Wednesday reading
The once a week format is a good thing (for me - not sure about the readers); I wonder if I should set up something else, too - crafty Mondays? Travel Fridays? (more like remembrance-of-trips-taken Fridays)
Anyway, weekly reading. Since the last post I finished Andrew Solomon's book about depression, and it was good. I don't think I quite like Solomon personally (it is relevant since there's a lot of personal matter in this book) but I definitely respect and maybe even admire him; and this gave me a lot of food for thought, some interesting personal stories and some relevant examples/models for understanding things.
Also I've read two whodunnits by Elena Mikhalkova which are good for when you're tired or in a bad mood (or when you take long bus trips - and I went to Helsinki in a bus this weekend). One, "Paper curtain, glass crown" is a bit weird because it's a roman a clef about Russian show business personalities. None of them end to be the murderer, though, and the main idea seems to be "they live in a different world but they're mostly actually kind of nice"... okay, whatever. The other one, "A bitter almond pie", is more traditional - a murder in the past, complicated family in a big house, all that. I did not enjoy the part where the heroine remembers the summer before the murder - it feels tense and you know something is going to happen - but it was probably the most interesting part. Though least soothing - such things do happen.
Meanwhile, instead of steadily continuing other unfinished books, I started two new ones. One is "Helsinki. The innovative city. Historical perspectives" by Marjatta Bell and Marjatta Hietala, which is good supplemental reading after the trip I took - it's more or less the history of Helsinki from an economic/developmental point of view. Even though I know more about the history of Finland than the average Russian person, a lot of things are new to me, and then there's also a lot of things I sort of knew but here they're set up more explicitly and logically.
Another new book is East West Street by Philippe Sands which just may end up as one of my favorite books of the year, because so far it's just the kind of thing I like. It's about the origin of concepts of genocide and crime against humanity and their connection with the history of Lviv, with a bit of Sands' s personal history too.
What am I going to read next? Dunno: I want to have a week's vacation to read ten things at once, I have so much choice and all of it is interesting.
This entry was originally posted at https://taelle.dreamwidth.org/75557.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Anyway, weekly reading. Since the last post I finished Andrew Solomon's book about depression, and it was good. I don't think I quite like Solomon personally (it is relevant since there's a lot of personal matter in this book) but I definitely respect and maybe even admire him; and this gave me a lot of food for thought, some interesting personal stories and some relevant examples/models for understanding things.
Also I've read two whodunnits by Elena Mikhalkova which are good for when you're tired or in a bad mood (or when you take long bus trips - and I went to Helsinki in a bus this weekend). One, "Paper curtain, glass crown" is a bit weird because it's a roman a clef about Russian show business personalities. None of them end to be the murderer, though, and the main idea seems to be "they live in a different world but they're mostly actually kind of nice"... okay, whatever. The other one, "A bitter almond pie", is more traditional - a murder in the past, complicated family in a big house, all that. I did not enjoy the part where the heroine remembers the summer before the murder - it feels tense and you know something is going to happen - but it was probably the most interesting part. Though least soothing - such things do happen.
Meanwhile, instead of steadily continuing other unfinished books, I started two new ones. One is "Helsinki. The innovative city. Historical perspectives" by Marjatta Bell and Marjatta Hietala, which is good supplemental reading after the trip I took - it's more or less the history of Helsinki from an economic/developmental point of view. Even though I know more about the history of Finland than the average Russian person, a lot of things are new to me, and then there's also a lot of things I sort of knew but here they're set up more explicitly and logically.
Another new book is East West Street by Philippe Sands which just may end up as one of my favorite books of the year, because so far it's just the kind of thing I like. It's about the origin of concepts of genocide and crime against humanity and their connection with the history of Lviv, with a bit of Sands' s personal history too.
What am I going to read next? Dunno: I want to have a week's vacation to read ten things at once, I have so much choice and all of it is interesting.
This entry was originally posted at https://taelle.dreamwidth.org/75557.html. Please comment there using OpenID.