Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is one of the authors that I never heard of before I started reading bookblogs. As I read more about her books, I became interested in reading them. Fortunately, an expat-friend who lives in southern Armenia recently sent me one of her books when she was in the UK for vacation. Vanishing Acts didn’t stay unread for long.

Delia Hopkins lives in New Hampshire with her dad and her four year old daughter Sophie. Her fiance Eric lives next door. She grew up with Eric and their other neighbor Fitz. The three were inseparable when they grew up and are still very close friends. Everything seems to be just fine. Until one evening the police show up at Delia’s doorstep to arrest her father. This is the beginning of a rollercoaster (yes I know, it is a cliche-word) of events that throws Delia’s world upside down and that make her question even her own identity. I know this is extremely vague, but it is all I am going to tell you about the plot. Otherwise I would just be giving away too much.

The point of view in the book changes with each chapter, but this is not at all confusing, not just because each new chapter starts with the name of the narrator, but also because the chapters for each narrator are printed in different font. This made it easy to go along with the changes in point of view.

Picoult touches many themes in Vanishing Acts: child abuse, hidden memories, cancer, child abduction, Picoult makes you think about right and wrong.

To be honest, I didn’t care too much for the characters, except for Delia’s father Andrew and for one of the main secondary characters, Ruthann. She made me giggle about her Black Market Barbies (think: PMS Barbie dressed in sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, that comes with a miniature pint of chocolate ice cream, a Sleepless in Seattle video, and a gun strapped to her hip. My favorite was Divorced Barbie who comes with Ken’s boat, Ken’s car and the deed to his house.), but at the same time Ruthann made me feel for her with her hidden secret. I wish there was more of Ruthann in the book.

I liked how Picoult didn’t tie everything up nicely at the end. There were lots of questions left: what would happen with Delia and Eric? And with her and Fitz? How would Andrew cope with his experiences? Would Delia and Elise stay in touch?

Picoult is certainly good at telling a story, but throughout most of the book there was something that kept annoying me slightly to the point of not wanting to pick up the book anymore when I was about one third in. I did pick up the book again and then raced through it, because I wanted to know what happened next. I have tried to find out, but I still have no idea what it was that bugged me. If it was something in Picoult’s writing, the characters, the storyline – I don’t know. Maybe it is because something about the court-case seemed wrong, it seemed unnecessary somehow, but at the same time that was also a major part of the story, the way to tie all the main characters together, to get them together in the same place.

I won’t mind reading a few more of Jodi Picoult’s books (if only to try to find out what it is that is bugging me) if I come across them, but I definitely don’t feel the need to read all of them. I have the feeling that if I read too much of her books, I will get bored. Picoult’s books seem to be good reading for when you feel like reading something fast and engaging without having to think too hard. The one that interests me most at the moment is the one about the highschool shooting – I forgot which one it is, Nineteen Minutes? If you have read any of her books, which ones would you recommend?

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Can I just add that I think this cover is hideous?! The edition I read had a much nicer, but equally sweety-tweety cover, however I couldn’t find an online picture of it.

You can read other reviews of Vanishing Acts here:

Book Haven
Trish’s Reading Nook

If you have also read this book, leave a link to your review in the comments and I will add it to the list.

Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith

After finishing The Waves, I needed something light to read, so I picked up the second volume in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detictive Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. Initially, it was a big chance from The Waves to Mma Ramotswe and I couldn’t read too much before I got slightly annoyed. But soon I had adjusted and was drawn in to Precious Ramotswe’s Botswana.

I ended up liking this second part in the series even more than the first part. I already knew and liked the main characters, Precious Ramotswe, her fiance Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and her secretary Mma Makutsi. This second part was less of a collection of short cases that last one or two chapters like the first book. Instead, it has several story lines and cases that are drawn out longer. I liked that much better than the sequence of shorter cases and stories in the first part.

In this second part Mma Ramotswe is asked by an American woman to find out what happened to her son who went missing ten years earlier. She promotes her secretary Mma Makutsi to assistant detective and gives her her first case to solve having to do a wife having an extramarital affair. Solving this case in a satisfactory way, however, brings up questions of moral importance. In her private life, Mma Ramotswe is pondering her upcoming marriage, and she has to deal with a sudden increase of her family by two when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni unexpectedly brings home two children from an orphanage.

