snow

June 30, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Releases for the Second Half of 2020

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking forward to the rest of the year. I’ve said a million times before that I’m not a big frontlist/new release reader, but here are ten books that I have been lucky enough to get my hands on advance copies of that I am looking forward to reading!

Axiom’s End: I love Lindsay Ellis’s Youtube videos (she’s more or less the only Youtuber I regularly watch, it is not a format that appeals much to me) and am very excited for her debut novel, about what would happen if we found out aliens had been around for a while now.

The Mall: This YA novel is set slightly before my time (in 1991, when I was 6), but I remember whiling away many an hour at the mall as a teen so this looks like a delight.

Afterland: Sometimes women joke about how a world without men would be paradise, but of course the reality is that it would be bad for any number of reasons. This is a story about a woman whose teenage son is one of the last men alive and who goes on the run to protect him from those who would take him away: including her other child, a daughter. This seems like an intriguing twist on gender relations!

Must I Go: This is about an old woman who get ahold of the diary of a man with whom she had a brief affair and annotating it with her own memories, which sounds like it will either be something that does not work at all for me or will be amazing.

A Saint From Texas: Twin sisters from Texas go on to wildly different fates…one becomes the star of Parisian society and the other heads to Colombia as a nun. This seems like extremely my jam.

White Ivy: This story about a Chinese-American young woman who manipulates her way into the life of the scion of a powerful political family promises a compelling anti-heroine at its core and I am ready for it.

Can’t Even: I really love Anne Helen Petersen’s writing and so I am very much ready for her second book, especially since it’s about millennial burnout and boy do I have feelings about that!

Snow: I am not always into mysteries, but the plot of this one (a detective investigates when a priest turns up dead in the ancestral estate of a secretive noble family) seems like it might be one I would like!

The Preserve: A future in which the robots take over and herd the humans onto reservations does sound like the kind of speculative fiction/sci-fi that I enjoy

The Orchard: People discovering the wider world after having been isolated for whatever reason is a storyline I like, so this one about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenage boy plunged into the world of elite private schools is definitely up my alley.

November 5, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Love To Take A Class On

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a autumny freebie. Since autumn always makes me think about school, I figured this week I’d feature titles I’d love to seriously study. I took a whole class on Dante’s Divine Comedy in college, and it was not only an amazing course, but it made me wonder how you could ever really understand the work without getting all that context, because there is SO MUCH Italian history crammed in there. And sometimes I feel that way with books, like I need to really dive into it to understand everything. So here are ten books I’d love to study!

War and Peace: I’d love to know more about Russian life, both among regular people and the aristocracy to which the Rostov family belongs. And then the Napoleonic wars on top of that!

Vanity Fair: Another perspective on the Napoleonic wars! Plus more information about social status/life/etc during the Victorian era would be great.

Midnight’s Children: I enjoyed reading this, but felt like if I knew more than what I’d picked up from other novels about the Partition, I would get about 1000% more out of it.

Snow: Turkey has had an interesting history, being neither really Middle Eastern or European, but a little bit of both. I just don’t know much about that history, which would have given a lot more richness to the way this wrestles with cultural tensions in Turkey.

Sense and Sensibility (and all of Austen, really): I still have one Austen novel outstanding (Northanger Abbey), but I would love to deconstruct both the class system of Britain and how it has changed/evolved and just really dig into what makes her work so brilliant.

The Age of Innocence: While we certainly know all about the Roaring Twenties, the Gilded Age in America (and particularly New York) isn’t as high profile. I’d love to learn more about that world, and compare it with our own, in exploring this wonderful novel.

Great Expectations: I’d really enjoy going into depth on form and structure here, as this was of course originally published as a serial. It’s been the most successful, for me, of the Dickens I’ve read, and how he managed to make each installment interesting while keeping the overall story on track would be fascinating to explore.

