March (fifth week) 2017 Reads

So March had almost five weeks this year? No wonder I got so tired of it. It's Madness, I tell you!

Speaking of madness I'm watching NCAAW games so not reading as much as usual...
 ...but...
          ...somewhere in the madness...
               ...I read two very fine novels, a good short story collection...
                     ...and... 
                           ...found time to shuffle up and pull a card for the Deal Me In story challenge...

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

The story: It's me! by Ekaterina Togonidze (in Best European fiction 2015) Translated from the Georgian by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field.
Iamze/Ia/Ianna/Yanna has her appearance changed through major and minor cosmetic surgeries--but does she still have a soul?


The card(s): The Queen of Spades: These are from a page of Queens of Spades on Playing Arts. Viewers were asked to vote for their favorite. The vote has ended but there are lots of neat card designs to view.  I had a difficult time choosing one for this story. The Pichardo one shows a dramatic transformation and the Mancini suggests the loss of soul. Googling for this card was a neat exercise during NCAA Women's Tournament game time outs--when I was supposed to be walking laps around the house. 

Fabio Mancini

Marco Pichardo

from the Library...

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two brown girls grow up in Northwest London dreaming about the dance. One has talent, the other does not. But it takes more than talent--luck also plays a part and these girls aren't lucky. As they grow their paths split and their friendship dwindles. One pursues a short mediocre stage career and single motherhood. The other, who is the narrator of the story, becomes personal assistant to a highly successful pop star. But there is much more here than the fluctuating friendship: racism, patronizing do-gooders, unintended consequences of charity, rich vs poor, parenting styles, exploitation, immigration--all packed into a smoothly flowing package.



from my "owned-but-unread" shelf... 



The Ambassador by Bragi Ólafsson, Lytton Smith (Translator)
An Icelandic poet makes a trip to Lithuania to attend a poetry festival. Our poet tends to overthink everything--the buying of an overcoat, a stain on a carpet, the return of a videotape, other small things. But when it comes to the big things like plagiarism he seems not to have thought at all. In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) his ineptness his adventures are fun to follow. At times  Inspector Clouseau in a new role as petty thief comes to mind.




Project Gutenberg find... 

Lotta Schmidt and other stories by Anthony Trollope; fourth ed., Chapman and Hall, 1876 (first ed was 1867)

I enjoy Trollope's novels of English life and was happy to find this story collection. In these stories Trollope turns his wry eye to the international scene, they are a delight to read.

Contents: Lotta Schmidt in which a Viennese girl chooses between two suitors; in The Adventures Of Fred Pickering a young aspiring writer must choose between starvation and pride; The Two Generals is a story of brothers on opposite sides during the American Civil War; the next story is a humorous one where an Englishman has a traveler's worst night ever in an Irish village "hotel" but he meets and becomes friends with Father Giles Of Ballymoy; Malachi’s Cove is a place near Tintagel in Cromwell where an old man and his granddaughter gather seaweed until a neighbor intrudes on their territory; The Widow’s Mite is about charity and what we are willing to try to give up for a cause; The Last Austrian Who Left Venice is the story of a Venetian woman who falls in love with an enemy Austrian soldier; the question asked in Miss Ophelia Gledd is "Can an American woman be considered a "lady" in London society?; and in the final story, The Journey To Panama, there is a shipboard friendship between a man planing on crossing the Isthmus of Panama (no canal in those days) and on to Vancouver and a woman who is to meet her future husband after crossing the Isthmus.