Forest Spirit Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 "The tennant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë, somehow painfully hitting home with the backstory of the character referenced in the title... but I hope there'll be personal growth and some happiness in the end! 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Nat-Me Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb SENTIENT SHIPS! PIRATES! CROSS DRESSING LADIES! THEOLOGICAL CHARACTERS AND DRAGONS! it took a bit to get here but now I don't want it to end 4 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyWizard Posted January 26, 2020 Share Posted January 26, 2020 "Lady of the Lake" from the Witcher series... But I've been reading it for quite a while cause I just can't stay focused for too long. 😒 In the meanwhile I also read "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and I loved it so much! Totally recommend it to those who are interested in... errr, death and funeral industry. 😅 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted January 29, 2020 Share Posted January 29, 2020 (edited) Recently: Paweł Średziński, Mamadou Diouf - "Africa in Warsaw. The history of African diaspora in Poland". Several articles about different aspects of the topic, for example the fascinating (though little known) story of a Nigerian participant of Warsaw Uprising. He came to Warsaw somewhere in the late 1920s, worked as a jazz musician and trader in small electric equpment, and during the war helped defend the city which had welcomed him. Nikola Kucharska - "Lost island, containing the diary of Dr. Alojzy Rzepa". A fun book for children which makes creative used of the "found manuscript" motif. The author writes about her porte-parole, a popular illustrator, who receives a proposal to write an illustrated book for children on any topic she chooses... and suddenly experiences creative block... and then, by chance, she travels to that island, finds the diary of someone who studied it and found very strange humanoid species there... A fictional story, of course, but it shows how this once very popular motif can be used nowadays and in children's literature. Marcel H. van Herpen - "Putin's Wars. The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism". The title of the Polish translation is actually misleading - it's, literally, "Putin's Wars. Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine" - and in fact the book was written shortly before the war in Ukraine, although the obsession of Russian imperialism with Ukraine is mentioned and the author suggests that Ukraine could be Putin's next goal - in the preface to the Polish edition he wrote that he was right... Paweł Goźliński - "Akan". Biographic novel about the Polish amateur ethnographer Bronisław Piłsudski (brother of politician Józef Piłsudski), who was sentenced to exile on Sakhalin for participation in a conspiracy against the Russian tsar - and ended up studying indigenous peoples of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, particularly the Ainu people, and this way saved them from being forgotten. Szymon Hołownia - "Divine animals". Hołownia is a Catholic journalist, representative of the more "open" side of Catholicism, and now also candidate for president. Too conservative for me, however: I respect him very much for being a vegetarian. It's very refreshing when compared to Catholic fundamentalists, including bishops (!!) who speak of "ecologism" as wrong and "anti-Christian", defend barbaric fur producers (this was, actually, the work of Father Rydzyk, who is more of a businessman, even Russian-style oligarch, then a real priest. By the way, my grandmother used to know his father and her story confirmed what I read: that Rydzyk, when he decided to become a monk, forced his own father to leave the house because he and his mother weren't married) and behave as if respect for animals and refusal to exploit them were a sin (or even, according to some particular fanatics, a sign of demonic posession!!!!!). Currently: Małgorzata and Michał Kuźmiński - "Śleboda". The title means "freedom" in the Tatra dialect, but is also the family name of the first victim. It's the first book in their series of "ethno-mysteries" - "ethno-" as in "etnography", these are detective/mystery novels firmly rooted in local communities, such as the Tatra highlanders, the Roma (Gypsies)... Not badly written (I found the prologue, where the first body is found, quite amusing - only after a few sentences I realised that the one who finds the body is not a human, but a bear, lured by the odour of some still edible carrion ), although I feel of course angry over how - as authors of a popular novel - they feel obligated to include a few sex scenes... But the story is interesting because it touches a shamefully hidden secret of this region, the history of the organised (while not very successful) wartime collaboration effort know as the Goralenvolk. Edited February 26, 2020 by Nowhere Girl typo 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Atheno Posted January 29, 2020 Share Posted January 29, 2020 Finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I'm not a runner (I might jog a half mile now and then) and I didn't find this to be a great read, personally. But it was okay. Bought When Breath Becomes Air from the library for two dollars, so hopefully it's worthwhile, I imagine it will be, though I've only read the introduction thus far. Um... various other books. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Riven Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It's hard going! 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Goonie Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Rhaenys Posted January 30, 2020 Share Posted January 30, 2020 Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins Quote Link to post Share on other sites
