Ooh.
Beautiful new penguins...😍

Not the right title...

Listening to the translator Daniel Hahn speaking about translating a second book by the same author.

Now need to go find Nowhere People...

I loved Nicholas. He felt like my brother, and never asked why I was twenty-six and jobless and living with my parents and why I only owned one outfit. When I volunteered it, he said, 'I wish marrying a total fuckwit was the worst life-choice I'd ever made.'

A young man witnesses a gang murder in the first few pages, and is forced by the police to identify the gang. Intriguing...

Is it a difficult book, I ask. No, it's just a book that really affects me, that makes me want to stop everything and make a different story or to tell the story only with my illustrations... A story of my own....Any story that has motherhood in it affects me, she explains. Shouldn't sci-fi stories be light, I ask. No good story is ever light, Federico, No good story leaves out what's dense, what's heavy, she observes...

...the way you wear that slicked-back hair you got... that white shell of yours, that totally fucking access-all areas skin, You're never going to understand what it is to be black, to be a poor fucker getting hassled twenty-four seven on your street, in your neighbourhood, in your city,

You don't know...what it is to be part of the race, getting ideas about being some defender of the cause, you cretin palm-heart opportunist...

"I couldn't last through an entire lecture. I missed whole days and then whole weeks...Towards the end of the term the dean put me on academic probation. He gave me a pamphlet on stress management and told me that I would need to make a good show in my exams if I decided to come back in January. ... Seeing me out of his office he said, 'There's one of you in every cohort,' and wished me a Merry Christmas."

Wow. Helpful...

Talking about Prince's new album and about the things happening in the world, things that only we can possibly know about, we who are so young and secure in our intelligence and have access to newspapers and magazines that report on what's new.... It's ...not their problem that I can't completely get my head out of the place I've come from, that I can't get rid of the way of seeing things that I learned back home...

The intermediate light tones are, he straightened glasses on his nose, Cream, Marshmallow, Lychee Cocktail, Lemon Sorbet, Light Almond, Fair Skin, Sunbeam, Creme Caramel, Maranhão Sand, Old Straw, Egg Custard, As the medium and darker ones.... Mahogany, Máte Gourd, Semi-Bitter Chocolate, All these names, and you can check for yourselves on the site later can be colours of human skin, Is that really where this commission is headed [?].

And then I felt ready to give at least a partial airing to the ghosts occupying my thoughts, ghosts that had also been those times when I felt uncomfortable being who I was, raised on the idea of being from a black family, an idea that became my identity, but moulded into a phenotype that jarred brutally with that identity, two factors that, when combined, expelled me forever from the generalisations of the game of he's black and he's white...

It was dark when the car came to a sudden halt and Abdulla lost the thread of his thoughts. They must have arrived at the prison. What had he been thinking about? Oh yes, the five bright-red oranges he hadn't been able to give his children, now left in a house where the lights were out. ... The courtyard was a shade of white tinged with blue, a pure covering still untouched by human feet...

Dutch journalist looks back at 100 years of Russian history. Some memoir, his own history in Russia, from the slow collapse of the USSR to the rise of the oligarchs. Some much older histories, narratives from those who witnessed the revolution in 1917, and saw the new communist order establish itself. I could have done without quite so much self-involved reflection in places. However many of those on Putin seemed prescient (original pub 2017).

Sima was the daughter of perhaps the greatest revolutionary the Netherlands has ever known: Henk Sneevliet, one of the instigators of the Jordaan revolt, the only rebellion against the authorities in the Netherlands, where the proletariat fought for two days on barricades decked with red flags against the army....

She asked how things were going with my book. Just the week before, I'd told her that the project I had on my hands was threatening to turn into a sort of chronicle of our own Russian life together.
'We've just moved into the Akademicheskaya Hotel 2, winter 1989...'
'God almighty, Jesus ...' She was speaking Dutch, and it was pretty plain at that, 'have you only got that far? You still have to cover a quarter of a century!'

"...The hippies and the wasicu longhairs who come here, they don't get that part, that our people are sacred too, not just the land and the water."

