Letters to a Young Gymnast - Nadia Comaneci

This book has a special meaning to me, because I was a gymnast myself and even if I never reached high levels, I’ve always enjoyed it immensely. When I was 12 I watched for the first time the film “Nadia”, about the life and success of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The movie was on this videotape that was passed on among us little gymnasts and every single girl in the gym thought that Nadia was her hero. I did as well. I don’t know how many times I watched it before bringing it back, but I thought about every scene, and sang the music that plays during her legendary uneven bar exercise at the 1976 Olympics, and dreamed about being her, for months and months. It was only after many years that I first watched a real video of her on tape. Short after I bought my first computer and learned how to surf the Internet, I began to trade gymnastics competitions on tape with people all over the world and one of the first competitions that I requested was the 1976 Olympics. It’s a rather boring tape, with no commentary and piano music played for the whole duration. But it still retains its magic, because it was THE competition. When Nadia became legend by earning a perfect 10 for the first time in Olympic history. Not just once, but seven times.

This book is her story, told by her, in the form of a long letter to an imaginary young fan asking for advices. She talks about everything, from her birth, to her childhood, to her first steps in the gym with legendary coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi. She speaks matter-of-factly about her victories and recounts passionately about her defection from Romania in 1989. She answers all the questions that are usually asked to her with honesty and patience. How her life changed after her success, if the stories about abuses from her coach are true, if she was starved by him, if she really tried to kill herself. She answers everything, even though I had the feeling she is not really telling everything, which is understandable. She denies that she attempted suicide, as told in the movie, and that leaves me a bit puzzled, because how could they have make up such a story if none of it was true?
But it was interesting to get an insight perspective from the very person who’s been my hero for so long. I didn’t know anything about her after her last Olympics in Moscow in 1980. That she lived a miserable life under the Ceausescu’s regime, and that she was eventually forced to defect. That she escaped in the night, on foot, with a group of strangers, and that she crossed the Hungarian border scratching herself on wire-fences, risking to be shot anytime by the Romanian police. That was very interesting, and scary.
We’ve lived very different lives, we have very different personalities, but we share one thing, and that is our love for gymnastics. She had the chance to shoot for the moon, I didn’t. But I understand when she says that her hard work didn’t feel like sacrifice, that she loved everything she did in the gym, not because she wanted the medals, but because she loved the feeling of flying in the air, of stretching her body towards impossible moves.

I dreamed of learning new skills. I never saw the bigger picture of international success and fame. I dreamed of running and twisting and double somersaults, and that nothing could tether me to the ground because I was born to fly.

She didn’t give up her childhood, she lived it just like she wanted to.

I enjoyed reading it, even though I suspect she had some help writing it. Her English is a bit too good, and too literary to be truly hers, and that didn’t feel completely real. Beside that, it really is a mandatory read for any real gymnastic fan.
For all the others, I know you might feel left out. So I will add this video, to help you understand what I’m talking about. Enjoy :-)

The Book Thief - Mark Zusak

This is definitely the best book I’ve read this year. It took me a while to sit down and write about it because I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it justice with my words. My copy is a big chunky hardback, 580 pages long, but it didn’t bother me to carry it around anywhere I went, while I was reading it. Instead I walked proudly with my big book under my arm, eagerly waiting for the next opportunity to continue the story.

A warning: the first few pages feel strange. The narrator takes his time to introduce us to the main story, playing with us, giving glimpses of what’s to come. We soon find out that it’s Death who’s speaking, and it’s his (oh, by the way, is Death male or female? Who knows…) peculiar point of view that will escort the reader throughout the book.
As soon as Liesel Meminger was introduced, I was scooped into the story and I wasn’t let go till the end.