HolidayT Posted February 9, 2020 Share Posted February 9, 2020 Just finished a Court of Thorns and Roses and need suggestions for what to read next! I'm really into imperfect characters right now. Been LOVING V.E. Schwab's books! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Goonie Posted February 16, 2020 Share Posted February 16, 2020 Finished Ghost in the Wires. I'd been reading it on lunch break and it seemed to take forever. I am currently reading Little Women part 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Zagadka Posted February 16, 2020 Share Posted February 16, 2020 The Populist's Guide to 2020, co-written by a Democrat and Republcan who both identify outside of current party lines (AKA, opposed to Trump and the DNC). It is an interesting guide to outside of the party lines. So far it has largely been critical of the media and establishment politicians, which is fine with me, though I hesitate to call myself a populist. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Skittles87 Posted February 16, 2020 Share Posted February 16, 2020 "The Story of the Lost Child" - the last book in the Neapolitan series. I really recommend it if you're into literary fiction and enjoy stories about complicated female friendships. Also, one of the main characters (Lila) is most definitely ace. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted February 18, 2020 Share Posted February 18, 2020 (edited) On 1/29/2020 at 3:09 PM, Atheno said: Finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I'm not a runner (I might jog a half mile now and then) and I didn't find this to be a great read, personally. I was never able to run even 400 meters... I just get extremely short of breath, to the point that my lungs hurt. My own recent reads: finished: Shaun Walker - "The Long Hangover. Putin's New Russia and Ghosts of the Past" currently: Edward Brooke-Hitching - "The Phantom Atlas" It's a very interesting, and fun to read, book about famous hoaxes, misconceptions, legends and errors in geography. From most famous examples such as Atlantis, El Dorado or Terra Australis Incognita (which is not synonymous with either Australia or Anctarctica, old maps showed "Terra Australis" as occupying a large portion of the southern hemisphere) to some a little less know ones. Some old maps are a real pleasure to look at, as they were often decorated with images of ships or sea monsters. For example, there was a map of Scandinavia and adjacent lands known as "Carta marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum" which is really amazing in its level of detail and includes several fantastic monsters, some of which could have been very distorted images of real animals (for example, the "sea pig" could have been inspired by a walrus). By the way, since adventure games are another hobby of mine, and collecting screenshots from games is a sub-hobby - I have screenshots of maps from several games. "Heroine's Quest": "Simon the Sorcerer": "Runaway 1": "Fantasy World Dizzy": Edited February 20, 2020 by Nowhere Girl typo 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Eva Blue Posted February 20, 2020 Share Posted February 20, 2020 I'm in University, unless I'm reading a textbook, I feel like I'm wasting time. Hahahaha! 😂 (Cries over unfinished copy of the Silmarillion) 3 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted February 20, 2020 Share Posted February 20, 2020 I've just finished "The Phantom Atlas" and started another book: Michał P. Garapich - "Children of Casimir". The best approximation, really, of what the book is about, is found in one of its reviews: "Do we come from the manor or the cottage? The answer may be more complicated than it seems, and the reason were horny noblemen". The author, an anthropologist of culture, turns to family stories to find the missing part of his family. Kazimierz (Casimir) Garapich was his great-grandfather, a nobleman from Eastern Poland, and father of over 20 children: 7 with Lady Garapich and the rest with young local peasant women. "Obviously", the illegitimate children were denied title, inheritance, property, and just the knowledge where they belong. I don't know if the author makes such a comparison, but it reminds me of American slavery (and by the way, I'd really like to read Peter Kolchin's "Unfree Labor. American slavery and Russian serfdom". Actually, in Poland, to some extent, serfdom was practiced even longer than in Russia - a law regulating the last remnant of serfdom, practiced in some local villages in the mountains, was repealed in... 1931). Because of the aspect of sexual violence inherent to slavery, in many cases slaveowners sold their own children or half-siblings... It's not possible to make a 1:1 comparison because the circumstances were different: Eastern European serfdom lacked the racist aspect. But class differences were often a "good enough substitute", the gentry was often adamant about defending their privileges and treated peasants like some lesser beings. 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Karst Posted February 22, 2020 Share Posted February 22, 2020 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin. 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Goonie Posted February 22, 2020 Share Posted February 22, 2020 Just finished Jo's Boys yesterday 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
