I find that I never stick to my goals and resolutions unless I tell someone about them. On that note, I am hereby publicly announcing what this year's resolution is.

My New Year's Resolution for 2010 is to read books from 26 countries and blog about it. I want to keep this blog for random stuff so I have created a brand new blog just for this goal. So if you like books, wanna support me, or just secretly follow and hope I fail, come and visit my ItsRoots Blog.

I realized going through the list of books I have read this year that there simply haven't been any that "blew-me-away". Oh well, there is still few weeks left so one can hope for a little gemstone popping up somewhere. Last year was a bit different and I thought I should post a quick summary of worthwhile reads from 2008. In case you need a nice book to curl up with during Christmas.

First off: Silk by Alessandro Baricco was a beautifully written tale of a French silk merchant that develops a forbidden fascination for a Japanese woman. The writing is the kind that makes you beg for more as it is very simplistic yet so perfect. The story was heart-breaking love story which made me cry. This one was my absolute favorite last year!

Another gemstone was A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. The sad story of four people struggling to survive in harsh time in India. If you like depressing and sad books about misery upon misery (like me) this might be something for you.

Jhumpa Lahiri did her magic yet again with Unaccustomed Earth. Melancholic short stories. Reading them is like eating a creamy caramel. You keep wanting it to last forever, yet you cannot stop yourself from reading onward. When near the end you start reading slower and slower because you don't want it to end. When you close the book you let out a sigh and hope she is hard at work at her next book.

A classic: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Clever story about a problem that is still relevant in todays society. Not necessarily the greatest book but one that keeps you nodding your head and uhumming to yourself "yeah I could see this happen if a certain political side got in power for too long".

Another excellent book was The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. Extremely well written account of what effect poverty, loneliness, and racial tension can have on a person's life.

Oh and if you are a girl/women and want to get a serious literary crush (think Anne of Green Gable's Gilbert) you might give Twilight by Stephenie Meyer a try. On contrary to the other books above this is real TRASH but there is something very likable about them. Be warned though that if you post those books as a recommendation at the bottom of a "serious" book recommendation blog post you will probably not be taken very seriously... :) .

Being a hopeless Facebook addict practically living my life in my status messages, having a serious obsession about books, and being what feels like the only girl on earth that found Pride and Prejudice utterly boring this simply couldn't go unnoted. Found through Andedammen.

Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook news feed.

Finally a version that I almost got through without dying of boredom :)

I have been working my way through shelf sitters (unread books I have gathered in various ways) during the last year. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of good stuff there but there were few gemstones in between. Okey, to be honest, some of those gemstones I went out and bought *blush*. Anyway, I thought I should point out few of my favorites in case somebody is looking for a good summer read.



If you can only pick one book to read this summer I recommend Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Chances are that reading it will make you rush to the bookstore and buy her novel The Namesake which is another wonderful book. Interpreter of Maladies is a short story collection, for which she won the Pulitzer prize, and as her novel it is mostly about first and second generation Indian immigrants in the States struggling to come to grasps with cultural clashes. The stories manage to strip reality down to its basic form and this nakedness makes them extremely powerful. I remember reading Interpreter of Maladies increasingly slowly because I wanted it to last forever. Two of her short stories can be found online: Hell-Heaven and Once In A Lifetime.

A Norwegian trilogy called Tora by Herbjørg Wassmo has been haunting me ever since I read it.. Unfortunately, only the first book in that series is translated to English: The house with the blind glass window. Tora is a young girl, living in a small island community up in North of Norway. Her life is
really harsh. Partially because her mother had her during the war with a German soldier (looked down upon back in the days), and because her stepfather sexually abuses her. The three books portray her as she struggles through her harsh childhood and as she develops into a young woman. The books are very well written in a beautiful, poetic language and manage to evoke strong emotions. I plan to write a bit more about those books but for the time being I will leave it at highly recommending them.



White Oleander by Janet Fitch was simply beautiful. The story is about a girl with a disturbed mother who kills her lover and is put in jail. The girl ends up going between various foster homes and has to fight for her existence and against her mother's selfish power over her. The story was good but the best part was the writing. The book was packed with analogies which are my favorite eye candy.








I loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude when I read it long time ago and I almost loved Love in the Time of Cholera as much. His writing is wonderfully colorful and you feel like you are sitting in a field with thousand of colorful butterflies flying before your eyes. Every mundane detail becomes interesting in his hands.



Out of Africa by Karen Blixen was a what I call an interesting read. Well written recounts of Karen Blixen's own life in Africa on her coffee plantation. The book showed me a face of Africa which I haven't seen before and which I liked.



If you want to sample Icelandic literature, I recommend Angels of the Universe by Einar Már Guðmundsson. Story about mentally ill man (unofficially the author is writing about his brother). The story is an elegant mix of sadness and humor. Be warned though, the story is heartbreaking and no matter how many times I read it, it always makes me cry.



You are just looking for a light, girly summer read? Oh well, I must admit that I really couldn't help liking both Angles by Marian Keyes and Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding. Sassy books!