At the start Liesel is 9, it’s 1939 and it’s Germany. She’s travelling with her mother and brother to a small town called Molching to meet her future foster-family, the Hubermanns. Her parents are communist, which is almost as bad as being a Jew, therefore her mother is forced to abandon her children and flee. During the journey Liesel’s brother suddenly dies, leaving her to face her new life alone. She has only one thing to remind her of the last day she saw her mother and brother. It’s a book that she picked up on the graveyard, “The Gravedigger’s handbook”. The first book stolen by the Book Thief.
Things don’t look very bright for Liesel. Her new Mama is a wardrobe-shaped woman who yells constantly and call her names. Her new house is bleak and cold, in school she’s forced to attend classes with smaller children due to her lack of education, and her nights are filled with nightmares of her dead brother. But not only Liesel is a tough little girl who knows how to defend herself, she also finds out that her new life is not as bad as it looks. Mama sounds fierce and abusive, but she’s also caring, in a very rough way. And Papa…he is the one that shows her unconditional love since the beginning. With his silvery eyes, his gentle heart and kind manners. Every night, when Liesel wakes up screaming, he is there, with his comfortable presence and his soothing accordion. Night after night he brings safety and trust back into her life, just by being there. Until one day they decide to use their sleepless nights to teach Liesel how to read. They use “The gravedigger’s handbook”, the book she stole. And letter by letter Hans Hubermann introduces Liesel to the art of reading.
During the day Liesel spends most of her time outside, on the street, playing football with her lemon-haired friend Rudy, who adores Jesse Owens and would do anything for one of her kisses. When the war begins, though, food becomes scarce and their main occupation is to find a way of filling their bellies.
One day they find a pfennig on the street and the first thing they do is to go to the shop and buy mixed lollies, please. But with one pfennig they can only afford one lolly and so they have to trade sucks, ten each.

Hurry up Saumensch, that’s ten already.
It’s not, it’s only eight – I’ve got two to go.
Well hurry up then. I told you we should have got a knife and saw it in half…
Come on that’s two.
All right. Here. And don’t swallow it.
Do I look like an idiot?
A short pause.
This is great, isn’t it?
It sure is, Saumensch.

I love this scene. It’s funny and sweet and it describes perfectly life during the war for two kids. When a pfenning found on the street and a shared lolly can make your day, leaving a happy grin on your red mouth.

Liesel’s life is due to change once more, though, the day Max Vandeburg, a Jew looking for a hiding place, arrives in her house. The basement, where she used to have her reading classes, becomes Max’s room, and soon enough the two of them establish an unlikely but enduring friendship.

There’s so much to tell about this story that I don’t think I can condense it here in few words. You have to read it yourself. All I can say it that it’s full of love. For reading, for people, for life. It’s incredibly full of love, in a time where hatred and violence was taught and encouraged. I guess this was Mark Zusak’s point. He wanted to tell the story of those who, although never rebelled against the regime, didn’t approve of it and just tried to survive it, while helping each other. It’s ironic that he chose Death as the narrator. But as you may have understood Death is not the evil skull-like face that we imagine. He’s just and observer, that happens to be distracted, amused or even moved by the “leftovers”, the survivors. This is a story about one of them.
Also, it’s a story about the power of books. Books are stolen (or saved, if you like), and in exchange they save lives, in many different ways. It’s books that save Liesel from her nightmares. A copy of Mein Kampf helps Max, the Jew, to reach the Hubermann’s basement. Their words have a soothing power, when they are read aloud by Liesel during the raids in the shelter.

It’s an ambitious book. Its structure is original, the language is mature and skilful, the sentences short and striking, the theme not an easy one. And the result is a very powerful book, which will stay with me for a very long time.
A last warning: be prepare to shed more than one tear for the ending.
And one advice: believe the hype!

other blog reviews
Nymeth at things mean a lot
Kristi at Passion for the page
Stephanie's confessions of a book-a-holic
Dewey
rebecca reads
caribousmom

Cool meme

I've been tagged by Em a while ago for this fun meme and I think it's high time for me to answer it!

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
Honestly, if a book has received only positive reviews (which is very very rare), the only reason why I haven' t read it is because I haven't got around it yet. I can think of a number of books that have enjoyed a great commercial success that I'm not going to read, but that haven't had completely positive reviews. The Da Vinci Code springs to my mind. I've heard a lot of people saying it was great but also a lot saying it was crap. I have absolutely no intention of reading it. Same goes for big Irish hit Ps: I love you, mainly because I don't usually read chick-lit.
Probably I'm cringing away from On Chesil beach by Ian McEwan, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but I'm not saying I won't read them one day.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

I'd love to go with Stargirl to one of her enchanted places and ask her to teach me how to erase myself.
I would take tea with Jane Eyre and I'd ask her to tell me how is her life with Rochester going.
I would invite Liesel from the Book Thief to come to my library and read with me all day.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realize it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

I must say for me it was an so-called Italian masterpiece I promessi Sposi ("The Betrothed") by Alessandro Manzoni. It is a mandatory read in school, but I could never push myself to finish it. How I hated it!I only know one person who actually read it and enjoyed it. That's what mandatory reads do for you!

