Cybertron Flower

As usual: ratings are out of a max of 5 (but the least possible one is 0, not 1), R stands for Russian, G for German, E for English. Recommendations in purple, this year with a few words about each of them.

Books:

( table with 60 books )

Absolute recommendations of this year:

"С неба упали три яблока" by Narine Abgaryan
-- this was a recommendation by fikuz. It such a warm book ... I don't have other words for it. It's sad and hard and terrible in parts but still warm and full of hope and just wonderful. Right now only available in Russian but in the process of being translated into English - I will so remind you of it.

"The Power" by Naomi Alderman (recommended to me by luna_puella), "Die Leichtigkeit / La légèreté" by Catherine Meurisse and "Das große Heft / The Notebook / Le grand cahier"" by Ágota Kristóf I have already recommended here.

"Vita Nostra" by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko
-- I haven't had a book pull me in that badly for a while. Just wow. I've read comparison to Harry Potter, but given all my love for HP (which was the series that made me start reading English in my time) - this one is darker and freakishly inventive (language, it's all about language and metaphors and metamorphosis). Another one to be translated soon - I'll remind you when it comes out, emphatically.

"Aller Tage Abend /The End of Days" by Jenny Erpenbeck's
-- where "Heimsuchung/Visitation" was about a place and it's place in history this is about a person and her place in history. A life and five deaths and German/East-German/Jewish history through 80 years, in all its ugliness. Not a word too much, not a thought wasted, and several absolute perfect sentences or paragraphs.

"Karte und Gebiet / The Map and the Territory" by Michel Houellebecq - a deep rumination on art and on the very purpose of existence, a slow book that required to be read slowly. In my goodreads review, in German, I called it a "ein verletzliches Buch, im Gegenteil zu Houellebecqs vielen anderen verletzenden" - a vulnerable book, as opposed to Houllebecqs other books, that aim to offend and transgress (but are not less good). It does not quiet mean the same in English, without the play of words that German allows here, but oh well, I don't know how to express it better.
A lot of the reviews concentrate on the fact that Houllebecq kills himself in the books rather horrifically. But it's not at the heart of the book; at the heart of the book is art and Houellebecq has shown already in "Rester vivant" that he has a lot of important things to say about art.

"Katharsis" by Luz
-- a sibling to Catherine Meurisse's book: another survivor of the Charlie Hebdo massacre talking about the life afterwards. Very differently but not less a punch to the guts. And of course another one that is not translated into English - if you know either German or French, read it. It will not let you go.
(I don't remember whether this one was a recommendation by soeinnarr or whether we "merely" talked about it *sighs*)

"Schuld / Guilt" by Ferdinand von Schirach
-- I do not often enjoy bestsellers, but some books have a reason to become some. Von Schirach's stories are lurid, but also full of a dark humor and of a certain kind of compassion. And moral dilemmas, of course moral dilemmas. Each story is more of a short sketch, leaving the reader to fill in the details, forcing to keep thinking about it.

"Amatka"" by Karin Tidbeck
-- I had great expectations for Tidbeck's novel after I finally managed to get hold of a paper copy of her short story collection, "Jagannath", last year and having loved it (the short story collection is being re-issued by a much bugger publishing house, by the way, - get it, it's amazing!). And Amatka lives up to the expectation. The language and the voice of the narrator first seems bland until you understand that the language that the story is told in is an intrinsic component of the story being told. And now that I think about it, it's the second of my recommendation this year that is, at its core, about the power of language.


Some statistics:
( break down of the reading list by language, internationality, new to me authors, author gender )

Lists from previous years are here: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.

I don't think I have ever, in my whole life, have been upset with the past-me. It's not like I make good decisions only but I also deeply believe that whatever decision I made was the right in the given moment - the fact that I often hate making decisions and spend hours agonizing over even the smallest ones sometimes helps. Or maybe just not making some necessary ones because it's too hard to tell whether I am going down the wrong path or not - which is then again not a good thing, but this is not about this.

I'm pretty thankful to the past-me who thought that a water-resistant phone sounded good, cleverly deducing that future-me may drop it somewhere. Yeah, I did. No, back pockets are really not a good place for phones. They fall out there. Yet my Moto is still alive and well.

There is also the moment in the evening when I force myself away from the living room and the computer, into the bedroom and towards a book and away from the monitors. I'm not always good at this and the general feeling is "but I still had nothing of the evening!", but it's mostly worth it. (Sometimes it helps that the bedroom, being small, is easier to get warm than the living room.)

There is also the fact that right now I mostly manage to reduce the time from my alarm clock sounding to getting out of the door to 50 minutes (I know this is a lot for some, but it's little for me) and part of it is daily due to last-evening-me actually pre-cutting all my snack veggies and putting them away in a box in the fridge.

Yesterday, I spent the evening making fist a lentil and sweet potato dal with rice tat I packed away for the lunches during the week and then mini-frittatas (in a newly bough muffin tin) and freezing them - for some reason, I crave warm breakfast at work. Last month, a while before leaving for the holidays, I made a giant bunch of syrniki, the last of which I ate on Friday. By the way, if someone has recipes for breakfast foods that can be warmed up in the microwave (we don't have a toaster so things like bagels or toast are out and so are scones if I want them warm; I do generally not like oatmeal although maybe I should try again), they are more then welcome. I'm drawing a blank - I could imagine making rice pudding or warming up normal pancakes instead of syrniki, but that's almost it.

I employ the same approach committing to social things of which I know that I will enjoy them but that my future-me will flinch away from them if she had to make the decision right before (right now I am fretting over D. visiting later today and staying over and hating my past-me for committing, but I know this will pass). I now need to apply this to some of my work/science/career (update CV, make some things for future projects, address some thing I hate and keep delaying because yes, I can) - I think this will be my approach for the next months. Do more things that make future-me's life easier (it helps that my new computer is to arrive on Monday and I will have to spend time setting everything up; and I do mean everything this time, not half-done jobs and "I will finish this later", it never happens).