A young woman, Alexandra, travels to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a job as an English teacher in part to help her recover from the strange disappearance (and probably death) of her brother. She has barely arrived when she helps an elderly couple and the man with them. By accident she ends up with an urn of ashes in a bag when her luggage and theirs gets a bit mixed up. The ashes are inside an ornately and unusually carved box with the name Stoyan Lazarov engraved on it. She sets out to find them with the help of a young cab driver.
As they set out on this journey, they discover they are being followed but have no idea why. The cab driver whom she calls Bobby has keen observation skills which mystify her at first. They find part of the family and then unfortunate things occur to many they meet who are relatives or are connected to the man whose name is on the box. Without initially realizing it, they become involved in Bulgarian politics and political corruption as they try to unravel the story of the box and the man whose ashes it contains.
As I read this novel, which is both a lesson on the horrible Soviet occupation of Bulgaria and human determination and resilience, I became entranced with the history and culture of Bulgaria. If you want a glimpse into another culture and its history and the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape, I highly recommend this book. It is also a mystery story that keeps the reader going.
The author also wrote an earlier book called “The Historian” which is a novel about the history of Vlad the Impaler who is the real person behind the Dracula stories. I plan to read that novel as well.
Joan, the main character, is an astronomer obsessed with the stars since childhood. She is content with her life as a physics professor until she sees an ad seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space program. While her initial attempt fails, she applies again and succeeds.
In the summer of 1980, she begins her astronaut training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, along with other trainees, including some from the military and others chosen because of their specialist expertise. She is one of those. Some of the top military pilots are nice and some like to make jokes at the expense of women. The women know they won’t all be chosen to go to space. As a consequence one woman in particular becomes excessively competitive. Others help each other and hang out together.
The novel details the rigor of astronaut training both mentally and physically, how trainees behave under stress, and how all the stress makes some people nicer and others increasingly rude. In the midst of all this Joan continues to care for her beloved niece and discovers a love she never dreamed of in her wildest dreams.
This is my first Murakami novel; it will not be my last. It’s fascinating and profound. A 15 year old boy, Kafka, runs away from home. His mother and older sister disappeared when he was four. He does not remember them. His father, a famous sculptor, ignores him. Although they live in the same house, they rarely see each other. After running away, he finds a private (but open to the public) library in another city and is taken in by the two people in charge of the library.
Nakata, another main character who is an elderly man, is not very bright due to a bizarre event that sent him to the hospital in a coma when he was a child. He talks to cats and makes fish and eel fall from the sky like rain. He becomes friends with another principal character, a young truck driver, who helps him out because Nakata reminds him of his grandfather.
The novel portrays the lives of these characters through their actions, dreams, and fantastical events. The unreal becomes real and people learn about their true selves through these events.
Translated from French and written by a Senegalese author, this novel takes place during the time of colonialism and the slave trade. In Paris of 1806, a famous botanist, Michel Adanson, is dying. He never has finished the botanical work to which he dedicated his life, and as he lays dying, his last words are the woman’s name “Maram”.
His daughter finds an unpublished memoir hidden in a cabinet. It is the story of his younger life, what happened to him in Africa, all addressed to his daughter so she can understand his story and the meaning of his last word. It is a tale both strange and sad, filled with healers and magic and tragedy. Maram, a fabled revenant, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, was captured and sold into slavery but managed to escape. While working on his quest to find new plants, Adanson hears about this woman and becomes obsessed with finding her. His guide, Ndiak, the son of a chief, accompanies him everywhere and they become friends. This is a story of adventure, romance, and the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade.
Note: The author won the International Booker Prize for his other novel, “At Night All Blood Is Black”. Readers of this will miss several books I am reading because I am a judge for a literary context and cannot discuss what I am reading for the next several weeks.
This is a sort of travelogue, memoir, and recipe book. The author begins in Odessa and travels south from there to the port of Constanza in Romania as well as various other seaside towns in Bulgaria, then to Istanbul. After spending more time there she heads east to all the ports and some inland cities near Turkey’s Black Sea coast.
I hope to learn new information and become a little more enlightened when I read–especially when reading non-fiction. This book did not disappoint. Here are a few of the things I learned:
-Odessa is a very old and once a very international city. At one point it had the second largest Jewish population in Europe. Now only about 1/3 of the residents are Jewish. Many of the restaurants serve traditional Jewish food even if not Jewish. Once in the past, Mark Twain visited there and made it famous for its ice cream.