I enjoy Alexander McCall Smith’s descriptions of people, of life in Botswana and of the land itself. He writes with so much obvious love and respect for his characters and for Africa. I loved the subtle wisdoms and bigger questions in the book. They are not obvious, but thrown in in a “by the way” sort of way. But when you stop and pay attention they give so much to think about: what would you do in that situation? In his own typical quiet and unobtrusive way (the way his writing is, really), McCall Smith comments on Africa, on colonialism, on morals and values. Maybe it’s just me, but there seemed more of that in this second volume than in the first.

One example of this is Mma Makutsi’s case of the adulterous wife, but I won’t quote from that part of the book as that would require giving away too much of that storyline. Instead, I’ll give you one other example. This American young man I mentioned disappeared when he was living in some sort of agricultural commune on the edge of the Kalahari Desert where the inhabitants were trying to grow vegetables. When Mma Ramotswe goes out to this now deserted farm, she thinks about all those foreigners coming to Africa to help:

[Mma Ramotswe] was familiar with people who liked to test out all sorts of theories about how people might live. There was something about the country that attracted them, as if in that vast, dry country there was enough air for new ideas to breathe. Such people had been excited when the Brigade movement had been set up. They had thought it a very good idea that young people should be asked to spend time working for others and helping to build their country; but what was so exceptional about that? Did young people not work in rich countries? Perhaps they did not, and that is why these people, who came from such countries, should have found the whole idea so exciting. There was nothing wrong with these people – they were kind people usually, and treated the Batswana with respect. Yet somehow it could be tiring to be given advice. There was always some eager foreign organisation ready to say to Africans: this is what you do, this is how you should do things. The advice may be good, and it might work elsewhere, but Africa needed its own solutions.

This farm was yet another example of one of these schemes that did not work out. You could not grow vegetables in the Kalahari. That was all there was to it. There were many things that could grow in a place like this, but these were things that belonged here. They were not like tomatoes and lettuces. They did not belong in Botswana, or at least not in this part of it.

Finally, I am curious if Mma Ramotswe will ever tell her fiance about the diamond (somehow I think she won’t). There’s a cliffhanger coming from an unexpected corner! If you have read Tears of the Giraffe, you will know what I mean; if not: go read the book and you’ll find out. I just didn’t want to put in any spoilers.

If you are looking for some light, quick, cosy but intelligent reading, I highly recommend the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I will be looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Alexander McCall Smith has just started writing an online novel at the website of British newspaper the Telegraph. It is called Corduroy Mansions and a new episode is published here every day.

There are other reviews of Tears of the Giraffe here:
Book Haven
Books of Mee

If you have also reviewed this book on your blog, leave a link to your review in the comments and I will add it to the list.

My review of The No.1 Detective Agency, the first part in the series, is here.

Belated awards

I am ashamed to admit that I just realized that I haven’t even blogged about this yet. Last night I found this half-finished post. Ouch! It’s been almost two  months, but I only get around to this now. Two great fellow-bookbloggers awarded me with this award (and they are not great because they thought me worthy of an award, but because I love their blogs, awards or no):

This is what Teddy Rose at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time said about my blog:

Myrthe at The Armenian Odar Reads- Is not afraid to read books about controversial or uncomfortable topics. I admire that and her blog.

Wow, Teddy! I am kind of floored by this. I just read what I think is going to be interesting, that’s all, but yes, I guess I do tend to pick up books that deal with difficult or not-so-fun parts of life or history.

Then on the same day Kim of My Literary Travels awarded me the same award saying this about me:

Armenian Odar Reads I started reading Odar’s blog a long, long time ago- I believe it was even before she started blogging exclusively about her reading habits. I felt an immediate connection because we’re both expats in quite unusual places and I’ve continued to follow her because I almost always like the books she reviews.

Kim is a Canadian expat now living in Albania and, though she started her bookblog fairly recently, for several years she has been blogging about her life in that unusual place here. That’s where I first found her a loooooong time ago, I don’t even remember how long I have been reading her blog. As she already mentioned, we are both expats in out of the way places and I recognize so much of what she writes about life in Albania. Replace Tirana and Albania with Yerevan and Armenia and I could have described some of the same experiences. Apart from that, she posts beautiful pictures as well. So don’t just go and check out her bookblog, but do go and pay a visit to Stepping Stones as well.

