yuuago | Reading Wednesday

I reached my goal for the year (50 books), so I've upped it to 75. ;V We'll see how this goes.

Just Finished: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. This one is a novel about tradition, comfort, resolution, and stories. More than anything else I was struck by how beautiful the writing is - this author has quite a way with words. I might need to seek out her other work.

Currently Reading: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This novel comes up every time somebody mentions alternate history, and it's been kind of on the to-read list for a while, but I've only managed to get around to it now. One thing that I failed to osmose about it was the reincarnation trope; I had no idea until very recently that it was an important part of the novel. Anyway, I'm about halfway through it, and I'm finding it difficult to put down. I don't read this particular speculative subgenre very often, but this is making me wonder if I should look up some others; it's a pretty good read. :)

Reading Next: Prrrobably Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I went to the library looking for Bulgakov's The Master and the Margarita, but they didn't have it (I'll have to ILL it), so I decided to go for this one instead, which I've been meaning to read for a while.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

zeest

If we were in the same town, I'll throw my copy of The Master and the Margarita over to you :D I'm not sure why I have it, probably picked it up at a sale years ago, and I have absolutely no clue what the story or writing is like haha. It's one of those books that I've been meaning to get to but I keep getting distracted by other things.

From:

yuuago

xD! It's too bad this kind of book-sharing can't happen. Alas.

...Ahh I have a few of those kinds of thing too - bought it years ago, and it's sat lurking ever since. Going to get to those one of these days~

From:

torachan

Congrats on reaching your goal!

I had a goal of 120 and I'm set to meet that by the end of this month, so in my head I'm going to aim for double that, but I don't think I'm going to adjust the number on Goodreads (which I did several times last year as I kept approaching and passing my goal).

From:

yuuago

Whoa, 120? Or double that? Pretty impressive. o_o

From:

torachan

I include comics and manga, too (though only full volumes not single issues) so that definitely helps pad the numbers. XD

From: (Anonymous)

Hm, I kinda want to start tracking how much i read a year. 50 books sounds like A LOT.

I heard so much about The Master and Margarita before reading it that I walked in with big expectations and ended up disappointed. You obviously need some knowledge of Russian history and specifically the political context during which it was written to get part of the appeal, so the political satire went right over my head. There are also apparently nods to literature classics I haven't read, so basically I was left with a mostly okay fantasy/magical realism book to enjoy. I wonder what your impressions will be!

LK

From:

yuuago

Goodreads is pretty handy for tracking. Or you could always just do it with a list, I used to do that. xD It's kind of fun to look back to see the different things one read over the course of the year.
I typically read while waiting for the bus, so that's a lot of time to get through things.

Thanks for the note about M&M. I hadnn't looked up anything about it, because I usually don't; only reason this is on my to-read is because Laufey likes it a lot, so I wasn't actually aware that it's a satire. I'll have to see if I can get one with thorough explanatory notes.

From: (Anonymous)

Well, as Laufey said, satire certainly isn't all there is to it. There's a strong spirituality side to it as well that mixes several traditions and I assume can be read in a myriad different ways, according to one's own beliefs, so that's interesting too. You'll probably be able to enjoy it on some level even without explanatory notes.

LK

From:

laufeyknits

Holy shit, M&M. You might know already because I rant about it so often, but what a fukken RIDE. Like LK says above it helps to know some Soviet history, because I kinda grew up with it - right next door you can't really not see what's going on - and like... Soviet Union was so bizarre. You won't ever understand Soviet people's capacity of surviving both horrifying and just plain weird ridiculous situations if you haven't read M&M, rest assured that the USSR reality could be even stranger than that book.

And yeah, there's plenty of political darts being thrown around, and it does help to know some literary classics, but even without them it's still a nice window to Moscow Back Then, I mean, if the literal Satan had decided to pay them a visit. He's not the worst evil you'll encounter in that book - that should say something. Best option is if you can get a book where the originally censored parts are marked, because that's another, very real time window to things you could not say in the USSR.

(One of those things is "she smiled, showing her teeth".)

