My (Previous) Year in Reading: 11 to 20

…in chronological order.

2015 has been a great year when it comes to reading books for me. During it, according to Goodreads, I have gulped down 212 volumes that were not only novels for adults but also volumes that belonged in many other genres: YA, graphic novels, poetry, children's stories, short stories and books in translation. This has also been a year that I stopped writing reviews since I had much else occupying my mind and time, so below I'll give you no more than a few words about the books I have read. I hope some of my choices echo yours and I look forward to an exciting new year of reading. 

11) Confessions by Kanae Minato. This book, to put it simply, is absolutely great. The author did a trick on me, as I'm certain she did on many other readers. If you like mysteries with many twists and turns and really unexpected endings, then you'll love this. Easily one of my best ten reads of the year.

12) Spectacle: Stories by Susan Steinberg. It's almost impossible for me to award five stars to a short story collection, but I did it for this one and for one by Alice Munro. These stories discuss the big questions in life; love, loss, difficult choices, revelations and secrets left untold. Her writing is exquisite and she's definitely a writer to look out for.

13) The Great Race: How the Chinese Zodiac Came to Beby Stacey Hirata and Charles Huang. This is a really fun book to read with your children. The plot is simple and the story straightforward, and I guess more or less the title explains it all. Reading it me gave me a lot of smiles and also taught me a little bit on the way I guess. Lovely.

14) The Wild Book by Margarita Engle. This is yet another children's book that I really loved. Its subject matter is not light but the author manages to make it sound fun and interesting to all in a playful manner, using beautiful prose that captures the reader's heart. Dyslexia is the name, getting over it is the game. Highly recommended.

15) Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest. I have to admit that I'm a big fan of KT, whom I discovered from a Guardian piece and her youtube videos. This poetry collection was almost all expected from her, as she uses simple words and straightforward language to talk about today's world. Some of the poems are better than others, a few of them are really great. The fact is that I've enjoyed reading most them so much that I sat myself down and translated the whole volume to Greek. Unfortunately, unless a miracle happens, it is never going to be published since, a) I'm not well connected when it comes to Greek publishers, and, b) The Greek market is on its deathbed after the last economic downturn. Oh well, at least I enjoyed the journey.

16) Poems Without Name by Dulce María Loynaz. I have bought this book 14 years ago in Cuba and I have read it three times since then. The poet is one of the most famous in her country and, though dead now, still waits to be discovered by the rest of the world. If you like poetry that talks about the things that matter not only on a personal but also a societal level, then this book can work wonders for you.

17) Pine and the Winter Sparrow by Alexis York Lumbard and BeatrizVidal. This is an old story told anew in beautiful prose and accompanied by wonderful illustrations. A children's story it is, but it can be read with pleasure by everyone. In these pages we watch birds and trees as they interact with each other and in the end we get to know why the pine trees are one of the few that stay green all year around.

18) Stories of Havana by Estrella Fresnillo. I bought this short story collection during that trip to Cuba as well, and I really enjoyed it. The stories here are quite simple. They are stories about people and their everyday lives. Stories that can make you smile or make you sad. The author seems more interested about the myth than the plot and that works just fine here.

19) Swamp Bones by Kathy Reichs. This is an original ebook novella that sees the famous forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan travel to Florida for a short holiday that was never meant to be. Human bones are found in the stomach of a Burmese python, and Temp, feeling certain that foul play was involved throws herself into full investigative mode. One of the author's better works, a fact perhaps helped by the size of the book.

20) Three Twisted Stories by Karin Slaughter. (Beware: This is the AUDIO version. You can seek the ebook elsewhere.) I don't think that there are many authors that do twisted as well as Karin Slaughter does. I won't go into details about the three stories that are included in this small collection, but I will say that they achieve their goal, which is to upset the reader, seemingly without great effort. KS reminds me of some Japanese masters of the genre.

 

To be continued 

See also: 1 to 10
 

My (Previous) Year in Reading: 1 to 10

…in chronological order.