Both blogs always give me tons of books to stay on the lookout for!

I really really want to finally put this post up, so I will leave out my nominations for now. There are loads of good bookblogs in my sidebar, so do some bloghopping and find good new blogs. There are so many blogs that I love reading, that give me food for thought, new reading ideas and new ways to look at familiar books. Thank you all so much for just plain being out there on the net and taking the time to write your blogs!

Sunday Salon: My Father’s Suitcase by Orhan Pamuk

I have a small book in Dutch containing three speeches that Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk gave on different occasions when accepting awards for literary work. The three speeches all deal with the theme of writing, approaching this subject from different angles. This and the next two Sundays I want to read the speeches and discuss them here.

The first speech in the collection is My Father’s Suitcase, Orhan Pamuk’s acceptance speech when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. You can read this speech here. This essay also appears in Pamuk’s collection of essays Other Colors.

Pamuk recounts how, a few years before his death, his father gave him a small, black leather suitcase containing his (Pamuk’s father’s) writings. He asked his son not to open it before his death. As long as Pamuk could remember, his father had written, but he had never published anything. Pamuk knew the suitcase, it had been in his father’s possession for a long time:

This suitcase was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.(…)I am now going to speak of this weight’s meaning. It is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and retires to a corner to express his thoughts – that is, the meaning of literature.

From here, Pamuk continues with his thoughts about the meaning of literature and the task of being a writer.

Orhan Pamuk doesn’t really believe in inspiration (or should I say Inspiration). Writing is more of a craft, a question of stubbornness and patience. But that is not enough either:

To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing. But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action.(…)The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.

To Pamuk on the one hand, a writer is someone who locks himself away from the noise of his surroundings, from the community and everyday life, who works hard and looks inward:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words

To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

On the other hand, though, a writer is also part of tradition, part of all the writers, books and stories that were there before him. Other people’s stories are just as essential for a writer as the seclusion he finds when he locks himself away in a room. Which is why Pamuk consistently talks about a writer locking himself in a room with books.

In the seventies, when Pamuk started to create his own library, i.e. to collect the stories of others, he felt very strongly that he and with him his country Turkey was situated outside of the center, far away from where ‘It’ was happening both in the world in general and in literature. Opening his father’s suitcase so many years later reminded Pamuk of this feeling of living in the provinces to return, together with the fear of being unable to be authentic. Both would become major themes in Pamuk’s own writing, the secret wounds he carries inside himself:

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know.

Over the years Pamuk overcame this feeling of living in the provinces. He now thinks that the idea of the world having a center where ‘Everything’ happens is being blown out of proportion, has been made too important. For Pamuk, the task of contemporary literature is most of all to tell and examine the stories of those who do not live in the center, the stories of what happens outside of the center.

About the task of contemporary literature Pamuk says:

What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind … Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

In the end, Pamuk is of the opinion that it doesn’t matter whether one lives in the center of the world, in the place where everything happens: The world a writer creates, goes beyond that. In that created world the question of whether there is a center and how important that place is, is of no importance at all any more.

[W]riting and literature are intimately linked to a lack at the centre of our lives, and to our feelings of happiness and guilt.

I have only been able to convey a small part of what Pamuk talked about in this speech. It is a very thought-provoking text that deserves to be read more than once. I am not sure whether I agree with Pamuk that a writer should seclude himself from everything around him, but I can agree with what he says later on about a writer being part of the tradition of writing and about literature exploring that which is outside of the center. Then again, I don’t think I have finished thinking about this text yet. I am looking forward to reading the other two speeches in this collection.

Finally, I want to share a quote from the speech about why Pamuk writes:

I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

You can read this text here.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

This was by far my most challenging read o the last couple of years. It took me at least two weeks to read The Waves (but this was in part because while my parents were here, I couldn’t really put my head to serious reading), though at some 220 odd pages it is not  what I consider a big book.

