The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (2019) #20 Books Of Summer

Aleppo was a beautiful city before the civil war brought unrest and violence to Syria. The Beekeeper of Aleppo provides a glimpse of this beauty before the civil war swept Syria with violence and destruction.

Nuri was a beekeeper and his wife an artist whose paintings of rural and urban areas of the country won her many awards. They had a three year old son, Sami. Nuri’s cousin, Mustafa, had introduced him to beekeeping and together they ran a profitable business. It was Mustafa who first realised that trouble was brewing and made plans to send his wife and daughter to England while he stayed behind with his teenaged son to see to the bees. 

‘I just can’t abandon the bees, Nuri,’ he said one night, his large hand coming down over his face and his beard, as if he was trying to wipe off the sombre expression he always wore now. ‘The bees are family to us.’

One night vandals destroyed the hives and with all the bees dead, Mustafa was ready to leave Aleppo along with Nuri and his family. But before he could left tragedy struck both families.

Mustafa managed to get out of Syria in time but Afra refused to leave. Trauma had blinded her, physically and mentally, and it took a threat on her husband’s life to awaken her to their danger. 

The political scene had deteriorated so much that men and boys were forced into fighting and leaving the country was fraught with danger.

The story follows Nuri and Afra as they escape via Turkey to Greece and the perils they encounter on the way. They planned to join Mustafa in England but everything was so uncertain and the smugglers they depended upon untrustworthy. Even in Athens there were dangers and it seemed as if they’d never find a safe resting place. Trauma had laid its hand on both man and wife and changed them both. Now they had to learn to know each other again.

Christy Lefteri is the child of Cypriot refugees and spent time working at a refugee centre in Athens. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a work of fiction but it grew out of what she saw, heard and felt on the streets and camps in Athens. A letter from the author at the end of the book describes how the idea for the story came to her and the impact her work with refugees made upon her.

Lefteri doesn’t shy away from the reality of civil war, the trauma suffered by refugees and especially the danger to unaccompanied minors in refugee camps, but she doesn’t dwell on it either. I thought this was handled well, giving the reader enough details but not too explicitly. It is a compassionate look at the plight of people caught up in messes not of their own making and the choices made by individuals to either to help or prey upon those who have nowhere else to turn. 

One thing I wasn’t enamoured with was the shifting timeline of the story. This seems to be a common device of modern authors but it doesn’t always work. I thought it was confusing in this case.

A plus - two nice full page maps showing Syria and Nuri and Afra’s journey. If I were a publisher this would be mandatory for any book involving a journey.

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden (1955)

 An Episode of Sparrows is another perceptive and sensitive novel by Rumer Godden. Godden’s writing is spare and unsentimental with a gritty realism, but also much beauty.

In the preface to this book she wrote:

'Finally the time came when I had to tell myself miserably, “You have squandered, muddled, and wasted everything, everything from opportunity to money. Wasted.”

There I was wrong. After the war years of hard work, poverty, and loneliness in Kashmir I needed that space of gaiety, companionship, even luxury, and I have come to believe that nothing is ever wasted; out of mistakes, or through mistakes, something quite worthwhile can come, in my case the seed of another novel.’

Living in the busy whirl of post-war London in a tiny little jewel of a house, she spent as much time as she could in the nearby park where she got to know the antics of the ‘London sparrows’- children from the poorer streets nearby. She picked her way through the bombed-out sections of London where weedy flowers pushed their way up through broken masonry and blossomed in the rubble.

Godden wrote that all her stories have themes underlying them, not actually stated, but there all the same. An Episode of Sparrows grew out of her stay in London but it wasn't until ten years later, in 1955, when she started to write it.

There are multiple characters in this story but the central figure, Lovejoy Mason, is a girl of about 11 years of age whose life held little love and no joy.

Lovejoy’s mother worked on the stage and had casually left her with Mrs Crombie and her husband, Vincent, a superb chef wasting away in an impoverished part of town with virtually no clientele, while she went off all over the place for work. From time to time the neglectful mother would return to her daughter who was devoted to her. Then there came a time when she didn’t come at all.

‘Mrs Crombie was kind, Vincent was very kind, but for Mrs Crombie there was really only Vincent and for Vincent there was only the restaurant. Lovejoy was a little extra tacked on.

