July Wrap Up and a Bit about Purge

In July, thanks to my summer holidays, I had more time for reading than I usually have which was really, really nice.

Here is a wrap up of my July reads:

Books read: 8

Books read in English: 7

Books read in Finnish: 1

Finnish books read: 1

Fiction: 7

Nonfiction: 1

Books reviewed: 5 (& one more to come in August)

Here's the list of the books I read in July plus links to my reviews:

• Beryl Bainbridge: The Birthday Boys
• Mikhail Bulgokov: The Master and Margarita 
• Emma Donoghue: Landing
• Bernardine Evaristo: Blonde Roots
• Henry de Montherlant: Chaos and Night
• Sofi Oksanen: Puhdistus (English translation: Purge)
• Leila J. Rupp: Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women (review will be up later)
• Betsy Tobin: Ice Land

Sofi Oksanen and Purge

Sofi Oksanen with her gothic looks and fearless opinions is definitely the most talked about writer in Finland. But, most importantly, she really is an amazing writer with a distinctive, strong writing style. She has written three novels this far and all of them have been very popular in Finland. Puhdistus, her third and most popular novel, was published here in 2008 and this year it came out in English translation both in the US and the UK with the name Purge. After finally reading the book in the beginning of July, I'm simply amazed by her writing and would highly recommend the novel to all you fellow bloggers. Go, nay, run to your nearest library or bookstore to see if they have Purge available!

Take a look at Sofi Oksanen's website (it's in English) to learn more about her and her books, including Purge.

(The photo in the beginning of this post was taken in the lovely, little Slovenian coastal town of Piran last week.)

Some New Books and Two Challenge Reviews

My summer vacation is nearing its end. On Monday I'll go to work after four wonderful weeks of sunshine, sports, and good reads. I've been reading both library books and my own, and now I have quite a few new acquisitions waiting for their turn, too, as I simply could not resist the end of sale prices and ended up with six new books to fit into my bursting bookshelves. :) The latest additions to my personal library are:

• Vladimir Bartol: Alamut 
  "A twentieth-century Slovenian novelist living in Trieste drew characters from eleventh-century Persia and wove an allegory of the fascism engulfing Europe at the dawn of World War II."
  I've been wanting to read this book for a long time now. In the end I decided to buy the English trade paperback, as the English translation has only 389 pages and the Finnish version 520! (We have long words :))
• Barbara Cleverly: Tug of War
  I loved the earlier Joe Sandilands mysteries, but have not read the newer ones. I hope this one, set in France in 1926 will be an enjoyable read.
• Madeleine Gagnon: My name is Bosnia
  This is another book from the Balkans, a story of a young woman in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Miha Mazzini: Guarding Hanna
  Yet another Slovenian author. Mazzini "has turned the Beauty and the Beast tale on its head and created a new hybrid: modern fable and thriller." Yes, I'm trying to get to know Slovenian literature.
• Caro Peacock: Death of a Dancer
  A mystery set in Victorian London.
• Jody Shields: The Crimson Portrait
  A young woman mourns her husband, fallen on the WWI. When her home is transformed into a military hospital, she falls for an officer with mutilated face and gets an opportunity to remake her lover into the image of her late husband with the help of a visionary surgeon and a woman artist. Sounds interesting!

I have recently finished two books that I read for two different reading challenges:

Beryl Bainbridge: The Birthday Boys

In this slim novel Dame Beryl Bainbridge tells the story of  Captain Scott's fatale attempt to reach the South Pole in 1912. The story is told in five chapters by five different members of the expedition starting in Britain in June 1910 and ending in Antarctica in March 1912. I think The Birthday Boys was very cleverly written. I liked the structure of the book. I liked the fact that the name of the novel was something a bit different, nothing to do with the Antarctic expedition in fact (somebody's birthday is mentioned in every chapter, thus the name). This was my first encounter with Bainbridge's writing, but surely not the last. She wrote 18 novels, so there will be 17 to choose from when I want to explore her art further. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2nd this year.

I read The Birthday Boys for the Reading the World Challenge as my Antarctica book. I'm hoping to finish the challenge next month with a book by a South American author, most probably The Book of Imaginary Beings by Borges.