He stopped for a second and looked out into the woods. "I think Indian justice means putting the oyate first, healing the community..... always remember the Lakota values, especially waohola, respect for yourself and respect for the community...."

I thought about the sound of the drummers at a pow wow, the smell of wild sage, the way little Native kids looked dressed up in their first regalia, the flash of the sun coming up over the hills. I wondered if I could ever really leave the reservation, because the rez was in my mind, a virtual rez, one that I was seemingly stuck with.

... parties were our mother's chief contribution to our domestic life... They overflowed the house, bled from Friday nights into Sunday mornings, and were populated by what our mother described as West London's artistic elite, though the only credential for getting in seemed to be a vague association with the arts, a tolerance for marijuana smoke and/or possession of a musical instrument.

"You," he says, "are so much weirder than I thought."

"Well, for what it's worth, before tonight, I assumed you went into a broom closet and entered power saving mode whenever you weren't at work, so I guess we're both surprised."

"Now you're being ridiculous," he says. "When I'm not at work, I'm in my coffin in the basement of an old Victorian mansion."

...my former business partner is still alive...it isn't that fact that makes it difficult for me to write about him, it's shame. The shame that in this life, which will ultimately prove to be a bloody battlefield for everyone, we lose friends and loved ones, because of misunderstanding, greed, lust, stupidity, cowardice, vanity, hate, betrayal, the desire to be glorified, the hunger for status, fame, power, and money, and sometimes love.

Not actually started reading this yet, but it's had a good hike around the coast.

...in your foreign post, they always kept an eye on you...You were interrogated. By types like that president of ours now. At the time, he was responsible for exactly that kind of work as a spy in Dresden: following and interrogating people. Now he's once again a believer, namely a believer in the lie that he created himself. The lie that he's God the 'czar' who can steal left and right without punishment. And hand out punishments.

And it was precisely in these arteries that I was now walking and living, almost a hundred years later: an excellent starting point for a personal book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. You buffed up your own life with a little patina, borrowed an abundance of what others had written, with liberal citations, made up a bit if need be, and mixed it all together like the ingredients of a thick, hearty soup, et voilà...

You're right. In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn't a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.' Her sister pointed at her own stomach.
'The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest.'
Jiyoung hugged the bottle to her stomach and cackled despite the pain.

Jiyoung was number thirty on the roster of forty-nine. Boys were numbers one to twenty-seven, and girls were twenty-eight to forty-nine. The numbers were assigned in order of birthdays. Jiyoung's birthday was fortunately in April...[but] the girls with late birthdays were only able to sit down to lunch around the time the lower-number students were done. Naturally, the students who were routinely told off for eating slowly were mostly girls.

...the streets were already full of Guysers, collecting money for Guy Fawkes Night. London's orphans had left their clandestine thieving and had taken to the age old practice of extortion. Why the magistrates turned a blind eye was a mystery, but one so lost in the mists of time that no one even asked.

The park has its dark parts, but near to Whitehall and the river, it was all light. A sting quartet played by the canal, surrounded by a dignified audience of what London society remained in town....as we walked through the female crowd it was an aviary of fluttering fans.

'Are these loose women?' Theodore asked with unexpected zest, and an offended old dowager bustled out from under our feet like a partridge.

'Apparently not.'

her braid coming loose in the breeze, the sun
Lifting its skirt, a peaceful Somali in her rearview.

Everything that has nothing to do with her is all 'the way of the world' that she can put away in some place where she doesn't have to see it... She's probably constantly telling her children that too. And her children will say that to their children. And in that way, things that can be labeled 'the way of the world' and put out of sight are created one after the other.

"Crossing off items from the list of things you enjoy - that's what it means to grow old."

Too many loan choices!

What should I read first?
How high we go in the dark
The long song of Tchaikovsky Street
His only wife
When we were birds
No one round here reads Tolstoy
Listening still
Violeta
Fugitive pedagogy : Carter G. Woodson and the art of black teaching
A swim in a pond in the rain
The dark side of love
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982
Olga dies dreaming
The Doves Necklace
The final revival of Opal & Nev

Gorgeous endpapers. 😍

Woo! I've read five of the six, and loved all five!

