Reading Wednesday

[yuuago]

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.

Comments

[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.

[(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