From: (Anonymous)

I just realized that me being not impressed by M&M (heh) might have something to do with living in a post-communist country that still had most of that cultural baggage when I was young. So a lot of the everyday things in the book were just business as usual for me (intellectuals being ridiculed/unjustly detained, the huge wealth gap between the elites and normal people, and, as you said, absurd things being mundane and commonplace). I also read it when I was pretty young and did not yet have a taste for grey heroes or political commentary in literature. Maybe it's time to revisit it.

Speaking of cultural backgrounds: When I first read 1984, I assumed the author researched communist countries for inspiration, because several things in that book are literally what happened in my country. Imagine how far my jaw dropped when I learned *when* it was written. I have mad respect for Orwell, he even got the timeframe right.

LK

From:

laufeyknits

Oh man, another one of my favourites. Reading 1984 in the mid-nineties when I was a teen, I honestly thought it had been written a bit afterward. When I finally found out I had assumed the writing year a liiiittle bit wrong was such a mindbending moment.

For Finns, we were right on the outside looking in, and heck... I have countless anecdotes from my family on things that happened to some of us while in the USSR, that the locals would not even bat an eye to. You had to switch your whole way of thinking when you crossed the border, and since half the family comes from Karelia and the other half had my auntie who even lived in Moscow for a while, we did it so often we were probably considered a potential threat by the Finnish authorities! :D I know auntie's Finnish phone was bugged, you could hear it every time you called her.

From: (Anonymous)

Wow, I'd love to hear some of those stories! I'm curious what it all looked like for someone who could regularly visit but also went back home to a different culture. What does a bugged phone sound like?

LK

From:

laufeyknits

It's a quiet cracking sound you hear right after the wired side picks up the call, which means someone else picked up the call as well. You wouldn't hear it in normal landline phonecalls.

Those stories though, they're mostly just "this is how you USSR" for Finns. Some generic parts you kinda hear in everyone's stories, such as coffee bribery or selling your jeans and then blowing all that money on cheap vodka, are even considered offensive these days. Or the buses, tourists coming over to Finland and hitting the major cities just to buy things we thought were ordinary. But man, those tourist buses were a happy sight to business owners! These days the east side of Finland just gets food tourists, people buying f.ex. lots of cheese and other dairy products for some reason.

One person used to bring spare car parts to Estonia and the USSR. Completely legal from Finland's point of view, as he did not do this on the regular, only if his friends there happened to need something that was hard to get back home. Technically speaking he should have been stopped at the other side of the border - teeechnically speaking. In reality the border controls was just a dance-through if you knew the steps: bring a convincing stack of papers with official-looking stamps on them.

It didn't matter that they were in Finnish, no one would bother reading them anyway, the point was that you had them. He had the local (Finnish) police station stamp his for extra oomph... plus on the Russian side, handing over certain items to the border control guys got you through with no hassle. The Estonian border usually just waved you through like "pfff as if we even care, we saw you had the documents so not our problem".

One family member hit his head on a metal structure during an open air music festival, and got patched up by a doctor in the audience instead of being taken to a hospital. In fact, it was important to NOT take him to a hospital, because while the official USSR side kinda turned a blind eye to the festival itself - that festival was kinda... too local-patriotic to be an accepted thing by the USSR at the time - a Finn in the audience might have drawn very unwelcome attention to himself. I mean. We had/have a reputation for being honest idiots with lots of goods and money. Add that to the 70's-80's KGB and you know.

We had a friend come over with his family one time for a holiday in Finland. The dad had been to Finland before, but the rest of the family was massively surprised we were not stopped anywhere for controls while within the country. That, apparently, was a thing in Estonia back then.

From: (Anonymous)

Thanks for sharing :) Most of these things are really familiar to me, especially those parts that are now offensive. We also had serious shortages of everyday items, contraband jeans, and pervasive bribery with such luxury items as coffee or cigarettes, especially for services we were entitled to anyway, like medical procedures etc. And the sprawling bureaucracy that made sense to nobody, and in practice was just a tool for people in positions of authority to fleece others "below" them. Good times.

LK