In The Waves we follow six people from their school days till middle age. Initially, Neville who is homosexual, the Australian Louis and Rhoda, who lacks self-confidence and feels insecure about herself, were the characters who stood out most to me. I think this was because from a young age all three of them felt like the odd one out, like they didn’t fit in society. Later, Rhoda somehow moved to the background and I found Susan becoming more interesting. Susan is the only one of the six who chooses not to live in London, marries a farmer and lives a quiet live in the countryside. Then there is Jinny, who remains unmarried and lives a free life in London. Bernard, though most of the story is told from his perspective, somehow remained a bit aloof to me. He doesn’t really have something ’special’, a specific trait or path in life that makes him stand out; on the contrary, he marries early, has children and a job, that’s about it.

The story of The Waves is told in an unusual form: the entire novel consists of monologues of the six characters, with most of the monologues being Bernard’s . The switch from one ‘narrator’ to another is marked only by the use of “said Bernard”, “said Neville”, “said Jinny” etc at the beginning of each new monologue. Especially in the longer monologues, I had to remind myself constantly of who was ‘talking’. This narrative form took me about twenty pages to get used to, though every time I picked up the book I did need a few paragraphs to get back into it. The effect of the monologues was, that the six characters in a way soon started to blend into one character. If I understood the introduction in my edition (Penguin Classics) correctly this was exactly the effect Virginia Woolf intended.

I found the writing very smooth, flowing. Deceptively so, as I had to make a very conscious effort to slow down my reading to absorb what I was actually reading. This was really something I had to work on with this book. As an aside, and something I recently mentioned in a comment at another post on this blog, I think that is also one of the reasons why I don’t read poetry: because of the effort I have to make to slow down my reading to concentrate on the words and the meaning of the writing. Does this make sense? Because I don’t know how else to describe it, though it sort of implies that I usually don’t focus on the meaning of the text. Which sounds weird as well.

The contrast between the flowing writing, deceiving me into speeding, and the story and narrative form, making me want to slow down and savor the text and try to understand what was going on, made for an interesting reading experience.

This is the first work by Virginia Woolf that I have read, and, though I am glad I read it, I am not all too sure I liked the book very much. I have the strong feeling that I haven’t even scratched the surface of this novel. Not even ten pages into the novel I could already see myself at some point picking up The Waves again for a reread; there is too much left to discover in this book. Is this all a nice and extensive way to say I found The Waves boring? Yes, it is, but I also feel that I might have picked the book up at the wrong moment and with a bit of the wrong approach.

I would still very much like to read some of Woolf’s essays or diaries, some of her non-fiction work as I think she is an interesting woman. I have the feeling that I could start to enjoy Woolf’s writing, however, it will certainly be an acquired taste. But I can see the potential!

By the way, the picture is of the cover or the Penguin Classics edition, which is the one I read. I just love it for it simplicity and its colors!

Blogging for Darfur

I am a bit late at blogging about this, because I was mostly offline last week. This is too important, though, so I still want to mention it here.

Over at Maw Books Blog, Natasha has pledged to blog the entire month of September to create awareness of the genocide that has been going on for years in Darfur. Not only that, she is raising funds as well that will go to helping the people of Darfur.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died, many more are displaced. I can not sit idly by knowing that this blog has given me the opportunity to make a difference. Why choose Darfur as my soapbox of the month? After reading about Darfur and watching documentaries about Darfur, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Isn’t that reason enough to stand up and do something about it?

So what exactly is Reading for Darfur? During September every book I read, every post I write, every comment left on this blog, and every book that you read about Darfur will make a difference. How? The difference will be you. This won’t work if I’m doing it all by myself. So I ask for everybody to get involved. There are a lot of different levels on which you can do just that, so choose the one that you are the most comfortable with.

Ways to get involved are for example: writing about Natasha’s campaign, sponsoring her for every page she reads this month, for every blogpost she writes in September, or leaving comments on Natasha’s blog. Natasha put up a whole list of things you can do which will raise money for the people of Darfur.

If you want to find out more about the genocide going on in Darfur, Natasha posted a huge list of books, films and documentaries about that theme here. Reading a book or watching a film/documentary on that list, blogging about it this month and letting Natasha know you did that is one of the ways to raise money as well.

I love that Natasha is using blogging in a different way, as a tool to create awareness and reach out.