2015 has been a great year when it comes to reading books for me. During it, according to Goodreads, I have gulped down 212 volumes that were not only novels for adults but also volumes that belonged in many other genres: YA, graphic novels, poetry, children's stories, short stories and books in translation. This has also been a year that I stopped writing reviews since I had much else occupying my mind and time, so below I'll give you no more than a few words about the books I have read. I hope some of my choices echo yours and I look forward to an exciting new year of reading.

So here it goes:

1) The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante. I have been reading about this author in newspapers, blogs and elsewhere for a long time now, so I've decided to read something of hers to find out what the buzz was all about. And I wasn't disappointed. Ferrante is a fine storyteller and a master at diving into the abysmal depths of the human psyche. She's on my reading list for the new year as well.

2) Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff. Truth to be told I am new to YA fiction but I think this is one of those special books that can capture the heart of young and old alike. Perhaps the world described here differs a lot from my own experience but it also sounds familiar in a way I can't quite pinpoint. But that doesn't matter. What counts is the story, and this is a very good one.

3) Grandma's Poetry Book by Di Castle. I really loved this book. It's fun and tender, and I remember smiling again and again whilst reading it. These poems are full of memories, past and present, and rich in emotions. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

4) Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb. I love discovering "new" authors just as much as I love reading about Japan. This is an outsider's tale. The tale of a young woman that feels happy to return to the land of her birth, but whose happiness turns to sorrow as time passes by and she finds out that she no longer belongs there. Perhaps she never did. As the pages turn, her psychological portrait is built before our very eyes, and bit by bit she (and we) discovers things about herself that look foreign to the self that once was. A short novel that carries a lot of weight.

5) There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I bet that this is not an easy book to stomach for western readers. You have to be willing to let go of your own perspective of the world to fully appreciate the one that inhabits the stories of this collection. Melancholy seems to be the prevalent feeling here, but that shouldn't surprise us since we all know what they say about the Russian soul. That though doesn't necessarily mean that there's no joy to be found in these stories. There is. A lot. And then there are the stories themselves, small masterpieces in the puzzle that we call humanity. An amazing book.

6) Dreaming of Elizabeth by Camilla Läckberg. A single short, as they call them, this is the story of Malin and Lars. They sail together on a boat, but that's just the background. The story itself is mostly a story about suspicion and fear, about the paranoia that grips people every now and then and never lets go. I've enjoyed reading it but didn't like it as much as this very good author's novels.

7) Evening by Anna Akhmatova. This is the first collection that I've read by this great poet, and it so happens that it is also the first one she published. I am no poetry critic but when I like something I tend to shout it out loud. And I did REALLY LIKE this one. Akhmatova had a way with words that decades after her death still sounds current and even urgent. It's as if her voice was meant to last for the ages. And it did.

8) Thunderstruck & Other Stories by ElizabethMcCracken. A collection of short stories can traverse through a range of lives and emotions and gift the reader with pure moments of narrative magic that speak to his own soul. And this one does just that as it explores loss and grief, loneliness and love, serenity and regret. A job very well done by the author.

9) Bristly Hair and I Don't Care by Nadia Budde. This is a funny book about a very serious subject matter for a lot of people, the way they look. We all say that looks don't really matter, but most of us don't really mean it. Well, this little volume tries to change that with some hilarious rhymes and the help of an uncle that's all the money. Lovely.

10) Art by Yasmina Reza. This is one of those little books that I pick up by chance every now and then, and which most often than not come to surprise me in a pleasant way. What we have here is a story about friendship, and about the differing views that people often come to hold about a subject, object, emotion or whatever else comes to mind. A delight to read.

To be continued...

The Second Deadly Sin by Åsa Larsson review

Great crime novels keep coming out of Sweden in particular and Scandinavia in general for the past few years, at a rate that sometimes is hard to follow. What is it that all of sudden made Scandinoir, or Nordic Noir, look so appealing in the eyes of readers all over the world? Is it still because of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo phenomenon or is it something else? Whatever the reason Scandinavian authors now seem to command our full attention and I for one are happy about itThis is the second book I read by this author and I’m sure that more will follow. Mrs. Larsson has a way of gripping the reader’s attention without seemingly trying to do so. Her heroes are everyday people who are trying to live their lives as best they can. They have families and pets, they have a lot of worries and most of them are torturing themselves psychologically, because they can’t really express their feelings, or because they do what they do out of greed or lust for glory instead for the right reasons.

