Bâ, Mariama "So Long a Letter"

Bâ, Mariama "So Long a Letter" (French: Une si longue lettre) - 1979

A while ago, a friend sent me an article called "The non-western books that every student should read". I forwarded it to my book club and we decided to read at least one of the books from the list. We decided on this one.

This is indeed a very worthwhile book to read. We rarely hear about women who live in polygamy, even less about what happens to them when the husband dies. This is just one of those cases and the author has described the situation of the protagonist so well. Apparently, it is more or less her own story, no wonder she knows how to explain the situation to us all so well.

We are given two different solutions, both of which are not really a great one but that is all the women have if their husband takes a second wife. They can either leave their husband or stay behind and be the "old" wife. Neither solution is very tempting.

It is interesting how short this novella is and how much it tells us. I definitely recommend this book, it's impressive.

We discussed this in our international book club in February 2017 and in our international online book club in August 2019.

From the back cover:

"Written by award-winning African novelist Mariama Bâ and translated from the original French, So Long a Letter has been recognized as one of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. The brief narrative, written as an extended letter, is a sequence of reminiscences - some wistful, some bitter - recounted by recently widowed Senegalese schoolteacher Ramatoulaye Fall. Addressed to a lifelong friend, Aïssatou, it is a record of Ramatoulaye’s emotional struggle for survival after her husband betrayed their marriage by taking a second wife. This semi-autobiographical account is a perceptive testimony to the plight of educated and articulate Muslim women. Angered by the traditions that allow polygyny, they inhabit a social milieu dominated by attitudes and values that deny them status equal to men. Ramatoulaye hopes for a world where the best of old customs and new freedom can be combined. Considered a classic of contemporary African women’s literature, So Long a Letter is a must-read for anyone interested in African literature and the passage from colonialism to modernism in a Muslim country. Winner of the prestigious Noma Award for Publishing in Africa."

Ephron, Nora "The Most of Nora Ephron"

Ephron, Nora "The Most of Nora Ephron" - 2014 

There is so much in Nora Ephron's writings that every woman can relate to. She is funny, she is hilarious, she is truthful. She says what she thinks, she says what a lot of women think and I love her for that. Maybe that is one of the reasons why "When Harry Met Sally" belongs to my favourite movies, it tells a story with real people in there.

I would love to quote from every single chapter in this great collection of her writings, some of which I had already read in "I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman" and "I Remember Nothing. And Other Reflections" but that doesn't matter, reading them together and in this sequence makes a lot of sense and makes us understand the wonderful woman that was Nora Ephron even better.

Also, we travel in time with her, to her first years in journalism, to a time that changed a lot for women, and still not enough. I loved the insight into journalism as well as her point of view. I think every woman should read this, especially those that come after us. Such wisdom, such insight into the real world. Brilliant.

Nora, you left us far too early. RIP.

Some of my favourite quotes:

"Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learnt something, become a better person."

This is my favourite part in "When Harry Met Sally". No, not "I'll have what she's having" (although that's not bad, either) but the way Sally orders her apple pie.
Waitress: "Hi, what can I get you?"
Harry: "I'll have the Number Three."
Sally: "I'd like the chef salad, please, with the oil and vinegar on the side. And the apple pie à la mode."
Waitress: "Chef and apple à la mode."
Sally: "But I'd like the pie heated, and I don't want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side. And I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it's real. If it's out of a can, then nothing."
Waitress: "Not even the pie?"
Sally: "No, just the pie, but then not heated."
Waitress: "Ah."

And this sounds yummy:
Lee Lum's recipe for lemon chicken involved dipping strips of chicken-breast in water-chestnut flour, frying it, plunging it into a sauce that included crushed pineapple, and dousing the entire concoction with a one-ounce bottle of lemon extract.

Books and authors mentioned in her article "Rapture". (You can read the whole article here.)
Alcott, Louisa May "Little Women"
Austen, Jane  
Baum, L. Frank - Oz Series
Carré, John "Smiley's People"
Chabon, Michael "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"
Chandler, Raymond
Collins, Wilkie "The Woman in White"
Frank, Anne "The Diary of a Young Girl"
Hodgson Burnett, Frances "A Little Princess"
Hulme, Kathryn "The Nun's Story"
Keene, Carolyn "Nancy Drew"
Lessing, Doris "The Golden Notebook"
McCloskey, Robert "Homer Price"
Montgomery, LM "Anne of Green Gables"
Puzo, Mario "The Godfather"
Thompson, Kay "Eloise"
Travers, P.L. "Mary Poppins"
Trollope, Anthony 
Wharton, Edith 

Fredriksson, Marianne "Simon and The Oaks"

Fredriksson, Marianne "Simon and The Oaks" (aka Simon's Family) (Swedish: Simon och ekarna) - 1985 

After reading "Hannah's Daughters" with two different book clubs, I always wanted to read another book by Marianne Fredriksson again. And I finally found one. I didn't regret it, a wonderful tale about a friendship that is lined with many obstacles, about a boy growing up not feeling he belongs, about a family with a secret and a country having to deal with a war that is going on all around them, just not directly in their home.