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it

See above. One summer I actually managed to read half of it but then I gave up...
Of course in class we were all supposed to know it by heart.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?
Not really.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead and personalise the VIP)
Whoa I'd love that job! If it's an Irish VIP I would recommend Roddy Doyle's The Commitments or The Snapper. So easy to read and so funny.
Anyone else, The last elf by Silvana De Mari. i haven't heard anyone yet who hasn't loved it.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
Japanese!!! I could read all the mangas in original, watch animes without subtitles, read their novels in original...heaven!

A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
Charlotte's Web! It's short and would remind me every year about the beauty of the cycle of nature and about the importance of friendship.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)
First of all I've discovered Challenges! Before June last year I had no idea they existed. Since then I've read a lot of books that I would not have read, the best was The Giver by Lois Lowry.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
My dream library would be more about the room itself. It would be a room entirely dedicated to books. Wooden shelves over every wall, a comfy couch to read, nice carpet, a big wooden desk to write. All my favourite authors would have signed my copies of their works. I would have a specific section for mangas, comics, graphic novels and picture books. Everything would be by genre, and by author, all nice and tidy. I would also have a database on paper! like in a real old-fashion library. Also, I'd have original illustrations by Oliver Jeffers, Emily Gravett, Catherine Rayner, and other favourites on the walls.

There!
I've seen this all over the places so if you like it and haven't done it, go ahead!:)

The Year the Gypsies Came - Linzi Glass

I chose to read this because I was attracted by the cover since the first time I saw it. The title as well was very alluring. I took it home one day, and it sat there waiting, till now, or precisely till two weeks ago, when I finally picked it up. I’m very happy I did.

“The Year the Gypsies Came” is the first novel by Linzi Glass, who was born and brought up in South-Africa during the Apartheid. The book owes much to what she experienced during that time, but the book is not a memoir. It’s the very delicate and yet tragic story of a family during the 60’s in Johannesburg, told through the eyes of 12 year-old tomboy Emily.
They live in a great old house surrounded by two acres of wild garden, on the edge of a bluegum wood, so that at night the sounds of the forest and the nearby zoo make them feel like they’re in a savanna.
But Emily’s family, like so many others, is not a perfect one. Her self-absorbed, beauty-queen mother, and her shabby and frustrated father are always on the verge of a crisis. Emily is constantly but silently seeking affection from them, but they never seem to notice it. What she doesn’t receive from her parents, Emily gets it from her beautiful and kind-hearted older sister Sarah.
Sarah, who sees the world brighter than it is.
It’s so refreshing, for once, to read about a relationship between sisters that is not an endless fight, but instead is based on admiration without jealousy from Emily’s part and on care and love from Sarah’s.
Since their parents can’t stand to be together alone and face their problems they discover a way of avoiding tension that seems to work like magic: inviting a guest to stay with them for a while, and make their problems disappear.
That is why, that year, their father brings home not just one guest, but a whole caravan of Australian travellers. They weren’t exactly gypsies. They were nomads. But as Emily says for me they were, and always will be, gypsies. For they came to us that spring in a caravan and cast a spell over us, and changed our lives forever.

What I loved most about this book is the way it’s written. The only word that I can find that describes it it’s gentle. It feels like a petal that softly touches the story and never intrudes too much. You can almost smell the flowers and the trees with exotic names (jacaranda, poplar, bluegum…) while you listen to a story told by Buza, the Zulu watchman who sits on a wooden stool all night at the edge of the garden, holding his stick who has been passed through generations and holds the power of sixty dead Zulu warriors.
These stories and the relationship between the old Buza and Emily, is what makes this book special. I learned a bit about the traditions and myths of the Zulu culture which I knew nothing about, and I also learned to love Buza’s wise way of looking at the world. It’s him that Emily goes to when she has troubles understanding the people around her or when she needs advices. His stories have always something to do with her life as well, and sometimes they help her to cope with it, or to see things in a different way.
I particularly loved the tale of the Great Morara, the wolf warrior of the Blue Mountains of Lesotho, and Bohato, the young she-cub who was sent in the valley to learn an important lesson. That sometimes the people who make the most noise are the ones who hear the least. (…) It is the sounds in here that we must listen to. The inside voices that we cannot hear with our ears but instead feel with our hearts.