Emma Donoghue: Landing

I had read one book, a collection of  short stories, by Emma Donoghue before this one. I did like the stories a lot, so was really looking forward to reading one of her novels. Landing sounded like a fun, lighter read and I was not dissapointed. It was the perfect book to take with me when I flew to Slovenia for a week. Landing is a love story between a 39-year-old, sophisticated Irish flight attendant Sile and a 25-year-old Canadian small town girl Jude, who works as a curator in a tiny museum. They meet on Jude's first ever plane trip and then juggle their long distance romance through e-mails, phone calls, and visits. The women have all kind of distances to cross, not only geographical, but also generational, cultural, economical... Donoghue writes engagingly and I will absolutely want to read more of her work. After Landing I already started one of her historical novels, The Sealed Letter, and have Life Mask waiting for its turn.

I read Landing for the GLBT Challenge.

Blonde Roots

I like inventive stories of any kind and if the writer has invented some kind of alternative reality set either in the past, present or future I am always interested in taking a closer look at the book. That is why Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo caught my eye. It is a story about the transatlantic slave trade, but with a twist. Evaristo has redrawn the map of the world. There is still Africa, America and Europe or rather Aphrika, Amarika and Europa, but in her map an island the shape of the British Isles called United Kingdom of Great Ambossa (capital Londolo!) is situated at the Equator just west of the Aphrikan coast and Europa is in fact south of Aphrika with a small, continental country of England on its west coast. On the other side of the Atlantic West Japanese Islands east of continental Amarika are famous for their sugar cane plantations run with slave labour. The twist in the story is of course that the Aphrikans are the slave traders and the Europana "wiggers" the slaves.

The book tells the story of an English woman named Doris Scagglethorpe & later renamed Omorenomwara, who is captured by slavers while a young girl of about 11. There is everything you could imagine in a story about slavery: abuse by the masters, violence, slave women's children being sold off, there even is an Underground Railroad (operating in the unused underground tunnels of Londolo) helping slaves to escape. 

I found the idea of turning the tragedy of slavery around this way very interesting. Evaristo has also made good use of real London place names and Aphrikanised them! Real life Paddington Station had become Paddinto Station, Mayfair Mayfah etc. This was all well and good, but the way she had imagined the Aphrikan culture made me think what would a person with an African inheritance think of this book? Would they find it interesting, amusing -or insulting? I felt a bit uneasy with some of the details of the imaginary Aphrikan culture. The inhumaness of slavery, however, was portrayed very well. As was the first generation slaves' longing to their home country. And there were also humour.

The alternative history aspect of Blonde Roots left me somewhat confused. On the one hand judged by the fashions of the Europanes and the time it took to cross the Atlantic by boat it seemed that the story took place in an alternative 19th-century world, but then there were metro tunnels and scateboarding kids, too! I would have prefered to have known better what really was the time period Evaristo meant the story to take place in.

All in all, I did like some aspects of the story, and others not so much. However, I think I would like to try and read more Evaristo, maybe The Emperor's Babe?

Have you read Blonde Roots? What did you think of it?

New Acquisitions

If there were 50% reduction from the already reduced prizes, could you resist buying one, two -or seven books form the sales? I could not. :) But never mind as the books were really cheap! This is what I bought:

• Rosalind Belben: Our Horses in Egypt
  At the outbreak of WWI horses were requisitioned from their owners in Britain and sent with troops to various locations. Griselda Romnay's horse, Philomena, is sent with the yeomanry to Egypt and Palestine, but when the war ends many horses, Philomena included, are sold off locally. Griselda decides to travel to Egypt and bring her horse back home.
• Emma Donoghue: Landing
  I read Donoghue's short story collection Touchy Subjects some years ago and liked it a lot. Ever since I have wanted to read more of her work. I actually have had The Sealed Letter in my TBR pile for some time now and now I'll add this book to the pile! This is a love story of two women that explores the questions "does where you live matter more tham whom you live with?" and "what would you give up for love, and would you be a fool to do so?"
• Slavenka Drakulic: Frida's Bed
  I have thought of reading Drakulic many times. She is Croatian born writer of both fiction and non-fiction, who has written a lot about the Balkans and as some you might remember I am interested in novels about the Balkans. This book, however, is not about the Balkan reigon, but about Frida Kahlo.
• Sarah Hall: The Carhullan Army
  This book was a possible Women Unbound Challenge read for me. I already had it from the library, but ended up reading something else instead. The novel is about a group of rebel women who have escaped the Authority's repressive regime. It is said to be " a haunting story of how far we will go to be free."
• Sheridan Hay: The Secret of Lost Things
  A young Australian women arrives to New York with little else than her love of books and takes a job in a used book store. Soon someone is trying to locate a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. This is "a literary adventure and evocative portrait of a young woman making a life for herself in the city." And the cover photo (=lots of beautiful, old books) is lovely.
• Lloyd Jones: Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance
  This book first caught my eye because of its title. :) I'm a dancer and it is always nice to find novels that incorporate dancing into the story. This is a story set partly in New Zealand. Louise, Schmidt, and two local boys hide in a cave. The boys are afraid of being called up to war (WWI). Schmidt gives them tango lessons with devastating consequences. Years later in Argentina Schmidt's granddaughter captivates a young man with the same tango music.
• Jude Morgan: The Taste of Sorrow
  I love Jane Eyre. I hate The Wuthering Heights. I find the lives of the Bronte sisters interesting. This is a novel about the Bronte family.

