look a bit like white hippos :)) and their friends in the Moominvalley.

Quite a few of Jansson's novels & short stories aimed for an adult audience, are also available in English. Sort of Books publishing house in London have during the 2000s published 5 of her books (Sun City, The Summer Book, A Winter Book, Fair Play, and The True Deceiver). Read more about Tove Jansson here.

3. The Collected Poems by Edith Södergran.

Edith Södergran (1892-1923) was another Swedish-speaking Finn and is now considered one of the internationally best known Finnish poets. Her first collection was published in 1916 and she managed to write five more books of poetry before succumbing to consumption. One more collection was published posthumously in1925. She was an early modernist, who gained more recognition only many years after her death. Read more about her here.

4. Not Before Sundown/Troll -A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo

Johanna Sinisalo (b. 1958) won the Finlandia Prize with her first novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi in 2000. Before that she had already established herself as a science fiction and fantasy short story writer. Her novel was translated into English as Not Before Sundown in 2003, and for the American market as Troll -A Love Story in 2004. This is a brilliant, innovative novel with fantastical elements drawn from Finnish folklore. The book is, in my opinion, a true modern classic. Sinisalo has written four books since The Troll, unfortunately they are not available in English. Read a bit more about Sinisalo here.

Happy Epiphany for those who celebrate!

How Beautiful the Ordinary

My first book read in 2010 is How Beautiful the Ordinary, a YA collection of twelve short stories exploring identity. The collection is edited by Michael Cart and includes stories by such renown writers among others as David Levithan, Emma Donoghue, and Julie Anne Peters. I will count this book as my first read in the GLBT Challenge.

 How Beautiful the Ordinary is a wonderful book. Were I to rate it, I would probably give it four and a half stars. Some of the stories I absolutely loved (a bit more about those in a moment).The last half a star would be missing only because there were other stories I merely liked. Interestingly, after reading the author descriptions from the last pages of the book, I had to rethink my initial reaction to one of the stories. When I first read Fingernail by William Sleator, I did not like it very much because of the abusive elements in the plot. It was unpleasant to read about a young Thai man's relationship to an unbalanced, violent Frenchman even if the story does end with a positive note. When I later learned that the story was based on Sleator's late partner's life, it made me value it quite a bit more.

All in all, How Beautiful the Ordinary is quite a well balanced collection. Maybe the stories exploring gay male identity dominate a little (6  stories), where as there are 3 stories about lesbian as well as transsexual identity.

Two of the stories are in graphic form, one is a historical short story, and one is partly written as a movie script. First Time by Julie Anne Peters, a touching story of two girls' first time making love, is told alternatingly by the two girls so that the pages are divided vertically in two halves and each girl has her half of the page to speak and think. Last story in the collection The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N. H. is noticably longer than the others, more of a novella than a short story, really.

This collection introduced me to many new authors. The only ones I had read something by before were Emma Donoghue (Touchy Subjects) and Julie Anne Peters (Define Normal), but now I would like to read something more at least by Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ron Koertge, and David Levithan.

Then to my favorite stories in How Beautiful the Ordinary. And I really cannot tell more about the plots, as I don't want to give too much away. You have to read them yourself!:)

• Jennifer Finney Boylan: The Missing Person
  In this story 14-year old Jimmy steals his sister's skirt and goes to see the Devon Horse Show as Jenny. Beautifully told, intimate portrait of a young boy's realization that he actually is a she.
• Emma Donoghue: Dear Lang
  Lang's non-biological mother writes her a letter for her 16th birthday trying to explain why Lang probably doesn't even know that she in the beginning had two mothers.This is another touching story & it speaks also about the importance of having certain legal rights/the problems caused by the lack of rights
• Ron Koertge: My Life as a Dog
  After ending up in hospital a young man finally gets the courage to tell his parents he is gay. I loved the innovative way in which this story was told.
• David Levithan: A Word From the Nearly Distant Past
  The spirits of the past generations take a loving look at the present and future state of affairs. This is the first story in the book and it ended up being my absolute favorite. Here is a little quote from page 19 that made me chuckle. Let's hope this becomes reality (well, not the Facebook part necessarily:), but the part about rights):
  
  
  
  

  "There will come a time -perhaps even by the time you read this- when people will no longer be on Facebook. There will come a time when the stars of High School Musical will be sixty. There will come a time when you will have the same inalienable rights as your straightest friend. (Probably before any of the stars of High School Musical turns sixty)."

Well, that concludes my review of How Beautiful the Ordinary. Happy reading, everyone!

Women Unbound Reviews Part 1

As I mentioned in an earlier post I am already half way through my Women Unbound Challenge suffragette level (8 books) goal. I haven't, however, posted any reviews yet, so, here comes:

The first book I read for the challenge was Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. This is the third book by this writer that I have read. I read The Girl with the Pearl Earring in Finnish (Tyttö ja helmikorvakoru) soon after it was translated back in 2001 and then continued by reading Falling Angels in English, but I had not read any other of her books before Remarkable Creatures caught my eye.