Somehow the actual story of the book seems less important to me than what happens around it. Buza with his stories, Emily and her cattery club, Sarah with her marmalade-scented hair and her kindness towards everybody, the bond that Emily establishes with Streak, the older brother of the family, which is sweet and special. And it’s as close to love as it can get at that age.

I don’t think that the tragedy is what the book is about. To me it feels like it was an excuse to tell us about these characters and their relationship between each other, and to make us care more about them when the tragedy strikes. And it worked.
I really enjoyed it and I'm going to recommend it in the store. Also I think I will look for her second book, Ruby Red, one day.

Set in Stone - Linda Newbery

After the lack of plot in Paddy Clarke I really wanted to read something straightforward, a compelling, absorbing story that would keep interested, with a good storyline, fascinating characters and possibly some romance. I ended up picking Set in stone by Linda Newbery, from the pile.
It won last year’s Costa children’s award, the former Whitbread prize. It had raving reviews by readers on Amazon, and a good enough cover, so I was curious about it.
It definitely served my needs of plot and twists, but it left me somewhat puzzled, and, mostly, unsatisfied.

It’s set at the end of the 19th century in England, and it tells the story of the Farrows, a rich and apparently quiet family, who hide some terrible and unspeakable secrets. Their story is told by young painter, Samuel Godwin, who is hired by Mr Farrow to be the art tutor of his two young daughters, Juliana and Marianne. And by their governess and companion Charlotte Agnew.
The stunningly beautiful mansion in the countryside where the Farrows live is named Fourwinds, after the sculptures of the four winds that Mr Farrow commissioned for the house. Only three, though, were actually put in place, leaving the fate of the West Wind to be one of the mysteries of this story.

At first Samuel Godwin thinks his life is sorted. He is living in a wonderful place, surrounded by nature, peace and harmony. His duties as a tutor only take him few hours of his evenings, leaving him the rest of day free to paint and to contemplate his lucky fate. He was hired to tutor mostly the older and quieter Juliana, but his attentions are drawn to the young and wild Marianne. Although he is aware of the age difference (he’s 21 and she only 16), he can’t help being completely fascinated and almost obsessed by her beauty and her untamed nature.
But as the time passes and he becomes more and more part of the family, he starts to realise that maybe things are not as uncomplicated as they look.
Together with Charlotte, the governess, he starts to unveil some truths about Farrow’s past that will change their lives completely.

This book left me kind of baffled because it’s hard to define. It’s supposed to be juvenile fiction, but the perspectives of the people who tell the stories are definitely adult. There’s two teenagers involved, but although they are two main characters, we don’t get to read their point of view. Which is kind of the main point of young adult books. I’m not sure that having two teenage girls in a book makes it automatically a young adult novel.
The writing was beautiful and completely suited for the times of the story. It almost felt like it was written in the 19th century. An example, to give you a sense of the general tone:

When I awoke in the morning it was from a dream of extraordinary vividness, so that I had to shake my head free of it, and gaze around my room several times to convince myself of where I was, and that the dream was not real but imagined. In it, I had been drawn by the liquid notes of a bird to the water’s edge, pushing my way through branches. I wondered now if the nightingale – for surely it could only be a nightingale? – had been pouring forth its song outside my window while I slept, for I could not have imagined such tunefulness. Of an intensity and sweetness that shivered over my skin, its song struck in me some chord of desperate yearning – for what, I did not know. In my dream I tried to draw closer, not expecting to see the bird itself, for I knew that it was brown and insignificant, and would not show itself in the summer night, but only to drink in more and more of that throbbing, silvery song, ever varying: now a mellifluous fluting, now low, drawn out and melancholy.