Ice Land

After my trip to Iceland last month I felt it would be nice to read some fiction by Icelandic authors or at least set in Iceland. I did borrow a book by Vigdis Grimsdottir and another by Kristin Steinsdottir, neither of which is available in English. Vigdis Grimsdottir's Z -A Love Story, which is a novel about a lesbian couple, has been translated into English, but not the newer book I now have in my TBR pile. There is a short snippet of Z -A Love Story available on Literature.is here.

The book I most wanted to read, though, was not by an Icelandic author, but an American born writer now living in Britain i.e. Betsy Tobin. Her novel Ice Land had cought my eye already earlier, but after visiting Iceland I really, really wanted to read it. Not only was it a story about the land I just had spent a few days in, it was set in the times of the Vikings (in year 1000 AD, to be more exact) and many of the old Norse myths and happenings from the Icelandic sagas were incorporated into the story. I love the Viking Age, it is a very interesting historical period. When I was 20, I actually spent a semester in Oslo, Norway, because I wanted to study history in the land of the Vikings! (If you ever go to Olso, you simply have to visit the wonderful Viking ship museum in Bygdoy!) Anyway, as you might guess, my expectations for the book were both high and very positive.

Ice Land did not dissapoint me. The love stories were sweet, the describtions of Icelandic nature well researched, beautiful and lively, and the way Tobin incorporated Old Norse gods and mythology and elements from the sagas into the narrative worked very well. All in all Ice Land was a delightful read! Now, however, I really regret I did not buy the collected Icelandic sagas in paperback from the Reykjavik airport!

The Master and Margarita

Confession number 1: Russian classics intimidate me, be it then older classics like novels by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or somewhat newer ones like The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. However, after reading some enthusiastic and praising reviews of Bulgakov's novel I decided to give it a try.

Confession number 2: I had always thought that the devil in The Master and Margarita was symbolic. 

Confession number 3: I don't usually like novels with surreal or (too much) fantastical elements.

Well, I must say that I was very surprised to learn that Bulgakov's devil was not some symbolic evil brewing in Moscow, but a personalised devil that "comes to Moscow wearing a fancy suit" and starts creating all kinds of trouble with his accompices one of which is a large talking cat!

The structure of the story is interesting in that it takes about 180 pages until the master is introduced and even longer until we learn more about Margarita. I actually felt a bit puzzled when I first realised that Bulgakov's novel is called The Master and Margarita in English and that the original title is similar Master i Margarita. (And I did first think that the master in the title was the devil.) In Finnish the novel is called Saatana saapuu Moskovaan ( i.e. Satan Arrives in Moscow), which I actually find a better, more telling title for the book.

I must say The Master and Margarita is quite a story! It is a story were anything really can and do happen. I like innovative stories, but unfortunately I must admit that Bulgakov's book was too surreal and fantastical for me to really love it. It is a well-written novel and I am very glad I read it, but in the end it simply is not my kind of a novel. If you, however, love surreal stories or over the top fantasy, you really should read The Master and Margarita!

Teaser Tuesday 13.7.2010

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 2 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 TBR lists if they like your teasers!

I am, once again, reading several books. I just started Angels Beneath the Surface, which is a collection of contemporary Slovene short stories, first such collection published in English outside Slovenia since 1994. I will soon be travelling to Slovenia for a week's holiday and thought to finally read the book. It has sat on my bookself since last September. I'm also still reading Sapphistries -A Global History of Love between Women by Leila J. Rupp for the GLBT Challenge. Let's see if I am able to finish it before my trip. Middlemarch is still waiting in the wings. I started reading it in May, but have not picked it up for many weeks now. I am still optimistic, though, that I will finish it in time for Nymeth's readalong. The fourth, and last, book I'm reading at the moment is Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo, quite an interesting tale of alternative history, where the transatlantic slave trade is reversed: Africans are the masters and Europeans the slaves. My teaser today is from p. 27 of Blonde Roots:

"Many of the market traders were immigrants from North Aphrika and the Lands of the Arabian Sands, some of whom had been instrumental in the slave trade -the Business. They came to Slavery HQ with the most impressive CVs detailing their brilliant horsemanship and exemplary skills at raiding villages and kidnapping Europane women and children into slavery."