I usually make very informal comments on all the books I read on my book page. Expect poor grammar and spelling and even half finished sentences but there might be some useful stay clear warnings in there of books that were just absolute shit:-).

I often want to write reviews of the books I read, but I never find the time to sit down and actually write anything. I read Life of Pi by Yann Patel almost two months ago and while I didn't really like the story nor the writing a whole lot, there was something about the book as a whole and especially the ending that got me thinking (and two months later I am still thinking). It managed to really challenge some of my basic beliefs about religion. Because of this I decided to take the time and write a review about the book.



The first part just contains general info and thoughts about the book. The second part, however, contains spoilers and my interpretation of the ending. This should only be read by people that have already read the book (or that have no plans of reading it). The section that contains spoilers is clearly marked as such.



If anyone has read Life of Pi, by all means let me know what you thought about the book and what your interpretations were in the comment section.



My review of Life of Pi by Yann Patel

Life of Pi by Yann Martel is about a Indian boy who grows up in a family that owns a zoo. When Pi is 16 years old, his family decides to sell the zoo and move to Canada. While transporting some of the animals with them to sell, the big freighter that they are on is shipwrecked. Pi finds himself on a lifeboat accompanied by an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi gets to spend 227 days on the boat with Richard Parker, and a big part of the book is about his attempts to survive together with a huge tiger at sea.

The first part of the book describes Pi's years growing up as the son of a zoo owner and there are many descriptions about animal behavior in this part. I got the feeling I was watching an "Animal Planet" documentary, something which almost made me give up on the book. The most interesting thing in the first part of the book was its humorous take on Pi's adventures with religion. Pi wasn't able to choose just one religion to follow, so he got involved with three different ones, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.



In part two of the book, we finally get to the part where Pi is on the boat together with Richard Parker. Unfortunately, that part doesn't manage to stay particularly exciting either. The story is rather long winded and dry. It wasn't until the end when I got blown away with a brilliant ending. It managed to partially save the weaker parts of the story by hooking the ending into the entire story and finally some of the long winded passages had a purpose..



To sum up, the story was weak and didn't really manage to engage me. It had some cute moments, such as when Pi meets all the three religious people that believed Pi was a follower of their religion at the same time. The big picture was however quite smart and in the hands of an talented author it could have been a masterpiece. I can still recommend it, for its ending alone. The book for example would make an excellent bookclub discussion.



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The fact that Pi survives the 227 days together with Richard Parker the tiger, is no surprise. That is unfortunately obvious from the beginning of the book. When Pi finally reaches land, the tiger runs away, and he is saved by local people. A committee from the shipping company is sent to interrogate Pi, and they refuse to believe Pi's story. Pi gives them another, more brutal story which replaces the animals on the boat with his family and some people from the ship. The reader is left wondering which story is true and whether the entire animal lifeboat story was just made up in Pi's delusional mind.



I myself decided that it wasn't that important to choose which ending was the correct one. I felt that it was telling me more important things than that. That we sometimes need to spice up things, give ourselves hope and meaning to stay alive during difficult times. So what if there was really no tiger on the boat? If imagining one keeps you going in gathering food and keeping you alive, what is the harm in that?



Towards the end of the book Pi had actually found an uninhabited island that he could have stayed on. It would have made more sense to stay there than heading out to open sea again without knowing if he would ever reach land. Pi "finds out" that the island is actually man-eating island and decides to leave. To make decisions that really make no sense we need to convince ourselves most of all that we are making the right decision. Humans are quite good at that, and this is nothing other than an exaggerated case of which lies humans can tell themselves to convince them of something.



I felt the book was telling me that maybe believing in something that isn't always logical, like religion, isn't always that bad? We sometimes need to ease the pain of difficult situations or something to excuse our non logical behavior. We sometimes need a little bit of faith to keep on going. This really clashes with everything that I believe. To be more specific, that we shouldn't believe blindly. I can however admit that if your faith or belief doesn't hurt anyone else then maybe it is all right in certain situations...



There is a chance I was just bored of the book and was desperately looking for a deeper meaning in it. I however have to admit that I truly liked the ending and find it extremely sad that this clever little story was written in such a weak way.

I have an obsession about holding onto stuff. In short I hate throwing things away! I have gotten better with the years but occasionally I hold onto things that make no sense. Now it has finally paid off!



I guess it must have been in the year 2000 I got a CueCat while shopping for something at RadioShack. A CueCat is a cat shaped bar code scanner made by a company called DigitalConvergence Corporation, which no longer exists. Its intention was to have users scan bar codes of products and bar codes in catalogs and lead the users to a web page about the product. It also had some tracking which could give you targetet ads based on which products you had been scanning. Wikipedia has some more information about the CueCat.

The CueCat




I never actually tried the CueCat while the servers were up since I thought the idea was a bit silly. I however decided to hold onto it if it ever become worth anything (I guess I realized right away that this was going to be one of those failure projects). I doubt that it ever will be worth anything since there are numerous CueCats out in the wild but yesterday I did find a purpose for it.