She had never heard of a vortex but she knew there was a big hole, a pit, into which a child could be swept down, a darkness that sucked her down so that she ceased to be Lovejoy, or anyone at all, and was a speck in thousands of socks, ‘Millions,’ said Lovejoy, and then there was something called ‘no-one.’

The story revolves around a secret garden. Lovejoy who, with the help of some other London sparrows, steals some good soil from the rich neighbourhood gardens to start their own. Godden’s clever use of shifting perspectives brings in all the other supporting characters and gives us insight into their motivations, reactions and thoughts. 

Olivia and Angela are two unmarried sisters who live in the more prosperous area near Lovejoy. Olivia, the eldest, is dominated by her beautiful, high energy and opinionated younger sister. When Olivia finds a small footprint in the garden bed that points to the soil thieves, she says nothing and her heart is stirred to find out more about the Sparrows.

“It was not the absence of a man that Olivia regretted so much, though she could have wished that both she and Angela had married…that blank in her life was not the worst, but I wish children were not so unknown to me…Olivia divined something in children, not in her nieces and nephews…who were precocious and spoilt, but in the children who were let alone, real children…they seemed to her truer than grown-ups, unalloyed; watching them, she knew they were vital; if you were with them you would be alive, thought Olivia.”

As Lovejoy planted her garden in the bombed ruins of a churchyard, her soul grew along with her seedlings…

‘At night now, when she went to bed, she did not lie awake feeling the emptiness; she thought about the garden, the seeds, their promised colours. She had never before thought of colours…except in clothes, thought Lovejoy; now she saw colours everywhere, the strong yellow of daffodils…the deep colours of anemones; she was learning all their names; she saw how white flowers shone and showed their shape against the London drab and grey. She was filled with her own business. She had never had her own business before; directly after breakfast, on her way to school, she went to the garden and was thinking about it all day long.’

She spent most of her time waiting…for her mother to wake up in the mornings; waiting for her while she tried on clothes or went shopping; waiting outside pubs.

‘Why did people take it for granted that children had all that time to waste? I want to garden, not wait, she thought rebelliously.’

Rumer Godden’s writing is similar in some aspects to Elizabeth Goudge’s. They both were both masters of characterisation and understood human conflict. Godden’s style is terse, Goudge tends to be rambling and more philosophically inclined but both were adept at thematic undertones. I think Rumer Godden had a greater insight into children - The Greengage Summer is another example of her way of seeing from a child’s perspective.

Although both of the books just mentioned are focused on children, there are some themes that make them more suited to older readers. Greengage has some obvious mature content, An Episode of Sparrows only has one aspect that would make me hesitate to give it to a younger person - Lovejoy’s mother would entertain her male friends in her room while her daughter sat forlornly on the steps outside. It was a passing observation so it would probably go over a child’s head. However, I’d hold off until about age 14 because there is an underlying richness that may not be appreciated or understood by a younger child. From an adult point of view it is a story that has staying power and lingers in your mind and heart afterwards.

Both authors have been unjustly neglected but Elizabeth Goudge has made a comeback in more recent years and from what I’ve read this has been largely initiated by book bloggers. (Yay!) Rumer Godden’s works need a similar revival.

Biography | Rumer Godden

20 Books of Summer Challenge

Faking this challenge - it's winter here and I won't be reading 20 books but these are some I'm hoping to read:

1) The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall - I really liked his previous book, Prisoners of Geography and I was given this follow-up book for Mother's Day.

2) Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov -  I've had this for a few years and have been meaning to read it at some point. Set in Bulgaria so will also use this for my 2021 Reading Europe Challenge which isn't going anywhere fast.

3) Mrs. Oswald Chambers: The Woman behind the World's Bestselling Devotional by Michelle Ule - another Mother's Day gift. I've been reading Oswald Chambers' book, My Utmost for His Highest on and off for years so am interested in his wife's story.

4) An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - this author had an interesting and unusual life and that's reflected in her books. Set in post-war London.

5) Keep Him My Country by Mary Durack - a novel by the author of Kings in Grass Castles. Durack was born into an Australian pioneering family and is recognised as one of the country's great literary figures. I hadn't heard of this one until I came across it in a secondhand book sale.

