I have been doing so much travelling this last few weeks that my blogging has fallen by the wayside. I have missed it! The bookblogging community is so well-populated with nice people, interesting perspectives and authentic passion that it gives me all the online socialising I need and I steer pretty well clear of most other social media. (Not that I would place blogging in the same category as those other types of AI-powered platforms.) I am just back from a bucket-list trip to Turkey and now have a few weeks of going hardly anywhere and quite a lot of work to help pay for all the travel! So, this year I did not go to the Hay Festival (although listening to various shows on the radio that were broadcast from there I confess to feeling a deep sense of FOMO) and I will not be going to Dublin for Bloomsday in a couple of weeks time. Next year.
There has been quite a literary twist to all my travel. I have researched the best bookshops and always try to buy a locally-themed book.
I had a marvellous week in Berlin, which was my husband’s ‘big birthday’ treat! There is no end of interesting things to see and do there and my particular highlights were the Jewish Museum (an extraordinary building designed by Daniel Libeskind), the Neues Museum, with its outstanding collection of Egyptian and ancient artefacts, and, slightly less highbrow, the KaDeWe department store! We also visited the Brecht-Weigel museum which was the modest but fascinating home of Bertolt Brecht and his long-time partner Helene Weigel. We sought out a bookshop of course and found the marvellous Dussmann on Friedrichstrasse, a few minutes’ walk from the Brandenburger Tor. I bought myself a translated version of the German post-war classic Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. Look out for my review of that soon (assuming I start getting my blogging act together!).
In March we paid a visit to an old family friend in Ross-on-Wye. It’s very close to Hay-on-Wye of course, but not somewhere I had previously visited. It’s a lovely town, but the highlight was going to Tintern and seeing the wonderful, Tintern Abbey, subject of one of Wordsworth’s best-loved poems.
And finally, earlier this month, I went on a holiday to Turkey, fulfilling a lifelong ambition. It’s not so very far away or even very expensive to visit so I’m not sure how I have not been there before. I joined a tour organised by Intrepid Travel (who I cannot recommend highly enough) which took us to some of the most famous sights in the country. Ephesus was a highlight – I have such vivid memories of being a child and seeing pictures of the facade of the Celsus Library and dreaming of far-off travel! Istanbul is a fantastic city, so vibrant, and with a beautiful church or mosque around every corner. And the Bosphorus of course and the obligatory boat trip – which does live up to the hype. The city is blessed with many bookshops and I loved Minoa Pera – I had to buy myself Istanbul by Orhan Palmuk. And Cappadocia and the Goreme national park with its extraordinary rock formations.
It seems appropriate that the last two pictures above are of the Celsus Library at Ephesus and the stairs in the Minoa Pera bookshop in Istanbul!
I have had quite the most incredible few weeks and feel myself very fortunate indeed. Now, back to blogging. And some healthy eating and exercise. And some work I suppose….
The Booker prize winner(s) were announced last week and for the first time in years, and against the explicit rules of the contest, the judges awarded the prize jointly to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. I have not read either book yet, though I am currently listening to The Testaments on the excellent BBC Sounds and enjoying it enormously, though it is extremely dark. There has been so much publicity around Atwood and The Testaments that I was wondering how on earth the Booker prize judges were going to be able to not award it to her! So, I think the judges probably made the right decision. By now, I would probably have worked my way through at least two thirds of the shortlist (I’ve never managed all six in the period between shortlist and winner), but, for obvious reasons, I have not read that much so far this year.
It is somewhat and sadly ironic that I was reading Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World at the time of my mother’s death, a novel about a woman, Leila, an Istanbul prostitute known as Tequila Leila, who is brutally murdered in a back alley by street thugs. Rather than death being an instant occurrence, however, the author explores the idea of it as a transition from the world of the living to the ‘other’ (with a duration, for Leila, of ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds) during which time her whole life flashes before her. Leila’s life story is told through a series of recollections about her five closest friends, how and when she met them and what impact they have had on her life. We learn that Leila came from a relatively affluent family. Her father was anxious for heirs, but when his wife proved incapable of having any he took a second wife, Binnaz, a much younger woman from a lowly family, who gave birth to Leila. Binnaz was forced to give up the child to the first wife to bring up as if she were her own, whilst Binnaz, who never recovered mentally from the trauma of that event, was thereafter known to Leila as ‘Auntie’.
The Bastard of Istanbul is a curious book, which my fellow book club members found disappointing. At the heart of the novel is the Kazanci family, living in Istanbul. The household is exclusively female and comprises Asya, (the eponymous ‘Bastard’) her three aunts and her mother (whom she also calls ‘Auntie’), her grandmother and ‘Petite-Ma’ who I think is her great-grandmother (more of that later, it’s part of the problem with the book). There is an uncle, who moved to America as a young man and has never returned. All the men in the family are afflicted by early death. Mustafa, the prodigal son, is in his 30s.
Julia's books 