-In Constanza, Romania, she witnessed a huge Navy Day celebration with booming gun salutes. Once upon a time, this city was famous for its Casino which now is just a glorious ruin. Here a breakfast mainstay is polenta with a mushroom topping. The author apparently liked the food because this section contains more recipes.
-Varna is the main seaport city in Bulgaria. The author’s main quest here was to see the gold, yes, gold. Once upon a time, this city was a major Roman port. Now the Museum of Archeology houses a spectacular collection of ancient gold. “Breastplates, bracelets, burial gifts, regal-looking head pieces, figurines, and pendants–all gold–shone for attention. The silent Midas room was deafening, ringing out with finery, treasure and opulence. And the loudest, biggest treasure of all, was the smallest. Tiny pendant earrings, almost inconceivably old, dating back 6000 years….these earring are the oldest ‘worked gold’ in the world. They belonged to the first known culture to craft golden artifacts, and they lived here, on Bulgaria’s section of the Black Sea in what some archeologists consider the oldest prehistoric town. But it was not gold that made this area wealthy; it was salt which was mined nearby. The world salary comes from the Latin word ‘salarium’–a Roman soldier’s stipend to buy salt.
-She goes to Istanbul and then on to Turkey’s Black Sea towns, Amasra, several a bit inland, Sinop, Trabzon, and Rize. Sinop has a particularly good harbor. There is a saying that the Black Sea has three safe harbors, July, August, and Sinop. This is in an area often targeted by Cossacks who crossed the Black Sea to raid these more prosperous areas. The town also houses an infamous prison where Russian convicts taught Turkish cellmates how to make model ships for which the town is now famous.-More than 3/4 of the world’s hazelnuts are grown in this area of Turkey. However, that did surprise me as much as the tea, yes, tea. When I think of Turkey, I think of that thick, strong Turkish coffee. However, Turkey is the fifth largest grower and exporter of tea in the world. The tea grows in the fog and mist on steep slopes that end at the sea. Several photos in the book illustrate the lush green mountains covered in tea bushes.
-When I think of Hagia Sophia, I think of the spectacular building in Istanbul, the one that has withstood invasions and earthquakes. But there is another one. On the western edges of the city of Trabzon, there is a smaller, more tranquil Hagia Sophia, one of the Black Sea area’s most spectacular monuments. It was built as a church in the 13th century, converted to a mosque, then to a cholera hospital, then a museum and finally back to a mosque in 2013. The ceiling and walls are covered with frescoes that for a long time no one knew existed until they were restored.
In addition to all the tales of her adventures and the ordinary people she meets, the book is filled with recipes that are specialties of the areas she visited. I’ve taken some ideas from several to experiment with new dishes like combining Swiss chard and sultanas (golden raisins) with chopped onions and garlic sautéed in olive oil and served over Basmati rice.
I enjoyed the previous book by Caroline Eden so much I searched for this one. I doubt I will ever make it to Samarkand or Tashkent, places sort of on my bucket list, so what I do is read everything I find about these fabled cities on the Silk Road. The sub-title of this one is “Recipes and Stories From Central Asia and The Caucasus”. It starts with Samarkand and the story of Tamerlane, the legendary hero who conquered a lot of this area and a large portion of surrounding areas in 1370. He was a military genius who loved chess and made up his own chess game with twice the number of pieces.
What foods show up in both the stories and recipes? Beets, fruit–dried and fresh for which the area is famous, tomatoes, cucumber, pomegranates, cabbage, lentils, rice, lamb and mutton, and all sorts of kebabs and flatbreads. I learned there is a huge beach on Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. It is one of the world’s largest alpine lakes and in summer people from Russia and all over Central Asia flock to its shores. People who own guest houses there make all their money for the entire year in the brief summer between mid-July and mid-August.
In the remote mountains of Azerbaijan lies the small town of Gyrmyzy Gasaba above the Qudiyaleay River, a town where all the people are Jewish. Even though Azerbaijan is a predominantly Shia Muslim country, the people in this town have peacefully lived here for hundreds of years. This town is considered the last surviving pre-Holocaust Jewish town untouched by WWII.
If you are a lover of apples, then consider this country, Kazakhstan, the place where apples originated. All apples in the world today come from the original apples here. The name of the largest city, Almaty, whose older name was Alma-Ata means fatherland of apples. In Ile-Altalan National Park on the northern slopes of the Tien Shan mountain chain thousands of acres of wild apples flourish.