The Lord of the Rings: There is a LOT going on in this trilogy, and I’d love to explore how J.R.R. Tolkien’s own life experiences/social world impacted the writing of these books, as well as really dive deep into questions I’ve always had, like what the holy heck is the whole Tom Bombadil thing about?

Harry Potter: I’m sure there actually are classes about this at college these days, but every time I go back and revisit these books I catch another layer in them, and would love the chance to really dig into this world.

Wolf Hall: I’ve read quite a bit of Tudor-era historical fiction, and most of it is wrapped up in the interpersonal drama of the relationships between the main players. But this one is uniquely rooted in both church and political power structures, which made it hard to get into at first and definitely required outside research to grasp.

March 8, 2018

Book 119: Snow

“It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come- in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

Dates read: January 18-22, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When someone asks me if I like the movie Goodfellas, I never know what to say. It’s a well-directed, well-acted, well-told story, so I think it’s a laudatory work of film and I admire its accomplishments. But I didn’t actually enjoy watching it and I have no desire to do so again. It’s one of those weird things that happens sometimes for media in all forms, for me. I’ll find something to be a significant piece and worthy of praise, but that doesn’t mean I always actually like it.

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow falls into that weird, middle-ground territory for me. It’s a well-crafted tale, rich with context and layers of meaning. But I didn’t actually enjoy reading it all that much. From a third-person narrator point of view (we’ll get to that later), Snow tells the story of Ka, a Turkish poet who has spent much of his adult life in political exile in Germany, newly returned to his home country for his mother’s funeral. When he hears from an acquaintance that a beautiful former college classmate, Ipek, is freshly divorced, living in a border town called Kars, he finds himself a pretext to visit there to see her. The pretext is that there’s been a recent wave of suicides among devout Muslim young women, who have been forbidden by government policy to wear their headscarves, and he’s there to investigate.

The snow is already falling thickly when Ka arrives in Kars, and it ends up closing off the community over one long, turbulent weekend in which there are assassinations, coups, and police brutality. There are several storylines, all interwoven tightly: the community debate over headscarves, Ka’s courtship of Ipek, Ka’s suddenly rediscovered inspiration to write poetry, Ipek’s relationship with her sister Kadife, both of their ties to a wanted terrorist, the poverty and desperation of the men in Kars, the hope and idealism of the boys at the Muslim high school. The theme of the tension between the West/secularism and the East/religion is pervasive, coloring all of the events of the novel.

Which turns out to be a story within a story, as we find out that the tale of Ka’s time in Kars is being told by his friend “Orhan”, based on Ka’s own written recollections. It’s a little bothersome that although the conceit is that the story is being told by a third party, the narrator seems omniscient more often than not, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What is more bothersome is that there is none of the characters is particularly well-developed, or to me, identifiable. Ipek is the embodiment of the virgin/whore dichitomy, either idealized or compared to a porn star. The terrorist, Blue, is constantly described as compelling without much in the story to make the reader understand why. Even Ka, though he is the center of the narrative, remains at a frustrating remove. Like Turkey itself, he’s neither completely Eastern nor completely Western and vacillates between the two. He doesn’t know his own mind, and it makes him hard to get a hold of as a character.

But the writing and structure is lovely. It’s a little snowglobe of a story, and effectively creates the air of emotional claustrophobia that anyone who’s been stranded (by snow or flooding or ice) for a few days can understand. I’m not sure that the third-party narrator is as effective a device as it could be, but I got a wry, frustrated smile out of plot machinations that mean that we never actually get to read one of Ka’s inspired poems…it lets us just imagine how great the poems must have been without putting Pamuk under pressure to write something magnificent. This was a book club selection, and proved divisive for the most part: there were several people who loved it and just as many who completely hated it, with only very few (like me) falling in between. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it based on my own experience of it, but maybe you’ll completely love it like some of my book club friends?

Tell me, blog friends…do you read literature in translation often?