#WomensPrize #Shortlist2022

In real life, rather than just the inside of head, Carville might have a cheerful southern accent, so that everything he says could be taken as the beginning of a good story and a funny one. Or he may even be an Englishman and sound like one of those rosy-cheeked Etonians who run our country now. When, by the way, will we get over wanting to tug our forelocks for those people? Is there something wrong with us?

Those yoga classes where you're supposed to lie there with nothing to do, and the teacher tells you to empty your mind...

... entirely the fault of the U.S. State Dept.

Lovely book, managing to be both full of grief and hopeful about the future. I know little or nothing about the civil war and partition of Cyprus, so hope this book will prompt me to do more reading too.

#WomensPrize #Longlist

Like many others, this particular painted lady had journeyed all the way from North Africa, As she gave me an account of her travels, 1 listened to her with respect, knowing what resilient migrants they are, seen almost everywhere across the globe. They can fly for an impressive 2.500 miles. I have never understood why humans regard butterflies as fragile Optimists they may be, but fragile, never!

... experts believed it was just 'paper agitation', the tension and violence that seized our land; they said it was a storm in a teacup and it would be over soon....how could there be civil war on such a pretty, picturesque island of blooming flowers and rolling hills?...These politicians and pundits seemed to assume that civilized humans could not slaughter each other, not against an idyllic backdrop of verdant hills and golden beaches

Tempting! #Bookishly

"When everything collapses, love remains.But is it a true story?"

This is the question!
Fascinating book that might appeal to readers of Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy.

I used to believe that to talk about human beings meant you had to talk about buildings collapsing... But when I think of certain lives, all that comes to mind are old-fashioned geopolitics, classic versions of Risk! left to molder, with nations ravaged by pain, but still with impregnable strongholds, condemned to resist, convinced the siege will pass, until they alone are left standing

To finish this week: #Borderlessbook club tomorrow and the shortlist for the Women's Prize is coming up on the 27th!

My mother can't stand fiction. Whenever we watch something, there's always a moment when she says, 'But is it a true story?' - even if we're watching a horror movie - and I have to lie because if I told her it's completely made up, she'd lose interest and we'd never be able to do anything together again. Her 'But is it a true story?" has plagued me forever.

[Her father] saves sand from his seaside trips and stores it in the garage....Sometimes he'll give me a starfish in a cellophane bag as a present, but it's always painted some tacky, fluorescent color. In a back room, he has bins of mineral chunks and shells, in the sort of box used for screws in hardware stores. I once picked up a can full of white pumice stone chips that was labeled 'Moon.'

#BorderlessBookclub
#InTranslation

I have failed in so much! I don't intend to fail in this, not for them...Why poke a stick in the nest? I was sent there, Maggie, and younger than you are now. That makes me a criminal? And what if you came to look at me like that? If one day you were to look at me as some of the people in that room in Belfast would look at me? Could I survive it?

At last, an easy question! I could not.

"Good for you," Basilio said. Not the answer Marlowe was expecting. "I'll tell you, kid, the job isn't exactly like that. I mean the heroic stuff comes up now and then but most of the time, you're looking for a lost horse or working undercover at Burger King or searching junkyard for an heirloom bedpan."

Eventually, when civil war had raged for far too many years to be sensible, the earth and the sky... took action. Together they produced a furious and very sudden hurricane, which came down on everybody at 3.07 p.m. one clear-sky day...Former enemies took refuge together for three whole weeks while it danced outside, ripping up the land so nobody could have it. Very different people were forced to listen to each other, and to work to survive.

Loved this one. An atmospheric look at Belfast, 1941.

She... feels it with a vertiginous rush, this waste, this sheer, unholy waste.

It hasn't surprised her...that the city around her should periodically erupt into barricades and flames, doesn't surprise her that it should be obliterated now from above, because that, sometimes, is how a cold small part of her feels - just take it, take all of it, I want none of it, none of this, because none of it - how can it? - none of it matters.

Sat outside and read this pm with some company on the birdfeeders.