The reader travels back and forth in time in rural Sweden as they embark on the journey of solving the many riddles at the heart of this story. A not so strange incident is what gives spark to flame and ignites the plot. A bear appears out of the snowy nowhere and attacks a farm. A professional bear hunter is called in to find and kill the animal, which under the circumstances is considered extremely dangerous. That happens sooner rather than later but the bear’s death brings to light a sinister discovery: within its body lie parts of the remains of a man. In the meantime, a woman is killed in her house, while a boy of seven, her grandson, hardly escapes with his life. What is it that connects the two cases?

Well, the perfect candidate for heading the investigation would be District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, who knows the people and the place really well, but an ambitious colleague that goes by the name of von Post hijacks her case. She expects that he’ll make a mess of it, and of course he obliges. Rebecka is furious with her boss for allowing him to do that to her and the case, but at the same time she’s determined to find the truth, even though at first she doesn’t even know she’s doing that.

As we follow her around and through the many flashbacks that spread throughout the story we get to learn a lot of things about the history of the region and its people, but most importantly about the stories of the victims. Rebecka is thorough in her research and a great detective of sorts and that’s exactly what leads her to discover the truth; a truth that was there for her to see right from the start.

The Second Deadly Sin is a crime novel, a psychological thriller and a social commentary at the same time, but most of all it’s a great book and as such I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to all.

First published in Crime Factory magazine

Book Review: Live Wire by Harlan Coben

It’s been a few years since the last time I’ve read a novel by Harlan Coben, but I can still remember pretty well his favorite fictional character, sports agent Myron Bolitar, who seems to be moonlighting most of the time as a detective.
     In Live Wire we see Myron getting into a shitload of trouble, as he tries to help one of his clients, the ex tennis player Suzze T., to set things right in her life. The latter is now the proud owner of a tennis academy and with child, the father of which is an infamous musician called Lex Ryder. Or is it? Somebody has a different opinion on the matter and posts it on Suzze’s Facebook profile; and that’s when it all begins, as Lex, just after reading that puts on a disappearing act. Now Myron has to trace the tracks of the musician, as well as find out who’s behind the post. The first he can do easy enough, but when it comes to the second things get a little bit complicated, since the one to blame for all this is none other than his sister-in-law Kitty, someone he haven’t seen for sixteen years.
     When he catches a glimpse of her at a club from a distance, he feels like his world has been turned upside down. What was she doing there and what was her relationship with Lex, whom he also spotted at the same place? That’s the big question. And there are a few to follow, concerning the absence of his brother, the whys of her return to town and so on. He suspects that she has again fallen into drugs, but has no time to find out if that’s so, as she manages to escape with the help of the club’s bouncers, along with Lex.
     The more Myron looks into these interconnected cases, the more things get complicated. As he knocks on doors that do not open and asks questions that go unanswered, he finds himself heading from one dead end to the next. And something that starts as a simple investigation, as time goes by, turns into a fast paced chase, which through its various twists and turns brings to surface lots of secrets and lies. Myron, who feels like he’s a victim and a victimizer at the same time, will put his life at risk in order to bring the truth to light; whichever truth that might be. During his long and dangerous pursuit he’ll come face to face with bouncers and cops, with drug dealers and their minions, and to survive he’ll have to ask for help from his friends: Esperantza the brave, Big Cyndi the, er, big (whom somewhere the author likens to a Volkswagen Beetle) and Win, a muscular and trigger happy millionaire, who likes picking up fights, and nowadays keeps a couple of lovers that go by the names of You and Mee.
     This is one of those books you can read in one sitting, since the writer manages to keep the reader moving fast, page after page, giving him some laughs on the way, but also making him meditate, at least a bit, on the big subjects of love and humanity. And he’s not soft on his hero; he slaps him around every now and then and kind of pushes him to change his way of thinking.
     Crime literature at its best.