Even though this book was published less than ten years ago in 2016, a lot of people must have been interested in reading the stories and recipes because the copy the library found for me is not in the best condition. Before I return it, I will copy some of the recipes to try.
The last two books of hers that I read were set in the more recent times when Salvador Allende and later Pinochet were presidents of Chile. This one dates back to the 1800s and the Chilean Civil War. In 1866 a nun of Irish descent living in San Francisco has a passionate affair with a Chilean aristocrat and becomes pregnant. He abandons her; their daughter becomes the woman in the title of this novel. She is raised by a loving step father, an intellectual teacher from whom she learns to be independent and defy societal norms. At a young age she becomes the writer of short pulp fiction novels using a fake male name. The income from these helps her family live a reasonably good life.
Bored with writing these lucrative little books, she convinces a San Francisco newspaper to hire her as a journalist where she works along with a more seasoned journalist, Eric Whelan. Eventually, the two are sent to Chile to cover the civil war and violence occurring there. She sees this as not only an opportunity to satisfy her adventurous spirit but also an opportunity to find her biological father. She encounters dangers, almost gets killed, and sets off to find herself in the far southern reaches of the Chilean wilderness, learning from the indigenous people who live there how to survive in remote mountains.
Note: One of the places she goes was nearly impossible for non indigenous people to find during the 1800s and many never made it. Today, it is a popular area for hiking, camping, and exploring nature.
What a delightful, entertaining book! The title refers to her basement kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she lives when she is not wandering the globe. Each chapter highlights a certain place in her travels, in this case Ukraine, various countries in Central Asia, e.g. Uzbekistan, Russia, and the city of Istanbul, which she says is one of her favorite cities to visit especially in winter when tourists are gone. In one chapter, “Russian Railway Pies”, she and her husband ride the train from Moscow to the eastern shore of Russia–the Trans Siberian Railway journey. They did this in winter when the temperature in some places they stopped were as low as 50 below zero.
Each chapter contains her experiences in an individual country or city. She describes the places in detail, the people she meets, the food she eats. She also relates her feelings regarding these places, many of which she had previously visited, how they have changed over the years for better or worse–worse in the case of Russia, what they mean to her. In each chapter she always goes back to her kitchen, her dog, hiking the Scottish highlands, and her cooking, usually a recipe where she is trying to re-create a food she ate in one of these places she loves.
This is her most recent book, published in 2024. She also has a series of books about particular places where the entire book is dedicated to that particular place. Mostly, she has travelled in Central Asia, Russian, the Balkans, Turkey. I enjoyed this book so much, I plan to read another one about her other adventures. She is not just on these adventures for fun but also as a career so she knows many journalists, diplomats, officials in these places.
Although the copyright says 2011, this book in so many ways continues to describe the different groups of people and cultures that live in Southern California. Even though I know that to which the title refers, I am not sure it really does the book justice. This is the story of a wealthy, young family living in one of the most expensive suburbs in Orange County. The husband, Scott, who is half Mexican, made it as a tech savvy guy. His wife, a transplant from Maine, does not work but stays home with two young boys who go to a fancy private school where she volunteers. They have a baby girl. Taking care of all this is apparently too much for her so they have a live-in maid, Araceli, who has her own little bedroom separate from the big house. Until recently, they had two other people working for them, one young woman who helped with the children and a gardener. Due to money issues, when the book begins, only Araceli is left working for them.
Financial pressures lead to the couple fighting. One morning Araceli awakens to an almost empty house; only the two boys remain. Everyone else has disappeared. She cannot reach the parents; no one is answering the phone. This continues for two days until they are about to run out of food. She has never had to interact with the children much before and is a bit at loss as to what to do. Neither she nor they have a clue as to where the parents are each of whom think the other one is at home. Araceli finds an old photo of Scott’s dad, Señor Torres, with an old address written on the back. She decides to have the boys pack some clothes in their backpacks and they head off to find their grandfather.
Their misadventures and the mistaken accusations that follow show just how crazy things can get when people totally misunderstand what has occurred, people cannot think correctly due to their prejudices, and the wrong people get involved. Since I live in Southern California and have been to some of the places described or places similar, this book rang so true for me and made me laugh out loud and keep on reading.
writingontherim 