Thank you to SouthEast for the new thread
Terpsichore, I'm on Amazon on my laptop, and on the right, under the usual buy options, there's an option that says "Buy for others:
Give as a gift or purchase for a group". Definitely still there for me!
- Lanny, Max Porter
2. Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
3. Airhead, Emily Maitlis
- Paris Echo, Sebastian Faulks
- Alchemy, Margaret Mahy
- My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering a Life of Adventure , Alastair Humphreys
- Mrs Everything, Jennifer Weiner
- Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxanne Gay
- The Salt Path, Raynor Winn
10. The Second Sleep, Robert Harris
11. Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places, Adam Fletcher
12. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
13. Punishment, Anne Holt
11. Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places, Adam Fletcher
Freebie via Prime. Another man-has-a-midlife-crisis book - not a genre I have chosen to concentrate on! Adam is living in his comfort zone, nice life, well-paid undemanding work, until he and his girlfriend accidentally visit Istanbul during a riot. Having enjoyed the experience of brushing up against Real Life, he decides the answer to his malaise is to visit increasingly odd or dangerous destinations. This was surprisingly funny and interesting, especially hearing a first-hand account of what it is like to visit some places that I am unlikely ever to visit myself, though you need a decent amount of tolerance for the "Hey, I'm a liberal white westerner, aren't these foreign people quite funny" aspect of a book like this.
12. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
The last place that Adam Fletcher visits in his book (above) is North Korea, and his description made me want to read further. This book was both fascinating and heart-breaking. Like most outsiders, Demick has only ever visited North Korea via limited and closely controlled visits. For this book, she interviewed a series of defectors now living in South Korea. They all came from the same city in North Korea and so Demick was able to cross reference their stories and descriptions, along with the limited amount of information available to outsiders about events and places, to form a cohesive narrative of people's lives inside North Korea over the past decades. She concentrates on a handful of main characters - a young couple, a housewife who is a loyal Party member, a young boy who loses his family and becomes homeless - describing the things that happened to them, their feelings, their ambitions, and how they eventually came to leave North Korea.
There are some dreadful and some beautiful things in this book. Demick fills in details of the country's history and politics, explaining things that I didn't understand about how it came to be the way it is now, but the main point of this book is the human stories - the reminder that behind all the craziness that we see on TV, there are human beings caring for their families, falling in love, arguing with their sisters and trying to feed their babies. Unforgettable.
13. Punishment, Anne Holt
I picked this one out as it's set in Oslo and we were there last week. Otherwise it's not a book I would normally have read - it's a crime thriller and the victims are children. Anne Holt has been a journalist, lawyer and politician in Norway - she's written about 20 books and this one was published in 2001.
Johanne is a frazzled single mother, working as an academic (lecturing in psychology - though we gradually learn that this has not always been her job) and trying to maintain a good relationship with her ex-husband as they share care of their daughter, who has an undiagnosed developmental condition.
When the first child disappears, Johanne is contacted by the detective in charge of the case who wants her to help with profiling the perpetrator. She is reluctant to get involved but gets drawn in, both by the urgency of the case and by a growing friendship/attraction to the detective, Adam. It sounds a bit formulaic but was better than the above description makes it sound. Both the main characters were quirky and well drawn, and the plot was compelling - just let down by an ending that relied on two strange and silly coincidences which didn't add anything IMHO.
Cherrypi, I listened a while ago to a great podcast about those horseback libraries: www.kitchensisters.org/2018/09/13/the-pack-horse-librarians-of-eastern-kentucky-on-nprs-morning-edition/