The Book Blogger Confessions Tag

I saw this tag at The Orangutan Librarian and decided to post my answers to it too. I will probably end up being hated for some of my opinions below 🙂 but a confession is a confession. 

Celestial Bodies Book CoverI. Which book, most recently, did you not finish?  

Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi (translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth). This is the recent winner of the International Booker Prize and, naturally, I wanted to read it as soon as possible. It is a tale of three sisters and their relationships in Oman. It is told through various characters’ perspectives, not only of the sisters’ but also of their children and husbands, apparently. I read first twenty or so pages, and though I liked the beginning, reading about the perspective of Mayya, one of the sisters, when other characters started telling about themselves, my attention veered off and I did not finish the book. I promised to myself to come back to this novel to finish it. The book has all the qualities of an important novel and I especially love that it is set in Oman, portraying a different culture. Continue reading “The Book Blogger Confessions Tag”

Advertisement

Six Degrees of Separation – from News of the World to The Woman in the Window

I saw this meme on the Books are My Favourite and Best blog, and decided to give it a go. The idea is that books are linked to one another in some way and there are “six degrees” to their separation. This is taken from the idea by Frigyes Karinthy that everyone is separated from everyone else in this world by six links. Since my previous book review was for News of the World, I am deciding to start there. 

Paulette Jiles’s News of the World is an understated adventure story of quiet power and beauty, involving the relationship between two people, and that brings to my mind the novel by Jack London – The Sea Wolf. I read this classic book translated to Russian when I was very young, but what I remember distinctly is the unparalleled sense of sea adventure. In this story, one young man is rescued by another ship captained by Wolf Larsen, a ruthless man, and our main character is forced to play by Captain’s rules if he wants to survive.  Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation – from News of the World to The Woman in the Window”