6) Pennies For Hitler by Jackie French - Australian author and a different perspective on WW2.

7) The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim - I've been wanting to read this for quite a while; set in Italy so will also be part of the Reading Europe Challenge.

8) Gentian Hill by Elizabeth Goudge - an author I've binged on lately but I'll be getting to the end of the books I can source fairly soon. 

9) Crooked House by Agatha Christie - I've been on a Christie catch-up since last year but I haven't been writing reviews...

10) Spain by Jan Morris - this book was published in 1964 while Franco was still ruling in Spain. I don't know much about Spain generally so this will be a history lesson for me as well as a travelogue.

Possible additions:

The Citadel by A. J. Cronin

The Bee Keeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Thanks to Brona for the Southern Hemisphere alteration at the top of the page.

The 20 books of Summer is hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books.

Reading Europe: The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)

According to the author, The Greengage Summer is true, or at least partly so. In 1923, when Rumer Godden was fifteen years old and her elder sister Jon nearly eighteen, their mother announced,

  “We are going to the Battlefields of France and when perhaps you see the rows and rows of crosses for those young men who gave their lives for you, it might make you stop and think of your selfishness.”

In the Author’s Preface to my copy of the book (a lovely Folio Edition that I picked up for $3 in a secondhand book shop 🙂) she gives a brief outline of her childhood experience that became the basis for The Greengage Summer. In the book the two girls were called Joss and Cecil and they were aged 16 and 13 years respectively. Godden had two younger sisters and the book replaced them with three young siblings, Hester, Willmouse and Vicky.

The Greengage Summer is narrated by Cecil and I nearly gave up on the book in the first chapter until I realised that the thirteen year old’s perspective was so well done that it coloured the whole narrative and seemed to jump around in the telling. I’m very glad I persevered as its quite an unusual story overall as well as a rather scary look at five children who were basically left to their own devices in a foreign country. With their mother very ill in hospital after an insect bite became infectious on the trip to France and their father somewhere unreachable in Tibet on a botanical expedition, Joss and Cecil are thrust into an adult world in post war France - living in a French hotel alongside some questionable characters, expected to pay their way, look after their younger siblings and get by with their limited experience of life - they were quickly initiated into the vagaries of human nature.

Joss’s beauty complicated matters. A jealous Mademoiselle, her enigmatic lover who becomes infatuated with Joss; a feral young waiter and then a murder, The Greengage Summer is a combination of mystery, deception and coming-of-age that depicts young people trying to navigate the world of adults before they're ready for it. Added to all this is a good smattering of French throughout the narrative.

A tense read at times but it resolves well, and I have to say I LOVED THE ENDING!

The Greengage Summer wasn’t published until 1958 and it would be ten years later that Rumer Godden officially converted to the Catholic Church. Several of her later novels dealt with women in religious orders, for example, In This House of Brede, which is a very different book to The Greengage Summer.

Linking to the 2021 European Reading Challenge: France

84 Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff is a book I first heard book lovers rhapsodising over about twenty years ago but I’d never really been tempted to read it for a couple of reasons - I’d never seen it secondhand and I usually only buy new books after much thought over whether I’d be sure to read them; and the nature of Hanff’s writing - epistolatory - and I’ve never been a big fan of reading letters meant for other people. 

However, I saw a copy of the first book and on a whim decided to buy it. It wasn’t until I had a look at the back cover that I realised it included the second book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury; a nice bonus as it turned out because I thoroughly enjoyed the first!

84 Charing Cross Road 

In 1949 Miss Helene Hanff of New York was in search of quality literature and not finding what she wanted where she was she wrote down a list of her ‘most pressing problems’ and sent it to a seller of rare and secondhand books in London. 

Helene Hanff was a financially poor script-reader/writer with an antiquarian taste in books. When she was seventeen she tripped over the Cambridge professor, Quiller-Crouch (‘Q’) in a library and maintained that she owed her peculiar taste in books to that encounter.

For twenty years the brash and outspoken Hanff corresponded with Frank Doel requesting books and  trying to puncture his proper British reserve. In his reply to her first letter he addressed her as ‘Dear Madam.’ The letter she sent back said, ‘I hope ‘madam’ doesn’t mean over there what it does here.’

'Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing, you are just sitting AROUND. Where is Leigh Hunt? Where is the Oxford Verse?

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia.'

She insisted on sending cash via mail to pay for her books, and didn’t hold back if she wasn’t impressed with the books she received. She was appalled by conditions in post war Britain and wrote to an American friend over there and asked her to take four pairs of nylons around to the bookshop. She also sent food packages and apologised that America was a faithless friend, pouring millions into rebuilding Japan and Germany while letting England starve!

WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?

Kindly inform the Church of England that they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin? They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.

It’s nothing to me, I’m Jewish myself

I couldn’t imagine a book lover not enjoying reading this correspondence. I loved her style - upfront, full of satire and downright insulting at times but Frank Doel remained unperturbed.

Sloth:

i could ROT over here before you’d send me anything to read…what do you do with yourself all day, sit in the back of the store and read? why don’t you try selling a book to somebody?

Over the years of their correspondence Frank’s family and the staff at the bookshop became involved exchanging letters and gifts. One Christmas Helene received ‘The Book Lover’s Anthology’ - a beautiful gold-embossed leather book with gold-tipped pages, that she said she’d keep until the day she died -

‘…happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book-lover yet unborn.’

For years Helene had planned a pilgrimage to London but it always had to be cancelled, usually due to lack of finances. 84 Charing Cross Road was published in America first and later a London publisher bought it for publication in England and he wanted her over there to help publicise the book. By this stage she was getting fan mail, offers of walking tours and even a personal guide to see her through Customs and Immigration when she arrived in London. 

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street was written about this trip. She’d just had major surgery and could barely stand up at times but she went and had a wonderful time.

'I tell you it’s insidious being an ersatz Duchess, people rushing to give you what you want before you’ve had time to want it. If I kept this up for more than a month it would ruin my moral fiber.'

Both books are delightful reads for book lovers, letter writers and those who appreciate old classics. They are also a testament to friendship.

Apparently, after the war there were too many books and not enough bookshop space so all the dealers in London BURIED hundreds of old books in the open bomb craters of London streets! What a tragedy.

Linking up with the 2021 Nonfiction Challenge at Book’d Out.

7) Hobbies - reading and collecting books 🙂

A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

It was 1922 in Moscow and Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stood before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. After a self-imposed exile from his homeland, Rostov had returned to Russia. He was in his early thirties and was accused of returning to the Motherland in order to take up arms against the Revolution. 

Due to his reputation as a hero in pre-revolutionary days, he escaped the death penalty and was sentenced instead to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel where he had been living for four years.

If he ever stepped out of the Metropol he would be shot.

The Metropol was built in 1905

He was assigned to an attic instead of his elegant suite and denied his usual luxuries. His world had shrunk considerably.

But the Metropol was the world in miniature and in this world Rostov began to establish relationships and close bonds with a swathe of people. He learned that small things were important. As his physical life contracted into a tiny sphere, he had time and opportunity to make his soul. The relationships he cultivated grew him as a person and the lives he touched had far reaching implications in later years.

His has been a life of privilege and convenience but his reduced circumstances enlarged his life in ways that his prosperity and freedom never had. 

"I’ll tell you what is convenient," he said after a moment. "To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka - and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most."

I’ve always had an interest in reading about Russia during the heyday of Communist rule, but A Gentleman in Moscow takes a different route from my usual sorties into this time period. During his confinement within the Metropol, Rostov was shielded from much of the chaos and change that was happening on the outside, learning of it secondhand and intermittently, but the changes in Russia were reflected in the interior life of the hotel. It’s a unique way to view history to show the ripple effect that change and upheaval have on a society. 

"By the smallest of one's actions one can restore some sense of order to the world."

The kindness and friendship he had shown to people such as waiters, bellboys, the hotel barber, a  seamstress, and a precocious young girl, would be returned in ways he would not have imagined.

"Who would have imagined, when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia."

The author sprinkles the story with many literary comments and references, which I enjoy in a book, but sometimes it felt like a display of knowledge for its own sake, which might be a harsh observation...

An interesting and engaging story with a nice bit of adventure later on. I wasn’t sure about the very end, though. If you have read it, did you wonder what his plans were and if he was going to get away with them??

