Normal People by Sally Rooney

April 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Hogarth, 2019. Originally published 2018. 273 pgs. Purchased. In addition to winning the 2018 Costa Book Award for Novel, Rooney’s novel was also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see it offered as one of the options for April from Book of the Month, a monthly book subscription service that I’ve been part of for the last six months. So thrilled, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, Ireland, Man Booker Prize, Women's Prize • Tags: Sally Rooney

Becoming by Michelle Obama

April 17, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by the author. Random House Audio, 2018. 19 hours, 1 minutes. Purchased.  In 2009, Michelle Obama became the first African-American First Lady of the United States after her husband, Barack Obama, was elected President. Prior to that, Michelle attended Princeton and Harvard Law and worked as both a partner-tracked lawyer for a prestigious firm in Chicago and as an administrator in the University of Chicago medical system. These impressive achievements were – and continue to be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Feminism, Nonfiction, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Michelle Obama

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

Faithful Place by Tana French

April 12, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Viking, 2010. 400 pgs. Purchased.  In 1985, Frank Mackey stood on around the corner of the Faithful Place flats in Dublin waiting for his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, to appear. For weeks, he and Rosie had cobbled together a plan to run away to London together where they planned to marry against the wishes of Rosie’s parents and, hopefully, break the cycle of poverty and alcoholism that marked their – read Frank’s – lives in Ireland. Yet Rosie […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Ireland • Tags: Tana French

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

April 5, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Harper, 2018. 464 pgs. Purchased. Kingsolver’s latest novel teeters together two stories set roughly 150 years apart through a shared locality, the planned community of Vineland, New Jersey. The present-day story is set late 2015 and early 2016 – the characters react to the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s campaign, although never refer to him by name – and follows the matriarch of Vineland’s newest residents, Willa. Willa’s husband recently lost his tenured professorship after the small, insolvent […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver

Minnie’s Room by Mollie Panter-Downes

March 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2002. 125 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes”, this collection of ten short stories presents the realities and dreams of the British people following the end of the World War II. Each story was originally published for the American publication The New Yorker between the years 1947 and 1965, a follow-up of sorts to her short stories from 1938 to 1944. Those wartime stories were published by Persephone Books in 1999 as Good Evening, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, Short Stories, United Kingdom • Tags: Mollie Panter-Downes

Children of The Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi

March 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. Peirene Press, 2019. Originally published 2016. 176 pgs. Purchased. In 1819, Iax Agolasky travels to northwest Russia as the research assistant to a well-known French anthropologist and explorer named Jean Moltique. The goal of Moltique’s exhibition is to locate lost or ancient tribes in the region, and their search leads them to a cave in the Russian wilderness where a small group of children live. Moltique believes […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction, Finnish, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Virve Sammalkorpi

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

March 18, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Vintage, 2011. Originally published 2010. 622 pgs. Purchased.   Subtitled “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”, Wilkerson’s book follows three individuals in order to construct a larger narrative about the movement of black Americans between 1915 and the 1970s. Historians estimate roughly six million black Americans moved from majority black southern states governed by white minorities to northern and western states where racism had not (yet) been codified through Jim Crow laws. The three individuals profiled […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Mountain West, Nonfiction, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Isabel Wilkerson

Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright

March 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Harper Perennial, 2019. Originally published 2018. 320 pgs. Library copy. In the conclusion of her book, Albright says that some may find the title of her book to be alarmist, but it is her belief that we are living in an alarming time. Her assertion holds gravitas because of her credentials – she served as the United States Secretary of State and the Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 2001 – and her personal […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Europe, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Nonfiction, North America, Poland, Russia, South America, United States • Tags: Madeleine K. Albright

Last Train to Istanbul by Ayşe Kulin

March 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Turkish by John W. Baker. AmazonCrossing, 2013. Originally published 2002. 395 pgs. Free download. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Selva married Rafael Alfandari, a Jewish man whose family settled in Turkey after being expelled from Spain in 1492. Neither the Alfandari family nor Selva’s parents, Fazil Resat Paşa and Leman Hanim, support the marriage and, after being cutoff, Selva and Rafael flee to Paris in the hopes of finding a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, Genocide, Holocaust, Middle East, ReadDiverse, Translated, Turkish • Tags: Ayşe Kulin

Deep Work by Cal Newport

March 11, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Grand Central Publishing, 2016. 287 pgs. Library copy.  Subtitled “Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”, Newport’s book lays out how individuals who master the concept of “deep work” will be successful in an economy to increasingly demands more output. In Newport’s mind, deep work consists of “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Nonfiction, North America, Technology, United States • Tags: Cal Newport

Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldon

March 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Jeff Woodman. Recorded Books, 2007. 9 hours, 41 minutes. Library copy. Lord John Grey was first introduced in Dragonfly in Amber, the second book in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, as a young English soldier who attempts to save Claire from the wanted rebel Jamie Fraser. Jamie spares Grey’s life after he tricks the young boy into sharing information about the location of the English forces in the area. Grey and Jamie would cross paths again […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Crime, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Diana Gabaldon, Jeff Woodman