The Country of the Blind

guess I should comment on “why five stars,” but somehow, I find it very challenging to say something about this book. It feels way too personal. For the past thirty-six years, I have shared my life with a person who has been experiencing a gradual but inescapable vision decline. Too many situations described in this book are painfully familiar. I gave this book to my husband to listen to, and his reaction was: if I read it twenty years ago…

This book is really important for people who have just started to experience vision decline because it helps them understand that they are not the first person experiencing this pain and that there is a “life after.” It is equally important to those who do not have much knowledge about vision-related disabilities. It talks about different gradations of declining vision (for many people, it is “blind-not blind” without understanding a million different degrees of vision decline and how important it is to have at least some residual vision). Also, it talks about how a regular person can assist blind and low-vision people around them (it’s frustrating how much well-meaning people are unaware of the proper ways to help a blind person find a way around). I hope that people will read it 🙂

Tamara Pietkiewicz Memoires (part II)

I read the first part of this Memoires many years ago, and then I could not find the second part in an audio format. My friends made an amazing Christmas gift for me, narrating this book and assembling it together. I was very happy back then. Now, I look at the names, and I feel sad knowing how many of them are not my friends anymore. I do wonder a lot about what I have missed and why I haven’t seen what I should have seen. In many cases, everything was predictable, but not for all of them.

In any case, I wanted to listen to this book again, and when I learned that a professional narration is now available, I bought it right away.

It felt, needed, like a new book. Now, that I am almost constantly reflecting on my family past and my own past, that I am trying to find “where it went wrong,” the things I didn’t pay attention to ten years ago, stand out. It feels especially striking, because the events Tamara Pietkiewicz happened in the later 40s – 50s, when all of these events were so recent….

In chronological order:

• “Nothing was wrong before 1937.” Given her family history, she should have known better. Still, “37” sounds like a secret handshake for former prisoners. As if nobody was imprisoned or exiled before that.
• Her vacationing on occupied territories. When I recall being at the same places for vacations, it makes me cringe. If there can be any excuse for me, I was a teenager, I was born forty years later, and I was visiting these places twenty-five or thirty years later. Thus, my questions are:
• How could she “enjoy Lithuania” at the time when the Forest Brothers were still actively resisting? How could she “feel welcomed?”
• She was in the Carpathian Mountains. My forever love, love with tears in my eyes, and with eternal hope that one day ai will be back. In 1976, I visited all the same little villages and big towns she visited. Even being a complete idiot as I was, I could not not notice the difficulty with which the local people talked to us; I could not not feel that they would rather not talk. I felt 100% in a foreign country. Even knowing only a very brief history of this land, switching hands every dozen years for several hundred years, I could only think: poor country! Poor people! How much they had to suffer, and there is no end to it.
• Her working with blind people. The episode when blind people tell her that they do not want to be helped (I would add: they are often helped the wrong way). They tell her that feeling independent is very important for them, For which Tamara Pietkiewicz says that “they should allow others to feel good about themselves.”

I understand that she was “a product of society,” but still…

To Hell and Back

I started this book several times, and I would put it away to switch to something everybody was buzzing about. I finally finished it last week. I want to say that it felt incomplete, but having how long it took me to read it, it might be very well my fault. Also, I read a lot of historical books in between, so by the time I finished it, I mostly got the facts from other sources. I guess the idea of the book was to be a gigantic observation, and it was not supposed to end with a firm and detailed conclusion…

At some point, I bought tons of books on Audible, thinking that I could still return them if I didn’t like them or if I decided not to read them. However, they changed their return policies (and it was probably a good call!), so I ended up with a lot of never-opened books. Since they were already on my phone, I decided to give them a try, and many of them turned out to be not bad at all!

Code Name Blue Wren. I picked this book because it was in the Women’s Month recommended reading from CPL (from last year!). The description (a Cuban female spy) was intriguing, but when I started to listen, it felt boring, and I abandoned it. I resumed reading several months later, and finally, I was into this book. The most interesting was trying to understand the psychology of a person who turned against the country that gave them so much…

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. It’s a short story; I can’t tell why I liked it; I guess it’s just the timing was right.

The 19th Wife. I learned something about different aspects of polygamy that I hadn’t thought about before and about what is especially damaging to it. I am still unsure whether I should have spent that much time on it, though.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold. That was the book we read for our Book Club, and I really enjoyed it, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. During our discussion at the Book Club meeting, I suggested that it might be because I often reflect on whether I would have wanted something in my life to be different. However, I always come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t change anything in my past because everything I’ve done in the past has made me the person I am today.