Do hop over to Natasha’s blog to find out how things are going for her and see how you can get involved. You have no reason not to!

Natasha’s post with general information about her action is here

The Sunday Salon – Serious bookbinging

The last few weeks were book-harvesting time. My parents are visiting me and they brought tons of books with them.

But first, I found another bookstore in Yerevan that started carrying English books. They used to have a few, mostly study-related, but apparently they bought a container of unsold books or something like that. Their enlarged collection of English books is very random and at least half of it is chicklit. Everything was put on the shelves without sorting anything by genre, author or at the very least in alphabetical order. I found Nobel-prize winner Nadine Gordimer’s books on the shelf next to a chicklit-series and a David Baldacci paperback.

I spent an hour or so going through the books and this is what I came home with.

From top to bottom:
* The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides: I loved Middlesex, so I am curious to pick up this one. I have never seen the movie.
* The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif: The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. I never heard of either writer or book, but it sounded interesting. From the backcover:

In 1900 Lady Anna Winterbourne travels to Egypt where she falls in love with Sharif, an Egyptian Nationalist utterly committed to his country’s cause.A hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee and a descendant of Anna and Sharif, goes to Egypt, taking with her an old family trunk, inside which are found notebooks and journals which reveal Anna and Sharif’s secret.

* Emma by Jane Austen.
* Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility years ago and felt like reading some more Jane Austen. I am looking forward to reading some classics again.
* Extravagant Strangers edited by Caryl Phillips: A collection of writings by British writers who were born outside of the UK. Some of the authors featured are William Thackeray, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, Penelope Lively, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ben Okri. These are not even half of the authors featured in the anthology and only the ones I had heard of before. I am looking forward to dipping into this one, getting acquainted with loads of new authors.
* Telling Tales edited by Nadine Gordimer: more short stories by first-class writers. To name a few: Chinua Achebe, Maraget Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Guenter Grass, Hanif Kureishi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kenzaburo Oe, Amos Oz, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux, and John Updike. Another one I look forward to dipping into.
* The Forty Days of Musha Dagh by Franz Werfel: This is a book I have read before, but I wanted to own a copy and I had never been able to find one until now. It is a classic and THE novel about the Armenian Genocide during World War I. Not a very easy book to read, but highly recommended if you are interested in the history of the Middle-East, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
* The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell: Mankell is one of my favorite mystery/detective writers and it has been too long since I read one of his books. I have never read this particular Kurt Wallander-mystery before.
* The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-5 edited by David Marcus: Short stories by Irish authors such as Roddy Doyle, Bernard MacLaverty, Claire Keegan, and Colm Toibin plus many more that I had never heard of before. Another one to dip into!
* The World’s Greatest Detective Stories edited by Herber van Thal: I have started reading this one and, though the title is rather pretentious and up for discussion as far as I am concerned, I am enjoying most of the stories I have read so far. Authors represented include Agatha Christie, J.S. Fletcher, G.K. Chesterton, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Georges Simenon plus a whole load of others I had never heard of before. The collection was first published in the mid-eighties, so there are obviously no recent authors represented. I am not blown away so far, but it is entertaining reading.

So lots of short stories there, which is great because I had almost none on my shelves and I do enjoy them. Also, lots of new writers to sample, whose works I have never read before.

Then, this is all the reading my parent managed to bring me:

I read most of the magazines and newspaper clippings from the pile on the right over the course of this past week. I left the National Geographics and some of the other magazines untouched. One of them has loads of short stories in them as well. I found I couldn’t concentrate on Virginia Woolf, so I started reading the detective stories and went through the magazines.

Here is a better picture of the books my parents brought me:

So what is on that pile? From upper left corner to lower right one:

