Wishlist – Part 1: From the Blogs

I decided to clean out my Google Reader, when I realized how many book reviews I had marked over the past months. They were so many that I decided to divide them into two posts, one with recommendations I found through the blogs and one with books I found through book reviews from newspapers. In the first part I will share the books I came across in the blogs.

Simon over at Blogian posted about the memoir My Grandmother by Turkish-Armenian Fethiye Cetin. I had heard about this book, knew it was being translated into English but I didn’t know when it would be published. According to Simon the English translation will be available from March 1, 2008. Cetin is a prominent Turkish human rights lawyer who found out only a couple of years ago, that her grandmother was not Turkish, but an Armenian who was saved by a Turkish man during the Armenian genocide in 1915.

When Fethiye Cetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranush, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march. She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had family in America. Could Fethiye help her find her lost relations before she died? There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories. But in a country that maintains the Armenian genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heartwrenching memoir, Fethiye Cetin breaks the silence.

If I manage I will read this book for the In Their Shoes Reading Challenge.

From many different sides I found out about Orlando Figes‘ new book The Whisperers – Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. The book looks at Stalin’s regime of terror and gulag camps through private diaries, letters and life stories from ordinary Soviet citizens. Dovegrey Reader has a review here, the NYT Sunday Book Review has a review here and The Guardian’s review is here.Technically speaking, this book is no longer on my wishlist, as I know that there is a copy waiting for me at my parents’ house in Holland. I plan to read this one, together with Figes’ other book Natasha’s Dance, for the Russian Reading challenge next year.

Another non-fiction book, but a very very different one, I found through the BlogHer site is One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher about “slash careers”. Huh? From the review:

Can you answer, “What do you do” with a single response? I assume most BlogHer members might struggle coming up with concise wording. Enter the use of the “slash” descriptive. As in:

- Pharmacist / jewelry maker / eBay seller
- Manager of human resources / caterer / art collector
- Systems engineer / Champaign importer & connoisseur
- For many of us: / blogger is part of our identities.

My own slash career currently looks something like this: administrative employee/language teacher/website administrator/blogger. The first one I prefer to throw out asap and replace by something more interesting, because that’s the job I have to pay the bills, but it kills my brain and is completely unrelated to my education (law, in particular human rights law). I would like to change my slash career to include more writing, IT-related things, and more of my educational background. However, I do like the diversity I already have very much and the (relative) sense of freedom it gives me to plan my own time and activities. I actually can’t really imagine anymore being stuck in only one job. I guess you get why Alboher’s book appeals to me.

The Guardian’s Book Blog has a post about the Mitford Sisters. Who they were?

Unity, Diana, Jessica, Nancy, Pamela and Deborah. Or, if you prefer: a Nazi with a self-inflicted brain injury, Oswald Mosley’s wife, a communist muckraker, an infamous snob/talented novelist, a muse of John Betjeman turned late-in-life lesbian and the Duchess of Devonshire.

Call the Mitford sisters what you will – and they’ve been accused of many things – but you could never call them boring.

[...] But it’s not just the sisters’ own lives that are so interesting, it’s the way their lives often intersected with other important figures of the 20th century. Related to everyone from Winston Churchill to Walter Mosley, with family friends including Hitler, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou, the Mitford sisters were kind of proto-Forrest Gumps, always on the edge of history and sometimes actively involved.

I had heard of them before, though I don’t remember how I first came across them. I knew there was a biography about the sisters, but never wrote down the title and the author. This blogpost mentioned the book, so this time around I added it to my wishlist. The biography is called simply The Mitford Sisters written by Mary S. Lovell. If I get my hands on it in time, I will add it to my reading list for the In Their Shoes challenge.

On to fiction. Dark Orpheus wrote about Amy Bloom’s book Away, a book about a Russian-Jewish immigrant in New York in the 1930s. Both the book and the author are completely new to me. Dark Orpheus writes:

[It is] a book that doesn’t thrive on dramatic and overwrought emotions. Rather, it stirs me with its stillness, its tenderness. I have said it before, but I shall say it again. Away is a quiet book, the way qualities like compassion and empathy are silent – but keenly felt.

In a nutshell: protagonist Lillian Leyb is a Russian-Jewish immigrant in New York in the 1930s. She is a survivor of a massacre that bereft her of her family. She works as a seamstress, and later plays mistress to a pair of prosperous father and son. Later, through a distant cousin, she finds out her daughter might still be alive and has been adopted by a family in Siberia. So she abandons the life she has reclaimed for herself in New York, and heads off in her quest for her daughter.

Can you tell I have a thing for Russia (well, for Eastern-Europe in general actually)?

Finally, Melissa at Book Nut reviewed another book and author I had never heard of: Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran.

It’s hard to describe what this book is about. It’s a food book, complete with the recipes for the delectable dishes that Marjan — the oldest sister – cooks up for the town of Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, Irleand, where the Aminpour sisters have ended up. It’s one part travel book — lush descriptions of both Irleand and Iran, as we slowly get the sisters’ back story. It’s magical realism; Marjan’s cooking changes lives, Layla’s (the youngest sister) sent of cinnamon and rosewater inspires lust in younger men and remembrances in older ones. The only sister who didn’t have a healthy dose of the magical was Bahar (the middle sister); perhaps it’s because of her past — it was too brutal and too sad (and the reason that the sisters are in Ireland) for it to be magical.