I recently purchased an excellent book cataloging software called Book Collector. They have now added a scanner support but their own scanner is ridiculously expensive (approx 100 Euros). So I dug up some drivers, hooked my CueCat up, and believe it or not it was working.



The woman in me has to admit that it would be almost as fast to simply type in the ISBN numbers and search for the books that way. The mediumgeek in me, however, cannot help finding this extremely cool! The best of course is that now I have a proof that holding onto weird stuff can sometimes be worth it:-).



If you happen to have a CueCat lying around and want to catalog your books with Book Collector then download the drivers here. These work on Windows XP for me (and said to work on Windows 2000 and ME).

Yes, my blog is becoming one of those boring blogs that just posts pointers to other people's stuff. No originality here! I just couldn't resist this time after laughing my ass of over the longlisted passages for the Bad Sex in Fiction award.



It was pretty amazing to find out that there was such an award in the first place but reading the passage made it even better. If you want to have a good laugh (and be amazed over how weird some are) you can go to the respectable source Guardian and read them.



What I am wondering is if the authors think this is sexy? Especially, the passage by John Updike? Horrendous if you ask me!

I had to change my rules today. I stood at Klassekampens Julemesse (Christmas sale) with bunch of books in my arms that I had been wanting to buy for a long time but my read three before buying one new book rule would only have allowed me to buy one of them. So on the spot I rewrote my rules and made one exemption a year. Book bought at Klassekampens Julemesse do not count because it is such a unique chance to get cheap books. Pretty pathetic isn’t it?



I left the place with 7 books by authors such as Umerto Eco, Toni Morrison, Knut Hamsun, Karen Blixen, and Leo Tolstoy and paid whopping 100 NOK (or approx 12 Euros). Had I bought these books in a Norwegian bookstore I would have had to pay at least 12 euros for each one of them. I made an even better bargain last year but this was a pretty good day:-).

Now I just need to find time to read these books, and all the other books that are on my to be read list.



Talking about books, the author of one of my all time favorite book Wild Swans by Jung Chang actually appeared on Norwegian TV a week ago. I had only few hours earlier taken out my copy of the book from my bookshelf to show to my boyfriend because I was discussing Mao. It was like have euphoric moment to see her on TV (on Fredrik Skavlan's show). I felt like she had just popped out of my book. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is about herself, her mom, and her grandmothers life in China during the 20th century. It spans from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution and mentions the author's blind admiration of Chairman Mao, which she has now written a hateful book about.



I highly recommend Wild Swans to everyone interested in different cultures and history. The book about Mao I haven't read but I have placed it on my wish list in hope somebody will buy it for me at Christmas.



I really feel obsessed when it comes to book. I honestly think I spend more time thinking about all the books I want to read than I do actually spend reading. Scary! I will make a prediction here that doesn't really show my good side. I can promise you that even though I am dying to read all these books I am pretty sure that by next years Julemesse I wont have read all the books that I bought this time. Just like I haven't read all of last year’s books yet.



Do they have therapies for people like me?

Long time ago I started writing about books I was reading, but I never quite managed to follow up on it. This is the second attempt and we will see how long that lasts:-).



What really pushed me to start again was that I just read a book that reminded me of my all time favorite poem - De evige tre (Eternal three) by Tove Ditlevsen. This poem brilliantly sums up how we humans are. We will always want something else than what we have. While the poem just takes one example it can be applied to almost everything in life.



The book I read was Pan by Knut Hamsun which is a Norwegian Nobel prize winning author. The protagonist is Lieutenant Glahn which is staying in a hunting cabin in North of Norway. He ends up falling in love with an upper class Edvarda that first encourages him but then scorns him. He is truly loved by another girl Eva, but while he sees nothing wrong enjoying her admiration, he is still madly in love with Edvarda.



The storyline itself wasn't the most intriguing one but the characters, their flaws, and the descriptions of nature and how the main character experiences nature was what made me love the book.



The story is told from the point of Lieutenant Glahn. The story does a good job of portraying how utterly incompetent he is in social situations. By repeated incidents of social blunders he looses the interest of Edvarda but is incapable of really understanding why. His social incompetence also comes through in how he treats Eva, which thankfully is simple enough to not fully understand how rude he is towards her. The triangle between Lieutenant Glahn, Edvarda, and Eva was what reminded me of De evige tre except this time it was two girls and one guy.



While in reality I hated the characters they were so true to real life that I couldn't help but being fascinated by them. They showed so many similarities to people I have met throughout my life, and flaws that I recognize in myself. This was definitely not the typical fairy tale romance nor a dark depiction of humanity. This was real life!



An added bonus for me as a person that loves nature were all the descriptions of nature and more importantly the descriptions of how the main character experiences nature. Reading the book was like being out in nature. He felt exactly like I feel while walking through the forest myself.



And to try to rate the book on the scale I made long time ago...



Literacy Value: 5

Entertainment Value: 4

Educational Value: 2




All in all I am impressed by Hamsun and plan to read more of his works.



If anyone is interested, an online English translation can be found at the Gutenberg project. I read the Norwegian version, which was a bit on the heavier side for me since it is in rather old Norwegian.