* To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee: A classic I have never read, but all the bookbloggers who wrote about it in the last couple of months, made me want to read it.
* A Writer’s People by V.S. Naipaul: This was a gift of a longtime friend from Holland. I have never read anything by Naipaul, so I am looking forward to expanding my horizons!
* Het Maakbare Nieuws: Remember I wrote about the book Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw (A Good Husband Sometimes Beats his Wife) by Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk? In that post I mentioned he had written a book (Het zijn net mensen / They’re just like human beings) about his experiences as a journalist in the Middle-East, which caused quite a storm in Holland. This book, Het maakbare nieuws (which approximately translates as The Makeable News) is a collection of essays by other Dutch foreign correspondents in reaction to Luyendijk’s book Het zijn net mensen.
* The Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres: I read and loved De Bernieres’ Birds Without Wings and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. This is apparently a very different book, but I am looking forward to it.
* War on the Margins by Libby Cone: This book was very kindly sent to me by the author. It is set on the Channel Islands during World War II. I wasn’t even aware that the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans during the war, that is, I didn’t know until Libby approached me about her book and until The Literature and Potato Peel Pie Society was published this summer. I am looking forward to reading War on the Margins and learning more about this part of history.
* Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson: Raving reviews by Lynne at Dovegreyreader Scibbles and by Danielle at A Work in Progress made me put this book on my wishlist.
* De Russische Kater by Laura Starink: Another book about Russia by a Dutch journalist who lived there for years. My dad read it while they were visiting me this week and he loved it. He calls Laura Starink one of his “Journalist heroes”. Starink’s husband was one of my lecturers at university.
* Het zijn net mensen by Joris Luyendijk: The book I mentioned above. I read it last year, but I want to reread it together with the other book Het maakbare nieuws.
* The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne: This is a book my parents picked from my shelves in Holland. I’ll reread it and give it away to someone in Armenia.
* Run by Ann Patchett: It was this review at Dovegreyreader Scribbles that made me add this book to my list. Since I have read a couple more positive reviews of this book.
* The Angel of Grozny by Asne Seierstad: Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist (author of The Bookseller of Kabul) who spent about a year and a half undercover in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. She writes about what life in this city is like now that the war with Russia has formally ended, but informally the conflict continues.
* Forgotten Bread: First Generation Armenian-American writers edited by David Kherdian: Narineh’s review of this book at The Novel World made me add this anthology of Armenian-American writers on my list. I couldn’t find a copy in Yerevan, so my parents brought it from Holland. Loads to read and explore here!
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: My parents loved this book and brought me a copy.
* Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton: A collection of Father Brown stories which I had on my bookshelves in Holland. Another reread from long ago.
* Onbegrepen (Martin Misunderstood) by Karin Slaughter: A short story by a new to me thriller author. That is, I have heard about her, but never read anything by her.
* The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett: Eva’s review at A Striped Armchair made me add this to my list.
* Resistance by Owen Sheers: Another one that I put on my list due to positive reviews on the blogs. Quite a few people have reviewed this one, so I can’t point to one or two bloggers who convinced me.
* Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: This is going to be another reread from my shelves in Holland.
* De pianoman by Bernlef: A short story/novella by one of the leading Dutch authors.
* Iran achter de schermen by Carolien Roelants: A collection of essays on Iran by a Dutch journalist.
* Rusland voor gevorderden by Jelle Brandt Corstius: Another book with essays on Russia and the Former Soviet Union by a Dutch writer.
* The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: I have never read any Atwood, but I really want to, so why not start here?
* The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty: I won this one in a giveaway over at The hidden side of a leaf. Thank you, Dewey!
* My Grandmother by Fethiye Cetin: Cetin is a Turkish human rights lawyer who wrote of the search for her family history which started when her grandmother told her on her deathbed that she (her grandmother) was really of Armenian descent and a survivor of the Armenian Genocide in World War I, a secret she had kept all her life until she told her granddaughter.
* Prince Rupert’s Teardrop by Lisa Glass: another book with a link to the Armenian Genocide, but that is not the only reason I became interested in this book.

Last but not least, there is another book on its way to me. I won Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith in Kirsty’s giveaway over at Other Stories. I have heard lots of mixed things about this book and it somehow found its way onto the Booker longlist this year, undeservedly according to many. So I am looking forward to reading it and see what I make of it. I had had my eye on it for some time, as it is a thriller/detective set in the Soviet Union in the Stalinist era. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that a somewhat unplanned theme in my reading this year is Joseph Stalin and his “reign” over the Soviet-Union.

I think I am all set for the next months: Tons of good reading that will get me through the cold Armenian winter! Which, by the way, I do hope will stay away for another two months or so. For now, it is still very much summer with temperatures of around 35 degrees Celsius.