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.