Marianne Fredriksson was a very powerful author who can tell us about a time not that long ago but still unknown to many of us. She manages to weave a plentiful story by adding a colour here and a character there, links that are not that obvious at first but get more and more certain after a while.

A lot of Scandinavian authors are known for their crime stories and I am sure they have a worthy place among the world authors of this genre. Marianne Fredriksson also deserves a place there.

From the back cover:

"Simon is an ordinary boy growing up in rural Sweden. Ordinary that is until the Second World War is declared; until he makes friends with Isak, a psychologically damaged Jewish boy who has fled with his father from Nazi Germany; and until he is told that he is adopted - that the working class couple he has assumed to be his parents are, in reality, distant relations. His biological parents had met and, with no common language, loved each other in an enchanted spot under a waterfall nine years previously.

So begins Simon's quest for self-hood: a quest which takes him through the bitter privations of the Second World War, through his military service, and through a destructive relationship with Isak's cousin recently liberated from a concentration camp. And, always in the background, his beloved step-mother watches over him, as constant as the oak trees on the cliff top that whispered their secrets to him when he was a child."

Book Quotes of the Week

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…" Lawrence Clark Powell

"Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it." Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking." Edward Gibbon

"You can travel the world and never leave your chair when you read a book." Sherry K. Plummer

"This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication." Logan Pearsall Smith

Find more book quotes here.

Pamuk, Orhan "Cevdet Bey and His Sons"

Pamuk, Orhan "Cevdet Bey and His Sons" (Turkish: Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları) - 1982

Orhan Pamuk is not only one of my favourite Turkish authors, he is also one of my favourite authors ever. He has a certain quality to talk about people and events that makes you believe you are right there with them. Whether it is about a murder in the middle ages (My Name is Red) or he tells us about his life (Istanbul), he brings Turkey and Islamism closer to us, he makes us understand a lot of things we wouldn't know without him.

In this book he tells the story of Cevdet, a merchant in Konstantinopel (now Istanbul) at the beginning of the last century. He describes his life in a vivid way and then moves on to the next generation, his sons and their friends in a pre-WWII Istanbul until he finally reaches his grandson in 1970. We follow the family Bey from the Ottoman Empire until their independence, the whole history of the 20th century. We read about the wars, Kemal Attatürk and his visions, the changes that go through the people of what we now call Turkey, the Sultans and their empire and how they got on with their new life. A story about a wealthy family but also about the people around them who were not so fortunate.

A great story by a great author.

From the back cover:

"The story of a small shop owner in Abdulhamid’s last years and one of the first Muslim merchants Cevdet Bey and his sons covers three generations from the beginning of the century to the present day, and it’s also the story of Turkish Republic’s private life. Through the adventures of a family which lives in Nişantaşı, it looks into the indoor lifestyles, the new life in apartments, big families that are becoming westernized, going shopping in Beyoğlu, listening to radio on Sunday afternoons..."

Books mentioned:
Balzac, Honoré de "Le Père Goriot" (Old Father Goriot) (Rastignac)
Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri "Ankara"
Stendhal "Le Rouge et le Noir" (The Red and The Black/Rot und Schwarz)

Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Orhan Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2005.

You can read more about the books I read by one of my favourite authors here.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Happy March!

Happy March to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this beautiful watercolour painting
by Frank Koebsch

 "Discoverer" "Entdecker"

March is the arrival of spring, the end of the long winter evenings. Always welcome. It makes it even prettier with a lovely painting, like this calendar picture of the beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch. 

You can find many more wonderful pictures on their website here.

Statistics 2016

My statistics for the last years are here:
Going back to 2009-12, 2013, 2014, 2015  

And these are the results of my reading lists for 2016:

* Statistics 2016 *

Challenges
I read books that contributed to the following online challenges:
Reading Challenge 2016
I read books belonging to 38 out of 40 different categories.
Reading Challenge - Chunky Books 2016
I read  28 books with more than 450 pages, 3 of them were more than 750 pages ("chunksters").
The "Piggybank" Challenge 2016
The 85 books I read this year resulted in €170 to spend on something nice.
2016 TBR Pile Reading Challenge
A new challenge where the participants try to read as many books from their To Be Read Pile as possible. I managed 37 books that had been on that stack for a while
101 Best Selling Books of All Time
This is a new list where I marked all the books I have read so far, 37 in all. I'm sure more will follow next year.
Travel the World Through Books
After reading the book "Die Ländersammlerin" [The Collector of Countries] by Nina Sedano, I thought it would be great to read a book from every country in the world. 77 until now. If you have a good suggestion for those countries I haven't "visited, yet, please let me know.
The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors 
An interesting list. 125 Authors have chosen the 10 greatest books ever written of which I have read six so far.
Emma's Book Club - Our shared shelf
This will hopefully be an ever growing list of books about and for women, a group started by Emma Watson (better known as Hermione Granger), UN Woman Goodwill Ambassador. I read eight of the nine books last year and fourteen from the overall list.
100 Books by the BBC
This is an old challenge, I added four more books to the list.
A Century of Books
This is also an old challenge, I added one more book to the list.
Best European Literature
No new books in this old challenge, unfortunately. There are still quite a few good ones that I haven't read, yet.
The 100 Greatest Fiction Books as Chosen by The Guardian
Another list where I didn't add any new books.
Le Monde - The 100 Books of the Century
This is an old challenge, I added three more books to the list.
Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
This is an old challenge, I added one more book to the list.
Nobel Prize Winners and Their Books
This is another list to which I could add four more books.
Oprah’s Book Club
So many old challenges, here is another one where I didn't add anything.
Oscar Winning Books
No new books.
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (German: Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels)
An ongoing list to which I added two more books.
Smiley, Jane "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel" 
This is an old challenge, I added two more books to the list.
What's in a Name 2014 Reading Challenge
Even though this is an older challenge, I always think it's interesting to read an eponymous book, it's always something special. Nine books this year.