Before Your Memory Fades. Book #3 (I believe) from the same series. During our book club discussion, somebody mentioned that “Before coffee gets cold” has a sequel, but “it is way worse.” I didn’t believe them and bought the book. It turned out that they were right!

Most Delicious Poison. Spices, medicine, poison – they all come from the same plants, there difference is in the quantity.

The Quiet Girl. One more book from last year’s Women’s History Month recommendations. Don’t know what to make out of it. It was definitely a captivating reading, but I do not think that I would miss something if I would never read it.

I still have several books from the last-year supply, and one new book from our reading club, and one more…

No time to write the actual reviews, but I still wanted to leave a couple of notes about the books I recently read.

• Last year, I read Henry at Work. I started reading it because it was recommended as a book about “the meaning of work,” especially “during the era of mass resignation,” and it sounded interesting. When I started to read it, I realized that first, I needed to read at least some works of Thoreau, so I started Walden. It was an incredibly difficult reading for me, in part because early nineteenth-century English is very different from the modern language and in part because the pace of the story is a hundred times slower than I am used to. I took it upon myself to beat this challenge and exercise patience, especially because it was sort of a point of Thoreau’s philosophy. I made it :), even though it was possibly the slowest reading in my adult life. I am still thinking to which extent I agree with Thoreau. Is my work meaningful? I hope it is because I am definitely not working “just so I can earn money to live.” But is it really meaningful? I am not sure. I am in the race for a big paycheck? Am I one of the people who wants things because others want them, and I might not need them? Judging by me being among the first to get Apple Vision, it seems like it, but that was probably the only purchase of that kind in many years. Are my desires to have more cultural experiences and travel more unworthy ones? Henry James Thoreau condemned trains, saying that there is no reason for people to get from one place to another “as fast as possible.” I find it hard to agree :).
• Eat to beat your diet. I started reading it because I thought that it was going to be an anti-dieting book. The author claimed that “you do not need to eat less; you just need to eat the right foods, and you will be able to fight bad fats, and everything will be great.” In fact, when he talks about the studies, he mentions that people in them were not eating less, but they were given some special foods in addition. However, when it comes to meal plans, the first things he emphasizes are “eat in moderation,” intermittent fasting,” and similar calorie-restricting techniques.
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold. I read it for the book club and loved it! I can’t even tell why I loved it so much and what’s the significance of this work, but I was completely taken! Loved it to the last drop! Possibly will read the next one in the series.
• Red Alert - The Novel that Inspired Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I started reading it after I watched the movie. That’s shocking reading for anybody born in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to say “I loved it” about such kind of a book, so let’s say it left a long-lasting impression on me. I will try to write more about it next week.
• Three more books “currently reading”.

I do not remember where this recommendation came from, but the description looked intriguing, and I purchased the audiobook. And in the beginning, it sounded awesome: Baba Yaga died in Kyiv and left her House on Chicken Legs to her youngest female descendant 70 years after her death. An attorney finds the descendants in the US, and the House on Chicken Legs arrives in a container, stretches it’s legs to the horror of the witnesses, and the story goes on. Then, there is a mysterious Russian who tries to follow the House, and we are not sure what his evil plans are.
I thought, it would be a great story, but then, the historical inaccuracies start to pile so high, that it was impossible to ignore them, and the story becomes uninteresting. Baba Yaga suddenly becomes a Jewish woman who lives in the pale of settlement. I could live with that, but next, in 1919, there are “Russian soldiers” who are “protecting the tsar”, and simultaneously, there is an October Revolution, Denikintsy, the White Army, the ‘Russian soldiers” defending “the tsar and Fatherland” and the ”government sanctioned pogroms.” Yes, I understand that the book is about historical memory, and keeping history alive and so on, but when the history is so brutalized, it’s difficult to come to terms with “presenving history.”

I felt this reading as a completely wasted time. I still listened to the end, because I couldn’t believe “that’s it.” And there is a good idea at the end, but one paragraoh is a poor justification for a long book.

This list was published a couple of weeks ago (see here), and out of these one hundred books, I read only two and heard about four more, which sounds like a miserable outcome. I am not sure there are that many people who would be able to read a hundred books in a year, and they do not have to be from the must-read list, but still. I feel like in the previous years, more titles sounded familiar.

I would be curious to know how many books from this list other people read.