I'm home with a bad cold, and the only good thing about it is that I've been able to read The Battler by Mikey Walsh. Mikey grows up in a gypsy camp in 1980s England. His family are famous boxers and even before he is born, his father has big plans for his boxing career. When it turns out that Mikey has no talent for fighting, his father's anger is aroused and Mikey suffers brutal and regular abuse throughout his childhood.
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The books that have moved me the most are often those that tell stories about people in another country, in another time. They can be real destinies, but they can also be fictional stories in a realistic setting. Of course, there are never a single Truth and a story can be told in many different ways, but if you hear many people's stories, the story becomes a little more complete over time.
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Last night we rewatched one of our favourite films: Memoirs of a geisha. This 2005 American film follows a poor Japanese girl from the day she is sold as a slave to a geisha house to her life as a prominent geisha. If you missed it, watch it!
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When we went to the Fish Market restaurant in Reykjavik, we had the best food we have ever had. Of course, we couldn't resist buying the restaurant's cookbook! The recipes are by Icelandic celebrity chef Hrefna Rósa Sætran.
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Markus Lutteman's 'El Choco' is not a literary experience. But it is a fascinating journey into a world that is best experienced from a distance. After a failed drug smuggling operation, Jonas Andersson ends up in the notorious San Pedro prison in Bolivia. There are no locks on the cells and no guards. The violent and armed prisoners rule the roost.
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Last read: Annika Östberg's account of her 28 years in an American prison and her journey to and from there. Initially, we meet a 13-year-old who is unhappy in her new home country, runs away from home, meets the wrong boys and gets hooked on drugs. Annika is sentenced to "25 years to life" for accessory to murder.
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Himmelsdalen, by Marie Hermansson, is defined as a suspense novel. And indeed, this is a page-turner! Swedish Daniel receives a letter from his twin brother Max, who is in a "rehabilitation clinic" in the Alps. Daniel travels to visit his brother at the exclusive clinic, but soon discovers that nothing is as it first seemed.
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I have read the book "Almost Home" by Jean Kwok. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to the United States, they think they will be better off. Instead, they end up in an unimaginable slum in Brooklyn: an apartment with no heat, but with cockroaches and mice, and work around the clock.
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During my flu season I have been reading Tina Thunander's "Travelling in Sharialand. A report on women's lives in Saudi Arabia". Tina is quite lost when she lands in the kingdom, but is soon given a lesson in the state of affairs by the Ministry of Information's envoy.
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When I read Sofi Oksanen's Purge, I found her storytelling to be magical. Her debut novel Stalin's Cows did not disappoint either. The language here is perhaps even more straightforward, and a little less polished, as it rushes across the pages.
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