Despite the skillful writing, the intriguing premises (the cover speaks about love, art, immortality and desire)and the beautiful setting, this story didn’t do it for me. It evokes Gothic themes, but they always feel only evoked, never really an integral part of the story (Its main inspiration is Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White, which I haven’t read. But I also detected more than one reference to Jane Eyre).
It promises passion but it’s the lack of it that really
strikes me. The ending seems too easy, and the epilogue is slightly depressing, and if you’ll read it you know what I mean. It never has the “young adult” feel that I’m used to. It’s suitable for teenagers because it’s never too graphic or violent, but it doesn’t speak to them. It’s not an adult novel either because it doesn’t explore the implications of the issues it brings up deeply enough. It stands in between, and yet I wouldn’t classify it as a crossover, like for example The Book Thief, which I’m reading and loving. It was disappointing and this is because I always want to be completely in love with the book and its characters.
But it kept me interested till the end, so there was at least one good thing about it.

Paddy Clarke ha ha ha - Roddy Doyle

Paddy Clarke is ten years old. He lives in Dublin, in the fictional north side Barrytown, with his little brother Sinbad, who wears a patch on one eye to help the other lazy one, a mother always busy with his two baby sisters, and a father always busy reading his newspaper. It's the 60's and a child's life takes place mostly outside, in the streets or in the fields which still surround the area, playing football, stealing from the shops just for the dare, exploring the near building site, always looking for danger.

It's a tough world. Teachers can still beat kids up. Bullies are respected and even emulated. But for Paddy the scariest threat is at home, where the fights between his parents are whispered, night after night, while he's in bed, trying to shut them out, or to magically make them stop with his thoughts.

This book is a trip in Paddy's mind. A sort of childish stream of consciousness. Facts, memories, events, questions and dialogues, all follow one another with no apparent logic. It's a truthful way of capturing a child's world, his way of thinking, his heroes (Geronimo, the leper priest, George Best...), his fears.
Specifically, what Roddy Royle does really well is showing how incomprehensible the grown up world seems to a child. How senseless and illogical.

Why didn't he like Ma? She liked him, it was him that didn't like her. What was wrong with her? Nothing. She was lovely looking, though it was hard to tell for sure. She made lovely dinners (...) There must have been a reason why he hated Ma. There must have been something wrong with her, at least one thing. I couldn't see it. I wanted to. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be on both sides. he was my Da.

The child's perspective feels so real, Doyle sticks to it so firmly you almost think that a child wrote it.
Maybe this was also the reason why I couldn't enjoy it completely. I struggled to finish it even though I enjoy some parts very much. What it lacked was fluidity. It felt fragmented, there was no common thread that usually keeps me interested and wanting to read more.
Sometimes I wished the flashes of stories that were told would go on longer, that became part of a whole. But to me they never did.
Some dialogues were really funny and reminded me why I love his other Barrytown books so much. But with this, I never felt completely absorbed and I was glad when I read the last page.
That said I didn't give up on him. I still have to read two of his books. "The woman who walked into doors" and "Paula Spencer". One day, when I'll read them, I'll let you know if they lived up to the expectations.

Other Blog Reviews
Nymeth at Things mean a lot
Kristi at Passion for the page

Confessions of a fallen angel - Ronan O'Brien

This is a book I couldn't put down, right from page one. I was told it read a bit like Roddy Doyle. But with Roddy Doyle he shares only the use of the Irish accent and the fact that the story is set in the north side of Dublin, typically the poorer, working class, bronx-like part of the town. This is not an account of a daily normal life as in many of Roddy Doyle's novels. It's the very tragic story of a man with a curse, which make him see the imminent deaths of the people close to him, through recurring nightmares.

The story begins when the character is 10 years old. He likes to play football and to swim in the canal with his best friends, but a close encounter with death during a football game changes his life forever. He doesn't die that time, but his foretelling "gift" that is given to him during that experience, is going to haunt him for the rest of his days.
Though sad and heart-breaking, this book is also incredibly funny, thanks to the Irish humour sprinkled throughout its pages. One of my favourite lines is when the guy has his second nearly deadly experience, and his dead friend tells him that "Time doesn't mean nothin up here. It's like a Dublin Bus timetable". So true.

And although you know that the tragedy is only waiting to happen, you still want to keep reading, hoping and praying that something will change, that the man won't meet his fate, not this time.
You'll have to fight your tears back if you don't like crying. And you will keep reading just because it's a damn good story.
I usually don't go for sappy, melodramatic books, and actually this one isn't. But I do love good romantic stories. And this is one has the most moving and sweetest romance I've read in a long time. It's about one soul that reunites in two bodies, the perfect couple, the true love, the one that would really last forever. If only fate didn't play with it.

other blog reviews:
Ulat Buku in the city