Remarkable Creatures tells the story of two women, middle class Elizabeth Philpot and working class Mary Anning, who both hunt for fossils. For Elizabeth, sent to live in Lyme Regis at the turn of the 19th century with her two sisters after their brother gets married, collecting fossils is something to do, someting to direct her energy in, for Mary it is a way to earn little something to help her family get food on the table. Despite their different circumstances the two women become friends.

The story is told alternatingly by Mary and Elizabeth. I think that kind of structure worked very well for this book. Chevelier also tells very subtly, but interestingly, about the difficulties the women encounter because of their gender in the male dominated world of scientists, and, well, in the male dominated world of the early 19th century in general. Thus, this was a perfect read for the Women Unbound Challenge. I really enjoyed reading Remarkable Creatures. It ended up on my top 10 list for books I read in 2009.

Mary Anning was a real person, an expert fossil hunter, who made some very important finds. She, for example, found the first ichtyosaur skeleton recognized as such and the two first plesiosaurs ever found. Read more about her here or here.

(As a sidenote: I just visited the Finnish Museum of Natural History on Wednesday and saw both an ichtyosaur and a plesiosaur fossil there. I'm quite interested in fossils now!)

My tiny little criticism is for the cover of the book. I like to colours and the picture, but the dresses of the women pictured do not match the time period the novel is set in!

Next I turned to two old favorites: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.Virginia Woolf is my favorite author (the fact that I might have mentioned a few times before in my posts :)). I have only read The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West, but really loved it, when I read it many years ago (after I had read Orlando for the first time and learned that it was dedicated to Sackville-West). As for achieving my goal of suffragette level in the challenge I am to read at least 3 nonfiction books. I chose Vita & Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf by Suzanne Raitt as my first nonfiction book for the challenge. As it says in the back cover of the book it "examines the creative intimacy between the two women, interpreting both their relationship and their work in the light of their experience as married lesbians."

This book was a fascinating read. I'm actually not a great fan of books about literary research, but this one was really interesting! I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes the works of Woolf and/or Sackville-West. Raitt's book makes you read Woolf and Sackville-West with new eyes.

I had thought to reread Orlando in 2010 as part of the GLBT Challenge, but after reading Raitt I just could not wait after new year. I found the chapter about Orlando in Vita & Virginia especially interesting. Orlando by Virginia Woolf is thus my third read for Women Unbound. It is a story, a biography really, of a young, English nobelman born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who desides not to grow old. We will then follow Orlando's life, loves and career until during his time as an ambassador in Constantinople in the 17th century something incredible happens to him. He falls to a long sleep and when he wakes up, he is a woman. After that Orlando returns to Britain and continues her life as Lady Orlando.

I have always thought Orlando a brilliant book and this reread did not change my opinion. After reading Raitt's book I now, however, paid more attention to how gender and the fluidity of sexuality was portrayed in the story. It made the reading experience even more interesting.

The fourth book I read was Astrid & Veronika by Linda Olsson. This is an interesting writer. She is originally from Sweden, but has lived in New Zealand since 1990. She writes her books not in her mother tongue Swedish but in English. To master another language so well that you are able to write fiction in it, that is something I always find very admirable!

Astrid & Veronika is Olsson's first novel. It was first published in New Zealand in 2005 as Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs. The American edition, as well as many other editions, is called Astrid & Veronika.

Again this is a book about friendship between two very different women: Astrid an old woman, a recluse the villagers call the witch, who has lived her whole life in a small community in Swedish countryside and younger Veronika, a writer trying to write her next novel in peace and quiet and to recover from something that has happened to her while she spent some time in New Zealand.

I had heard good things about Astrid & Veronika, but unfortunately I must say I was somewhat dissapointed with the book. Both Astrid and Veronika are characters you feel for and maybe one of my problems with the book was that both their stories were so sad (though there is also optimism in the book). There were some really touching moments in the narrative, but then again there were parts I just wanted to skip. I do understand that the Swedish midsummer traditions, using some Swedish words every now and then etc. must seem exotic for many, but it all just irritated me. It felt like a gimmick that, at least for me, did not work very well. And I speak Swedish, so I could understand all those "exotic" words and our traditions over here are pretty similar to our Swedish neighbours. Well, probably that just was the problem. The exotism was all lost in me. Though I must say I kind of had the same feeling about the beach scenes set in New Zealand and I have never been there.

I'm planning on reading Olsson's second novel Sonata for Miriam this year for the What's in a Name Challenge. We'll see, if I'll love that book more.

That's it this time! Have a great 01.01.10 everyone! I'm off to read some more Woolf now!