Books Read: 85
Pages read: 29,533 (80 pages per day)

Books dating from which year:
Pre 1800s: 3
1800s: 5
1900-1949: 4
1950-1999: 26
2000s: 48 (4 of which from 2016)

Male Authors: 36
Female Authors: 46

Nobel Prize Winners: 5

Fiction: 52
Non-Fiction: 33

Chunky Books - more than 450 pages: 28, more than 750: 3
Library: 16
Re-Read: 8

Oldest Book:
Anonymous "Lazarillo de Tormes" (Spanish: La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades) - 1554
Newest Books:
Konar, Affinity "Mischling" - 2016
Oates, Joyce Carol "The Man Without a Shadow" - 2016
Longest book: 691 pages
Eliot, George "The Mill on the Floss"
Shortest book: 64 pages
Grimm, Jacob und Wilhelm "Jorinde und Joringel. Acht Märchen der Brüder Grimm" (German: Jorinde und Joringel. Acht Märchen der Brüder Grimm) - 1812

Longest book title: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bryson, Bill "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid"
Shortest Book Title: Q & A
Swarup, Vikas "Q & A" - 2005
Funniest Book:
Bryson, Bill "A Walk in the Woods" - 1998
Saddest Book:
Too many to choose from but these are probably the saddest ones.
Abulhawa, Susan "Mornings in Jenin"
Filipović, Zlata "Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo"
Konar, Affinity "Mischling"
Štimec, Spomenka "Kroatisches Kriegsnachtbuch" (Kroata Milit Noktlibro)
Weirdest Book:
Mitchell, David "Cloud Atlas" - 2004
New authors (for me) that I would like to read more from: Leila Aboulela, Susan Abulhawa, Sabahattin Ali, Kate Atkinson, Ayşe Kulin, Zlata Filipović, Affinity Konar, Amin Maalouf, Barack Obama, Gloria Steinem, Lyudmila Ulitzkaya, Juli Zeh

Translated Books: 10
3 from Turkish, 2 from Russian and Spanish, 1 from Bosnian, Hebrew, Italian
Books read in another language:
16 German, 5 French, 1 Dutch and Esperanto

Numbers in Book Titles: Three, Zero
Place Names in Book Titles: American, Carthage, Cleves, Deutschland/Germany, Floss, Globe, Jenin, Königsallee, Persepolis, Rothschildallee, Samarkand, Sarajewo, Trastevere, Unterleuten
Names in Book Titles: Cevdet, Emma, Jorinde, Joringel, Lazarillo, Macbeth, Perlmann, Shakespeare, Sisyphus, Zlata
Colours in Book Titles: Green

My Favourite Books:
Abulhawa, Susan "Mornings in Jenin" - 2010
Alexievich, Svetlana "Second Hand Time. The Last of the Sovjets" - 2013
Atkinson, Kate "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" - 1995
Bryson, Bill "A Walk in the Woods" - 1998
Ephron, Nora "I Remember Nothing. And other reflections" - 2010
Filipović, Zlata "Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo" - 1993
Kostova, Elizabeth "The Swan Thieves" - 2010
Kulin, Ayşe "Rose of Sarajevo" (Sevdalinka) - 1999
Maalouf, Amin "Samarkand" (Samarcande) - 1988
Mistry, Rohinton "Family Matters" - 2002
Oates, Joyce Carol "The Man Without a Shadow" - 2016
Pamuk, Orhan "Cevdet Bey and His Sons" (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları) - 1982
Perkins, Sue "Spectacles" - 2015
Trollope, Anthony "The Way We Live Now" - 1875
Zeh, Juli "Unterleuten" - 2016

With my books, I visited places in the following countries:
Africa (6):
Algeria, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Sudan
Asia (17):
Afghanistan, Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Irak, Iran, Israel, Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Uzbekistan, Vietnam
Europe (21):
Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegowina, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, Turkey
North America (2):
Caribbean, United States
South America (3):
Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela:
Australia/Oceania (2):
Australia, New Zealand
Extra-terrestrial (1):
Galaxy
Countries "visited" in total: 52

You may find some even greater statistics by better bloggers than me at "Stuck in a Book" and "Ready When You are, C.B."