Wishlist Part 2 – From the reviews

This is the second part of my Google Reader clean-up. I had too many starred items with book reviews there. The first part, with recommendations I found through the blogs, is here. This is the second part, with books I found through book reviews in other, non-bloggy places. Again, there is lots of Russia to be found in my book picks.

First off, is the new novel by Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood. Though I wasn’t wild about it, I liked Suite Francaise enough to want to read this one as well. The Guardian’s website has a review here, the NYT Sunday Book Review has a review here and you can read the fist chapter here.

I had never heard of Ellen Litman and her collection of short stories The Last Chicken in America – A Novel in Stories, but this review in the NYT Sunday Book Reviews made me add it to my wishlist.

Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is [..] warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.

Jason Goodwin is another author I had never heard of before reading this review. His The Snake Stone sounds like an interesting mystery novel set in the Istanbul of the 1830s. This book is the second in a series with the eunuch Investigator Yashim as the main character. The first novel in the series is The Janissary Tree.

And again a new to me author with an interesting novel: Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai tells the story of a Jewish family in prerevolutionary Iran.

I didn’t know that Israeli author Meir Shalev has a new novel out, A Pigeon and a Boy, but when I found out, I immediately added it to my wishlist. I read one or two of his novels years ago and I should have them somewhere on my book shelves, so it is high time for me to get re-acquainted with Shalev.

As Yair escorts travelers in safari vests “full of pockets, the kind that tourists and foreign correspondents love to sport while in the Middle East,” he points out the Valley of Hinnom, gets them settled in their hotel rooms, reminds them of the story of Moses on Mount Nebo and orders them coffee — all with the same urgency and import. But just when he thinks he has had enough of both his thankless job and his enervating marriage, his mother gives him some money and advice: go off and find the only two things you really need, a story and a place of your own. The novel serves as his report back to her, telling the tale of a mysterious soldier and pigeon-handler known as the Baby, who died during Israel’s war of independence, and of Yair’s own search for a home.

On to non-fiction. In A Soldier’s War Arkady Babchenko writes about his time as a soldier in the Russian army in Chechnya.

Arkady Babchenko didn’t write about fighting in Chechnya to make his name as an author, nor to mount a political attack against Russia’s rulers. He wrote to recover.[...]What poured out of him – at night, at work, on the metro – is an unflinchingly un-macho record. No comforting heroes or villains; no familiar arc of near-defeat and triumph-against-the-odds. Instead Babchenko presents us with a relentless account of fear, boredom, confusion, filth, cold, disease, hunger, thirst and lingering dread – a world that feels far removed from the gold-embossed bestselling accounts of square-jawed British or American ex-soldiers.

If I manage to find and read this book before the end of 2008, I will let it count towards both the Russian Reading Challenge and the In Their Shoes challenge.

Another book about Russia, but about a very different era is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography about Josef Stalin as a young man, Young Stalin.

Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution.[...]Mr. Montefiore has found his devil in the details, working his way with a fine-toothed comb through previously unread archival material in Russia and in Georgia, where he uncovered a memoir written by Stalin’s mother. Throughout, he connects dots and fills in the blanks, uncovering facts that Stalin, once he assumed power, took great pains to conceal.

Despite the criticism that this book recieved here, I’m still interested in reading this book.

Sebag Montefiore [...] is not one historian but two. The first is capable of serious research and insight, but he is eclipsed by the second, who sees history as scandal and its writing as gossip. Vanity Fair goes to Lubyanka.[...]There is so little insight into Stalin’s development because Sebag Montefiore is too busy glamorizing his hero — “gangster godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist,” “the solitary hunter” and “this ace of conspirators.” Stalin dresses for his role in a world of “swashbuckling heroics and sordid murders” by wearing a “dashing Circassian coat with his trademark black wide-brimmed fedora and a white Caucasian hood tossed over his shoulder.” Like a Bolshevik Zorro he robs banks and forces prison guards to remove shackles from political prisoners.

Again, if I manage to get my hands on this book in time, I will read it for both the Russian Reading Challenge and the In Their Shoes challenge. Reviews are here and here. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Finally, I will mention some books from the NYT Notable Books list that I had already set my eyes on, but that haven’t been mentioned here yet.

Martin Amis – House of Meetings;

Nathan Englander – The Ministry of Special Cases;

Dalia Sofer -The Septembers of Shiraz;

Michael Chabon -The Yiddish Policemen’s Union;

Pierre Bayard – How to Talk About the Books you Haven’t Read