CourtlyLove Posted February 23, 2020 Share Posted February 23, 2020 Miles- Autobiography of Miles Davis Taking a brief break from Contact by Carl Sagan Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Bloc Posted February 23, 2020 Share Posted February 23, 2020 Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray If just read the first few dozen pages. The part I read is just so gay when Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton are talking about and with Dorian Gray. They are both crushing on Dorian. 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted February 26, 2020 Share Posted February 26, 2020 This time a novel (and most things I read are non-fiction): Jessica Shuttock - "The Women in the Castle". It's about a German countess and member of anti-Nazi resistance who, feeling bound by a promise given, after the war looks for other widows and children of resistance members to give them refuge in her dilapidated castle. But as their community grows, ghosts of the past become more and more visible. In fact, the title caught my attention (in the Polish translation is sounds even better, more like "Ladies of the Castle"), it made me think of the Ladies of Llangollen - a famous 19th-century couple of "romantic friends" who were able to spend several decades together. Of course, this is something else, but anti-Nazi resistance is a topic I appreciate too. 2 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted February 26, 2020 Share Posted February 26, 2020 On 2/23/2020 at 2:22 PM, Bloc said: The part I read is just so gay when Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton are talking about and with Dorian Gray. They are both crushing on Dorian. Well, obviously, Oscar Wilde was gay. I read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" when I was about 15 or 16 years old and I too noticed the gay undertone of the novel. Interestingly, I have also once read... caution, pornography: "Teleny", a pornographic gay novel attributed to Oscar Wilde. I'm not sure about the attribution... I mean, Wilde didn't write that poorly, to me it feels like the book was attributed to him because he was the best known gay author of that period. But it was... not even fun, rather funny to read. I even calculated that sex scenes, "preparations" and erotic thoughts make up about 2/3 of the book. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted February 29, 2020 Share Posted February 29, 2020 Alysia Abbott - "Fairyland: A Memoir of my Father". A story about growing up with a gay father in 1970s San Francisco. And even though I haven't yet been alive in the 1960s/70s (but the remains of hippie counterculture were deteriorating in the 70s), even though I have never been to San Francisco, even more, I have never put a foot outside Europe - I just love that place, first of all due to my sentiment for the hippie counterculture. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted March 2, 2020 Share Posted March 2, 2020 I'm getting so quick that nobody posts between my "reports"... "Fairyland" was a difficult read in the final phase, when Steve Abbott was already dying of AIDS. Now I'm back to something lighter and this time fiction. As I repeatedly wrote, I'm an adult who never wanted to have children, but I, myself, enjoy several texts of culture made for children: books, films, games... Now I'm reading a historical adventure novel for children: "Knock, knock! Is the king home?" by Marcin Przewoźniak (illustrated by Nikola Kucharska, whose books I have already read). The plot has a rather crazy starting point: a modern family finally manages to buy a door for their pantry (which is in an old building and has an untypical frame size), the door is very old, bought at a flea market... and right after that they discover that their pantry is a portal for time travel. They can't go anywhere, but are visited by a 16th-century royal jester (already an experienced time traveller who tells them what happened ), a member of the Teutonic Knights order... My, the author has some crazy ideas. There is also part 2, "Knock, knock! Open the door!". I can read such a children's book in one day, so the day after tomorrow I'll go to return them and pick another book in the neighbouring general library (it's not the closest one and the bus takes a relatively long time to travel such a short route because of all the detours during construction of the Warsaw Southern Ringroad*). *By the way, want another funny thing? The Polish abbreviation is POW - Południowa Obwodnica Warszawy (pronunced "pov"), but someone realised that it looks like the English onomatopeic "POW!". They figured out that many people must have seen such stuff in English-language or partially translated comic books (with all the big colourful onomatopeics left in original) and so they decided to use a big comic-book-style "POW!" as a promotional sign, to make the whole contruction less tiresome for locals. So now on the fences around buiding sites there are signs with trivia such as: "The concrete used for building POW! could fill 120 Olympic size swimming pools" "POW! is a road tunnel under the metro line" "POW! tunnel is 2300 meters long! It's the longest in Poland" Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Forest Spirit Posted March 3, 2020 Share Posted March 3, 2020 "Wifes and daugthers" by Elizabeth Gaskell, having a classics phase since a few months🙃 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Andrea KF Posted March 4, 2020 Share Posted March 4, 2020 Kalmars historia (transl. The History of Kalmar), by Dick Harrison. As the title says, it's a book about the history of the city of Kalmar. I'm not from Kalmar myself, but half of my ancestors were/are. