My wishlist, part 2

[Updated March 20 to fix an incorrect link]

I’m not going to lose much time on an introduction. Instead, I’ll get straight to the rest of books I have recently found through blogs or reviews that are now firmly on my wishlist. The first part can be found here.

In the third issue of The Short Review there were two reviews of collections of short stories that I was absolutely drooling over. The first is ID Crimes of Identity, an anthology of the Crime Writers Association edited by Martin Edwards. None of the writers in the collection are familiar to me, but the review I read piqued my interest. I used to read a lot more crime novels than I do now, but I still like good crime fiction.

The other book reviewed that got my particular interest should not come as much of a surprise for those who know me even a little bit. It’s title needs no additional explanation: The Third Shore: Women’s Fiction From East Central Europe edited by Agata Schwartz and Luise Von Flotow. 25 Authors from 18 countries are represented in the book. Some of the countries the authors come from are Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, Albania and former East-Germany. Unfortunately, the review doesn’t give any names of the authors, but a search came up with….

When I first started hearing about People of the Book, the latest novel by Geraldine Brooks, I just let it pass by without much interest. The more I heard about the book, the more I did become interested. By now it has stormed up to somewhere at the top of my wishlist. Technically, though, this book is no longer on my wishlist, as I know that I will receive it some time later this year. Here is a blurb from The New Yorker:

When an Australian rare-book conservator named Hanna Heath finds a butterfly wing, a salt crystal, a white hair, and bloodstains in the recently rediscovered Sarajevo Haggadah, a late-medieval illuminated codex of uncertain provenance, she sets out to solve the mystery of the book’s origins. To her disappointment, analysis of the specimens reveals little. “It’s too bad,” an organic chemist tells her. “Blood is potentially so dramatic.” Brooks, beginning where science leaves off, uses Hanna’s finds as entry points to richly imagined historical landscapes peopled by the Haggadah’s creators, protectors, and would-be destroyers—a female Muslim slave in Convivencia Spain, a Jewish doctor in fin-de-siecle Vienna, an alcoholic priest in seventeenth-century Venice. Their narratives alternate with Hanna’s own, and the final, multilayered effect is complex and moving.

Lynne at Dovegreyreader Scribbles is reading around the world. She has made a lengthy stop in Israel and read several novels by contemporary Israeli writers that I’d love to read as well. One of them is Edges: O Israel, O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith. From DGR:

Centre stage, fourteen year old Liana Bialik who along with her mother and sister Ivy and following the suicide of her father, is returning to Jerusalem in 1963, thus interrupting a life growing up in the US. This is her mother’s homeland and as Ivy descends the steps from the plane sporting her badge declaring loudly PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON IS A DRUG ADDICT it’s clear a clash of cultures is inevitable. Except it wasn’t as I anticipated, because in fact it’s the Israeli culture that proves the more extrovert as their mother Ada quickly discards all inhibitions and throws herself back into the life she once knew. This is her homeland, physical, mental and spiritual, this is where her first family are and where she ultimately belongs and it takes her but a nano-second to roll down her stockings and start dancing. Ada’s exuberance of course a complete surprise and cringe-makingly embarrassing to her adolescent daughters. Liana has to find her own place in this troubled and divided land both as a daughter and a woman but also as a stranger, and set against a backdrop of rising military tensions and increasing danger this is never going to be simple.

The other Israeli novels Lynne discussed, were also unknown to me and do seem very good as well: The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump by Aharon Megged; Ten Thousand Lovers by Edeet Ravel and If You Awaken Love by Emuna Elon.

In January, Ted at Bookeywookey read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium and wrote four posts that completely whetted my appetite. Ted calls the book “part memoir, part travelogue, part political critique” and a “splendid, wild ride – a mixture of history, psychology, world politics, geography.” When I add that it’s all about the former Soviet Union, are you surprised I put in on my wishlist?

One of my favorite bookbloggers out there, Eva at A Striped Armchair, recently mentioned another non-fiction book on Eastern Europe that sounds like a must-read to me: Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca about the Roma living in East- and Central-Europe. From Eva’s blog:

Fonseca looks at the plight of the gypsies, mostly in the present, but with some historical digressions. This book is difficult to categorise; parts of it feel like a travel memoir, as Fonseca runs around central Europe, parts of it feel like a call to arms, other parts feel like history lessons. Oh, and there are black-and-white photos sprinkled liberally throughout. Fonseca manages to mix all of this together into a compelling book that brings readers, if not quite into the gypsy’s world, at least into the outskirts of it.
[...]
Fonseca alternates sections on general info about gypsies with personal profiles. She also travels around, looking at how gypsies are treated in various countries. The historical digressions, with the exception of the gypsies’ origins, focus on the twentieth century. There are long section on how various Communist regimes mistreated the gypsies and, in the second-to-last-chapter, Fonseca goes into great detail about the Nazis’ view of gypsies and the resulting genocide. Fonseca, Jewish herself, argues that the gypsies have been unforgivably over-looked, even by Jews intent on ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten. Within both this and the final chapter, Fonseca becomes more overtly political, but the reader can hardly blame her as one atrocity after another is documented.

Dani at A Work in Progress also wrote multiple posts about a completely different book, that sounds equally fascinating: Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson. The book discusses the “surplus” of women in post-World War I England. So many men had died on the battlefields that women who had lost their husbands and boyfriends during the war and other women of marriageable age who didn’t have a partner yet, where destined to remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men to get married to. At that time, being an unmarried woman, a “spinster” was not looked upon very favorably and roles for women in society were very limited anyway. What happened to these women once the war was over, how did they fill their lives, make their lives meaningful (or not), how did they manage to support themselves if there were only limited possibilities of acceptable jobs?

I had first seen a review of this book at Dovegreyreader Scribbles. It seemed interesting then already, but I kind of let it pass. Then, while I was in Holland in January, I read another review in one of the Dutch newspapers. And then Dani wrote three raving posts about the book. I can no longer let it pass!

The last book I want to mention is another non-fiction book: Jasmine and Stars by Fatemeh Keshavarz. I have just read Reading Lolita in Tehran for the In Their Shoes challenge (for which I still need to write a review. Shame on me!), which is why the review of this book at The Complete Review caught my attention even though the review is not unequivocally positive:

Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars promises Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran [the book's subtitle], but it doesn’t deliver nearly as much as one might hope. Keshavarz’s book is meant to be a corrective and response to Azar Nafisi’s bestselling and ubiquitous Reading Lolita in Tehran, but Keshavarz tries to go about it in too many different ways, diluting the valid and important points she makes. She tries to convey that contemporary Iran is a more complex place than Nafisi and her ilk (‘the New Orientalists’, as she calls them) allow for, but in all this mix of very personal memoir and literary essay (which includes a close reading of a recent Iranian novel and a critical dissection of Nafisi’s book ) that message ultimately isn’t as convincing as it should be.

I seem to be riding a non-fiction wave recently, both reading mostly non-fiction and adding more non-fiction than fiction to my wishlist and TBR-mountain. Going over this post and part one of my wishlist and looking at my TBR-mountain, it seems that this wave is not going to end anytime soon. Do I think that’s a problem? Noooooo, not really as I have some excellent non-fiction reading ahead of me.