Sweet Darusya

Followed a friend’s recommendation. It was difficult in the beginning because although I do not speak Ukrainian and even more so Hutsulian, I could still feel that the English translation lost a lot of language flavor, and I was frustrated not being able to grasp it. Still, I kept reading because since I first visited Bukovina in 1976, I had fallen in love with its people. Despite all Soviet propaganda, it was impossible not to see the level of oppression Hutsuls had experienced, and it was absolutely clear that their existence within the Soviet Union was not a happy ending to their struggles. I fell in love with the local legends. For many years, Oleksa Dovbush was my hero, and when other romanticized korsars and musketeers, I dreamed about opryshkes. I know what is drymba and what is kiptar, and how does Hutsul embroidery look.

After the initial “no, it doesn’t sound right!” I got all absorbed in the story: powerful, horrifying, and so beautifully written. I am not 100% sure whether those readers who knew nothing about the history of this region would love the book as much as I loved it, but I highly recommend it.

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

It seems hardly possible to tell something new about Greek mythology, but Natalie Haynes succeeded in this endeavor. Focusing on female figures in Greek Myths, she conducted extensive research and presented the readers with many little-known facts. She also encourages the readers to think beyond what they learned in schools about the Greek Gods, and analyze the myths from today’s point of view on gender (in)equality

Eile Weisel: Night. Dawn. Day.

For some reason, Goodreads does not show the other two books of this trilogy, Dawn and Day. I believe they are often combined into a “Trilogy,” but I can’t find it either. I listened to the audiobooks, starting with Dawn and ending with Night. All three are not easy to listen to. They all talk about the long-term personality damage that does not end after a prisoner is liberated from the concentration camp, which I think is really important to understand. I just looked over the reviews of this book, and I see that most readers limit their reviews to one or two sentences, and that’s how I feel: it’s very difficult to write anything except for “horror” and “must-read”.

I didn’t have time even to mark books as read on Goodreads, and it was only when I waited for my last delayed flight that I finally caught up with my reading. Not all of the books I read or listened to are listed below.

May Contain Lies. I mentioned this book in connection with the podcast I listened to some time ago. The book has even more examples of (mis)interpreting the results of surveys, researches, and such. Really useful, especially for people who have very strong in their opinions, like me 🙂

Moral Decision Making. A series of lectures from the Great Courses. It was the first time I listened to anything from the Great Courses, and I liked it! The series consisted of twenty-four half-hour lectures, and here are some excerpts from the course description:

Whether or not we’re aware of them, we make important ethical decisions all the time – as professionals, consumers, citizens, parents, sons and daughters, and friends. These 24 thought-provoking lectures offer you the chance to reflect on some of the most powerful moral issues we face in our daily lives: Is it ever OK to lie? What are our moral obligations to others? What is the key to living the good life? <…>. Engaging stories and thought experiments bring these issues to life, showing what different philosophical theories have to say about real-world ethical dilemmas.

According to Professor Martin, the trick is to understand that the mind is like a parachute; it only works when it’s open. Rather than take a side in any particular debate, this course provides a framework for thinking through a host of debates and dilemmas from all sides. Through it all, Professor Martin is a sympathetic guide, helping you think through some of our most complex decisions.

The last sentence describes what I liked most about this course: I believe that morals and ethics are very logical, and that “at large” doing good is profitable for an individual, and Professor martin talks a lot about it. Of course, according to these course, the best thing that happened in my life was completely unethical (but I know that! and I can’t talk myself into admitting my wrong). Still, this is one of very few pieces in my digital library which I might go back to listen to again.

The Year of Less

When I started listening to this book, I though: I know that all, what can a younger person tell me about savings, nit buying things – I’ve done it, and I’ve done it successfully. BTW, I do not remember why I chose this title – was it on a weekly recommendation list from Audible, or in TIME magazine, or in the “daily deals.” To my surprise, after I finished listening, I realized that I forgot about some techniques, and about small ways not to overspend, and thought that I might resme some of these practice.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – I am a fan of the Hunger Games, and I do not care if somebody is going to criticize me for that. I really loved this “book zero,” and I am looking forward for the next title in this series.

Once again, I didn’t update my Goodreads progress for two months or so, and now I have a long list of books I read without marking them as “currently reading.”

Learning to Love Midlife I know why I picked this book: there was a WBEZ episode with Chip Conley, and it sounded interesting. But the book was disappointing. I know that the older I get, the more I love my life, and I don’t understand why it should be otherwise. In the first half of this book, the author explains why midlife is hard, and then he explains why it should not be. I do not need either of this 🙂

Yoga Life by Brett Larkin – surprisingly good and agreeable with how I perceive yoga (yes, confirmation bias :))

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. I am ashamed I only read it now, not twenty years ago when it was first published. Now, it’s a Chicago classic, and it is possible I wouldn’t have enjoyed it that much twenty years ago as I can enjoy and appreciate it now!

Murder by Lamplight. I am not as much of a mystery reader now as I used to be, and this book was a pleasant surprise. I am not sure I will continue reading mysteries, and even less sure I will continue these series, but who knows!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. OMG!!! That was something! So good! This is the book for our Book Club at work. Same as with mysteries (and probably more), I completely lost my previous interest in Sci-Fi. When this book was voted to be the next book in our Book Club, I was extremely disappointed and didn’t even sign up to receive a free copy. But then I decided to give it a try, and I couldn’t take a break from listening to it! One of the best things I read recently!

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.