Summer reading

A slow summer allows for more reading! I actually started similar posts before but I never got round to publishing them - usually I was waiting to finish one more book to put on the list and by the time I finished, I had already started another one. Also, I don't have any logic or system to selecting my books but it's usually just what I have on top of my "unread" pile (currently surprisingly small).

My main criteria are that it should be 1) entertaining and 2) relatively light in physical terms so I can easily carry it around and read on the metro to work. This has unfortunately worked against some books, such as Murakami's 1Q84 trilogy which I bought last year but never got round to reading it because it is just too damn heavy! In hindsight it would have been better to buy each volume separately but that was just some saving on the wrong end.

Long story short, here are the books I've read over the last few months:

• Elena Ferrante - "My brilliant friend"

Quite liked it but I absolutely cannot agree with the general  hype around her books. Yes it was a good read but I didn't like the characters very much and I kept on thinking "what is the point of this?". Maybe there will be a big revelation in book 2 or 3 but so far I didn't feel the need to continue reading. 

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "Love in the times of cholera"

I used to love Garcia Marquez and I even had a newspaper clipping of him pinned on the noticeboard above my desk - which I actually took down and threw out after finishing "Love in the times of cholera". It doesn't have any of this mystical realism that makes "One hundred years of solitude" so amazing and in most places it's just gross and not at all what I expected. What did it for me was when the old guy, Florentino Aziza, starts an affair with a 14 (!!!) year old girl and thinks that is totally ok. Whatever this contributed to the storyline I don't know but the last part of the book I was just hoping that he wouldn't get together with Fermina Daza because he was simply an a**hole and didn't deserve a happy end. Well, maybe this is again me not liking the character and this might not be a very founded criticism of the entire book (I agree that the writing can still be good even if the characters are not likeable) but I just didn't enjoy reading it anymore. 

• Ben Okri - "The famished road"

Didn't finish it. And this is one of the few books I didn't read until the end because I usually hope there's some redeeming turning point. It was just too confusing and abstract with the dream world being a little too crazy for my taste - but I can see why people like it and in general I could get into the "mood" of the book very easily. It just wasn't for me. 

• Erich Maria Remarque - "All quiet on the western front" ["Im Westen nichts Neues"]

Now, this is a classic about which I can wholeheartedly say it deserves its place in the hall of fame of books in history. Personally I'm a pacifist so I thought this should be a compulsory read but for some reason I never got round to it, not even in high school. So I'm a bit late but I nevertheless really liked it and I think it brings across the horrors of WWI perfectly through the words of the young soldier who goes straight from the classroom to the Western front. Just thinking about it gives me shivers again: imagine nowadays a 17-year old young person being recruited by his/her teacher basically to go to certain death - and a not a nice death, that's for sure. In places it was very difficult for me to continue reading simply because of the awful scenes the author describes. But then again, I couldn't put it down because you want to know how things play out, even though (spoiler alert!) you already know that the narrator will die.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - "Half of a yellow sun"

I picked this book up in a charity shop and when I went to pay the shop assistant already told me "I cried so much when reading this but it is so good!". This pretty much summarizes also my reading experience! I LOVED this book and it one of those stories that captures you from beginning to end plus you have the added benefit of learning about a chapter in West African history that I personally only had a very hazy notion of. Set in the Biafran war, the author does an amazing job of mixing the personal storylines with the political and historical facts and putting things into perspective. After reading this book you will look differently at those pictures of starving children and I think it really helps to put it into the right context. I'm not an expert on Nigerian politics but I'm pretty sure some of the conflicts today are also a result of this. Finally, another reason to read this book (if you need any more) is that there are not many young, female, well-known contemporary African writers so it is even more important to experience this new angle. 

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - "Americanah"

I got this book straight after finishing "Half of a yellow sun" because I didn't want the magic to stop! I was a bit surprised that "Americanah" is completely different, though. Different but not less good, actually. 

• No-Violet Bulawayo - "We need new names"

I had been planning on reading this book since I visited Zimbabwe a few years ago and only now got round to it. In spite of what I just said, there are some other young, female, contemporary African writers and Bulawayo is one of them (even though she is much less known than Adichie). Even though the basic storyline is comparable to "Americanah" (a girl leaves Africa for the US), it is much darker in a way and displays strikingly the poverty and difficulties that people are trying to leave behind and start a new life in the US. That is, of course, not much easier as the narrator faces a life far away from most of her family as an illegal immigrant in the US. I liked it but compared to "Americanah" it was just a bit too rough for my taste.

• Jonas Gardell - "Torkar aldrig tarar utan handskar" (Trilogy)

Loved this trilogy. It's so well written and has such a personal touch to it that I read each book in less than three days. I didn't know Gardell and his previous work  but he's famous in Sweden and he has been a gay rights activist for a long time, so the subject of the books - the start of the HIV/AIDS "epidemic" in Sweden in the 1980s - is well informed, I suppose. I liked it also because we mostly know about how HIV/AIDS became known in the US and the hysteria that it caused there. Personally I still remember all the information campaigns about safe sex at school in the early 90s, but  in the small town where I'm from it seemed very far away and somehow unreal. Reading the story of a young gay couple, Rasmus and Benjamin, in Sweden in the 1980s and into the 1990s and how one of them dies from HIV/AIDS brings it really, really close to home. The family situations are described  well so you can empathise with the protagonists and Gardell uses headlines from newspapers of the time to show how negative and hateful the public image of gay men was. HIV/AIDS which was described as the "gay plague" seemed to fit right into the awful public rethoric - and all that in a country like Sweden, which we often hail as so tolerant, open-minded, and advanced. The only tiny little criticism that I would like to make of Gardell's books is that he only and exclusively portrays HIV/AIDS as a problem of the male gay community, even though it must have affected women, too. Especially women that were brought in connection with prostitution when it turned out they were HIV positive, which must have caused an equally strong stigma for them. Also, I would have appreciated a connection to the views on HIV/AIDS today because many prejudices and stereotypes still exist - even though many issues are now played out on a different stage, far away on other continents. But I certainly don't want to discount the struggle for the rights of gay men and the specific issues of that community, since this was clearly to be chosen at the centre of the novels. Many more interesting novels could be written on this topic!

Now I'm looking for new books to read this autumn, any ideas are welcome!