No Reading in Paris

I spent last week in Paris watching tennis at Roland Garros. In addition to most of my favorite players on the women's side I was lucky enough to have a ticket for the main stadium for one of Roger Federer's matches. :) Now I'm back home and back to work -and hoping to have more time for reading in the weeks to come!

This is my May wrap up:

Books read: 4

Books read in English: 1

Books read in Finnish: 3

Finnish books read: 0

Fiction: 4

Nonfiction: 0

Books reviewed: 1

List of books read in May:

-Dorrestein, Renate: Pojallani on seksielämä ja minä luen äidille Punahilkkaa (originally written in Dutch, not available in English as far as I know)

-Morgan, Terence: The Master of Bruges

- Shields, Carol: Ellei (Unless) (reread)

- Neville, Katherine: Kahdeksan (The Eight)

What a meagre list of books read I have for May! :( But there is also some books I started in May but am still reading that did not quite make this list. After many years I felt I wanted to read some Agatha Christie and am half way through Miss Marple's Final Cases now. I'm also reading Middlemarch by George Eliot for the first time, and I finally got into reading An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah, but have only had time to read the two first stories this far.

Well, I'll leave you today with a photo taken on a bit rainy day in Paris. And yes, that is Roger Federer sitting on the player's chair there on the right. :)

The Master of Bruges

I love making book lists for challenges, but the funny thing is that I actually seldom follow my lists. More often than not at least some of the books I read for a particular challenge have not been on my list and very often I have just kind of tumbled on them somewhere on the way. One such book is Terence Morgan's debut novel The Master of Bruges. I saw the book at work, loved the cover picture, found the cover text interesting, and decided to borrow it, and it was not until I had started reading the book, I might have even been already half way through it, before I realised that I could use this novel in a challenge. 

The Master of Bruges takes place in the latter half of the 15th-century in mainly Burgundy and in England. The master in question is painter Hans Memling. The novel, which mixes real life events & people and fiction, follows Memling's life from a painter's apprentice to a revered old master. The Duke of Burgundy takes young Memling under his wing and later Memling falls in love with the Duke's daughter Princess Marie. While an ordinary Marie could marry Hans, Burgundy cannot marry a painter and Hans Memling is to be dissapointed in his love of Marie, who marries Maximilian of Austria and rules Burgundy with him after the death of her father. However, the lives of Hans and Marie weave together quite dramatically all the way till the death of Marie.

At one point Hans, now a succesful painter of both religious pictures and portraits, gives shelter to some refugee Englishmen. Only after a while does he realise that the Dick and Ned he has been sheltering in his house are the dethroned King of England and his brother. It is the time of the War of the Roses. When the fortunes of war change King Edward IV returns to power and later Memling travels to England to finish a painting for an English customer, but he also gets invited into the court and becomes involved with what happenes to the sons of Edvard IV, the so called Princes in the Tower.

The Master of Bruges is an easy book to read. It is a thrilling historical novel, where the author has used his imagination and created a plausible story mixing facts and fiction. I enjoyed reading this book a lot. I only wish that I had used either the net or a book of Memling's art as a reference while reading. It would have been fun to take a look at the paintings mentioned in the book.

I read The Master of Bruges for the What's in the Name 3 -Challenge. The book's name has a place in it, thus this is my PLACE-book for the challenge.

One Long Overdue Review and a Wrap Up

Yes, yes, I know April is long gone :), and I am totally behind with my reviews, but unfortunately I had no time for posting these past few weeks (been happily busy with my dancing). I read one challenge book for the GLBT Challenge in April. So, here comes a short review:

The Others by Siba Al-Harez

I read this book for the GLBT Challenge and had very high hopes for it. It is a novel written by a young Saudi woman and set in the largely Shi'ite eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The novel tells the story of a young nameless woman at a girls' school who is seduced by one of her classmates. The glimpse into a culture and society so very different from my own was interesting, but the unhealthy, violent aspects of many of the relationships whether straight or gay in the novel alienated me from the story as did the odd figures of speech all over the text. The book was originally written in Arabic (it is described in the dust jacket as having been a bestseller in Arabic). I don't know Arabic, but I have an idea that it is a very poetic language full of great figures of speech. If that is true, then maybe the oddities were Arabic sayings translated all too literally into English. Anyway I found the text really difficult (as in heavy going) to read. Of course English is not my native tongue, so maybe that played a role, too. Actually it would be really interesting to hear what a native English speaker would say about the translation. All in all The Others was a dissapointment for me. I did not feel any sympathy towards the characters and I had to struggle to get to the last page.

This was my 5/12 read for the GLBT Challenge.

April Wrap Up:

Books read: 5

Books read in English:5

Books read in Finnish: 0

Finnish books read: 0

Fiction: 5

Nonfiction: 0

Books reviewed: 2

List of books I read in April:

-Al-Harez, Siba: The Others (see review above)
-Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
-Heyer, Georgette: The Reluctant Widow
-Laski, Marghanita: Little Boy Lost
-Shields, Carol: Happenstance