What are you reading this week?

Library Loot 9.7.2010

Library loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encouragers bloggers to share the books they have checked out from the library. If you would like to participate, Mr. Linky is over at Marg's blog The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader this week.

I'm on vacation at the moment and just before my summer vacation started I got into my head that now I would have time to read masses of books I've been thinking of reading :) and I was lucky enough to get quite a few of those books from the library. So, strictly speaking this should have been last week's library loot, but let's not be so strict. :) And thanks to my holiday head :) I also forgot a few of the books from the photo. Well, never mind...

• Beryl Bainbridge: The Birthday Boys. This novel about Captain Scott's fatale expedition to Antarctica in 1912 will be my Antarctica book for the Reading the World Challenge. I had chosen this book for the challenge a long time ago and now that I finally borrowed it it unfortunately became very actual for the sad reason that Dame Beryl Bainbridge passed away just a few days ago.
• Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings
  I'm thinking of reading this modern bestiary that includes such creatures as antelopes with six legs, the Cheshire cat, Cerberus, and sirens, not to mention the Hippogriff, fairies and elves, and the elephant that foretold the birth of the Buddha for the Reading the World Challenge as my South America book. I also have never before read anything by Borges and feel that I really should.
• Julia Gregson: East of the Sun. Danielle over at A Work in Progress talked about this novel and I thought it sounded interesting. I was actually going to read Gregson's other novel first, but then my library had this one in & I decided to borrow this one first instead.
• Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel. I like adventures set in Revolutionary France. I've seen the Scarlet Pimpernel TV-series twice and the 1934 movie starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon once. I think it is high time I read the book, too! :)
• Bernardine Evaristo: Blonde Roots. In this story the transatlantic slave trade is reversed. The Africans are the masters and Europeans are their slaves. This seems to be a really interesting piece of alternative history! And I just realised that I might be able to use this book in The What's in a Name Challenge! I still haven't read my food book and in another context roots could also be something edible, so I think this novel qualifies.
• Jamie Ford: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. A much reviewed book in the blogosphere. It sounds interesting. A story about fathers and sons and the fate of the Japanese in the US during the WWII.
• Ali Shaw: The Girl with Glass Feet. Ida MacLaird is slowly turning into glass. I have read some praising rewievs of this magical tale. Let's see if I'll like it.
• Betsy Tobin: Ice Land. Well, I just returned from Iceland a fortnight ago & wanted to read some fiction about the land. This is a historical novel about a forbidden love with some fantasy elements as Tobin uses the world of Norse mythology to great effect in the book. I'm reading Ice Land at the moment and enjoying it very much.
• Thrity Umrigar: The Space Between Us. Set in modern-day India this novel tells the story of an upper-middle-class housewife and her illiterate servant. It is said to be "a powerful and perceptive literary masterwork" that tells us "how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture."

We are enjoying a heat wave at the moment and long may it continue! :) Ice Land by Tobin is the perfect read today also because of its name! Some ice would be nice just now! :)

June Wrap Up

It's unbelievable how fast this year has gone and now we are already in July! After several months of not being able to spend as much time reading books as I would have liked to, I finally had more time for both reading and blogging about it in June. Here is my June wrap up:

Books read:8

Books read in English:6

Books read in Finnish:2

Finnish books read:2

Fiction:8

Nonfiction:0

Books reviewed:6

The books I read in June with links to my reviews:

-Benmalek, Anouar: The Lovers of Algeria

-Christie, Agatha: Miss Marple's Final Cases

-Duffy, Carol Ann: Rapture (poems)

-Fagerholm, Monica: Amerikkalainen tyttö (The American Girl)

-Junkkaala, Heini: Kristuksen morsian (a play with a GLBT theme)

-O'Farrell, Maggie: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

-Radulescu, Domnica: Train to Trieste

-Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray

My summer vacation started on Thursday and I'm looking forward to a month of being able to "recharge my batteries" & to read as much as I ever want to! I'm also very much looking forward to my upcoming trips abroad. :)