One year ago, I was reading: Housekeeping

Two years ago, I was reading: American Gods

January 30, 2017

A Month In The Life: January 2017

And the first month of 2017 is already ending! It feels like it went really fast…maybe because it did, maybe because my busy season at work starts in just about a week and I’m not feeling quite ready for the long days it’ll bring (expect diminished reading around these parts for the next four months). Let’s look back at the last 31 days, shall we?

In Books…

Where’d You Go, Bernadette: This book was a big sleeper hit a few years ago, but it did nothing for me. When I found out Maria Semple had been a writer for Arrested Development, it made more sense: this kind of absurdist humor would be a lot more palatable on-screen, but on the page it made me hate nearly everyone involved.
The King Must Die: Mary Renault’s novel takes the mythological story of Theseus and tries to create a real-world story (read: no Olympian gods, for the most part) that might have given rise to the myth. It’s good, but it’s not especially compelling.
American Heiress (ARC): I’m a big fan of Toobin, but I didn’t find this to be his best work. I definitely learned a lot about the Patty Hearst/SLA situation that I didn’t know before, but the bulk of the book was about her life with the SLA and not about the trial, which is what I was more interested in.
Americanah: This book has gotten a lot of buzz, and I was worried it was going to be one of those situations where my expectations were so high I’d inevitably be disappointed. But I completely loved this, the prose and the story, and it’s something I’d already consider a favorite.
The Wars of the Roses: Since I’ve been reading Philippa Gregory’s The Cousins’ War series, I wanted a primer on the actual history of the dispute and the players. As always with Alison Weir, this was well-researched and very readable.
Snow: My book club book for the month, I admired Orhan Pamuk’s novel more than I actually enjoyed it. Its central plot points circle around some of the underlying tensions that make up the conflicts between the East and the West, and reading about them from the perspective of a writer from Turkey (a nation that straddles both worlds) provided interesting insights.
Helter Skelter: This true-crime classic about the Manson murders was written by the lead prosecutor, so it would be hard to imagine a more informed source. And while his writing is engaging and it’s an interesting story, it gets a little eye-rolling at points when he makes sure you know how much work he did and how great he was. Not that he didn’t both work really hard and do really well, but still. If you’re at all interested in the Family, it’s a great read.

In Life…

Rang in the New Year: This year it was just me, my husband, and our pug at home. I’ve never been super into the whole going-out-for-New-Years bit, so hanging out with my two favorite guys and and being able to walk just outside the door to see the downtown fireworks (we live just a handful of blocks away) was perfect
Made it through #nvflood17: Northern Nevada is fortunately not burdened with much in the way of severe weather (we don’t even have a tornado siren), but one thing we do get are floods. A heavy storm front moved through the weekend after the New Year and there was significant flooding all over the area, and even avalanches (more than one!) up in the mountains. We were in a safe area, though, so we just chilled out and watched the rain come down.
State of the State: The first real event of the political season that’s about to kick off, this sets the tone for the upcoming legislative session and a lot of the lobbyists come up for it, so we all get to see our other-side-of-the-state friends for the first time in a while!
Work holiday trip: My work does a holiday long weekend trip every year, and this year we went to Phoenix! I’d never been before and Drew and I had a fantastic time. Since we’ve got offices there, Las Vegas, and Reno, it’s often the only time of year the entire company gets together and it’s good to catch up with what’s going on work-wise everywhere else and reinforce our social bonds.

One Thing

Being in my 30s, especially living in a dry climate, I’ve gotten much more aware of skincare lately. And no one does skincare like Koreans, who have a whole ten-step process to take care of your largest organ. A good place to start with K-beauty, if you’re interested, are sheet masks, which are serum/essence soaked cotton masks you lay on your clean skin for about 15-30 minutes. The Soko Glam 7-Day Sheet Mask Challenge Set gives you a variety pack to experiment with and find favorites! This isn’t an affiliate link or an advertisement of any sort, I just bought it and liked it and thought I’d share.

Gratuitous Pug Picture

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