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted March 4, 2020 Share Posted March 4, 2020 Agata Maksimowska - "Birobidzhan. The land where we were supposed to be happy" A historical/reportage book about the town of Birobidzhan itself and the whole little-known Soviet project of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East. It was, to some extent, intersting as a Soviet/communist response to Zionism (remember that this was before the war, so also before the establishment of the state of Israel) - it actually even attracted some Jewish settlers from outside the Soviet Union. But, being critical of the Soviet state, I rather tend to see the negative, such as a slightly absurd motivation for creation of the Oblast: that Jews, as an ethnic group without a continuous territory of their own, inadvertently made the Soviet definition of a nation not fit all cases... for me it's obvious that if a definition doesn't fit, you should change the definition and not try to bend reality to it. Sure, many people went there willingly because they had nothing to lose, but the area is not friendly, it has very hot summers, cold winters and lots of insects, particularly mosquitoes (in another book I read it was called "boreal jungle" because it really combines elements of temperate-cold and tropical ecosystems), and later Stalin's purges have just stopped all promising development of the Oblast. Fun fact (not really from the book, I just know it anyway): the coat of arms of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has a tiger in it (remember that I'm a lifelong tigermaniac). The Russian Far East is indeed land of the tiger, we humans are only guests there. And the flag of the Oblast (which still exists, but only has a tiny Jewish population) is a rainbow on a white background. Given Russia's aggressive homophobia, it's considered "controversial" nowadays. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anie Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 On 2/9/2020 at 2:52 AM, HolidayT said: Just finished a Court of Thorns and Roses and need suggestions for what to read next! I'm really into imperfect characters right now. Been LOVING V.E. Schwab's books! If you’ve not read Shades of Magic yet I’d definitely recommend that, otherwise Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
HolidayT Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 6 hours ago, Anie said: If you’ve not read Shades of Magic yet I’d definitely recommend that, otherwise Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell Shades of Magic is one of the greatest books I've ever read! You have great taste 😁 I'll bump Spellslinger to the top of the reading list! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
everywhere and nowhere Posted March 8, 2020 Share Posted March 8, 2020 I have finished "Birobidzhan" and now I'm back to children's books for a while. Another one by Marcin Przewoźniak - "Excuse me, is this place haunted?", a very funny ghost story for children. I just can't resist translating and quoting a bit... Quote - But dad! The people who came here before ran off after a minute! It was enough if they saw you without your head or mom coming out of the mirror - the little girl shook her head. - And this dolt spent whole fifteen minutes here! - Viorika, I have asked you many times not to use such words - the mother reprimanded her. - I'm sorry - the girl curtsied obediently. - But he really behaved like... like a dolt. He was talking to everything he was carrying, he probably only didn't talk to his tie and shoes. - He was talking on the phone and using a little computer - the little boy said with envy in his voide. - I'd really like to have one like this... - I wanted to remind that respectable ghosts don't need such oddities - the White Lady cut off his rapture. - And don't change the topic. I still haven't learned why this do... this intruder didn't run off, white with fear and losing his shoes on the way. Quote (...) we have been inhabiting this manor for two hundred and twelve years, including two hundred years while being dead. [the new owner uses some kind of hologram depicting a guard as a part of anti-burglary protection] Quote - And the most infuriating thing... - the count lowered his voice - ...is this sham-ghost in the corridor. He reminds me of that disgusting old man who brought the plague to our property and sent half inhabitants to the other side, including us. Quote The cat, seemingly forgotten by the ghosts, hidden in a wardrobe, suddenly felt that he was not alone. - What do you want? - he asked, without opening his eyes, when the little skeleton cowered next to him. - How did you know I came? - the little mousie ghost felt curious. - I don't need to look at you all to sense you. Humans are blind and deaf to such things, but you won't fool me. - So why aren't you trying to catch me? Mousor opened his shiny green eyes and snorted: - Do you think I'm stupid enough to chase after a dead mouse? If you were alive, I would personally turn you into a ghost. But this way, it's just a waste of time. - So let's become friends. You will chase me and I will be teasing you. My name is Luna - the mouse squeaked quietly. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Visenya Posted March 9, 2020 Share Posted March 9, 2020 The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do about Them, by Lucy Jones. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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