2021 Challenge - Reading Europe: Russia 

The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge (1941)

 

Many of Elizabeth Goudge’s books have historical settings. The White Witch takes place during the English Civil War, Green Dolphin Country and The Dean’s Watch are set in the 19th Century. I expected The Castle on the Hill to be set at some remote period of time and was surprised when I started reading it that it was written at the beginning of WWII when England was being hammered by the Germans during the Blitz.

The outlook was grim and many people were feeling quite hopeless. It is into this insecure and desolate setting that Elizabeth Goudge weaves her story of loss and despair, love and hope, duty and sacrifice. There’s a good deal of sadness, as you would expect. No one quite gets what they were hoping for and have to settle for circumstances that weren’t their first choice. But, in typical Elizabeth Goudge fashion, sacrifice and duty are redemptive decisions that grow people’s souls. As one of her characters decided after surviving a bomb blast that crippled him, 

‘The other way would have been too easy a death for a man who had too easy a life. Now he would have time to make his soul.’ 

One of this book’s most likeable characters is Miss Brown, a nondescript woman of forty-two years who had nothing about her that stood out, ‘nothing to catch hold of.’ She had a gift for protective covering and managed to blend into the background wherever she was. She was a woman who loved more than she was loved. 

She had had to give up her home for military use and had just learnt that it was obliterated in a bombing raid and the news caused her to lose hope.

‘Her loss of everything she had hitherto known was making her feel as solitary as though she were the only human creature alive in the world. And what a world! It was June nineteen forty. Yesterday was gone, burnt up in the blazing inferno of its suffering. There was today, a tiny patch of foothold, but there was no to-morrow...Memory of the past and hope for the future are companionable things.’

Sitting outside the Free Library in London, feeling herself to be on the edge of a great abyss, a small thing lightened her despair. A violin played by a street musician began to reach her,

‘And she knew it was the truth she was listening to. She heard no words, she saw no vision, but she was slowly made aware that she was one of a multitude that went upon pilgrimage to something or other. She had no idea what the something was, or how they were to get there, all she knew was that the way was stony and painful, dreadful, terrifying; yet worth daring all the same.’

The music was Delius’ Song of Summer and hearing it played helped her transcend her circumstances. When one of Dostoevsky’s characters said that 'beauty will save the world,’ I think he was referring to this ability of beauty to reflect truth, inspire us with a sense of awe, and point to something beyond ourselves. 

Some favourite passages:

'Orderliness of life and thought must be maintained as far as possible. When these chaotic days were passed what was left of it would form the scaffolding upon which the new order could be built. “Order.” A good word. How passionately sane men longed for it, and how incapable they seemed of achieving it with any permanence. How passionately the insane hated it and how easily they could destroy it. Hitler’s contemptuous sneer at “the bourgeois virtues of peace and order” was typical of all the anarchists through the ages.'

'England, from the days of Ethelred the Unready onwards had never been ready for anything, and never would be, had not been ready with proper shelters when the Blitz came.'

'I wish I could live that afternoon over again and do it better...one ought to be given the chance to live certain scenes in ones life over and over again until one gets it perfect.'

As with every book I've read by this author, I found her characters very well described. Her writing progresses slowly because she spends so much time exploring personality and setting, which I enjoy. Her work is perceptive and reflects a deep understanding of human nature, much of it shown through the conversations and reflections of the characters in her books. 

She was living in Devon when World War II broke out and you get the sense that her own personal experience of vulnerability permeates the book.

Linking to Reading Europe: United Kingdom and British Isles Friday

Non Fiction: A Woman in Berlin (1954)

A Woman in Berlin is a firsthand account of the Red Army’s entry into Berlin during the last days of World War II. The anonymous author was a thirty-four year old female journalist who was living in the city at the time. Berlin had been bombed extensively and ninety percent of its buildings were destroyed. There was no running water or electricity. 

Hitler had rejected any idea of evacuating the two million civilians left in the city, thinking that his troops would defend the city more bravely if their wives and children remained there. The civilians were mostly women and children and included 120,000 babies and infants - young boys and old men had been forced into the German army as the Allies gained ground. 

The author recorded the events that occurred in Berlin during the time period of the 20th April 1945 up until the 22nd June, 1945 in a notebook. 

The diary was first published in an English translation in the United States in 1954 and not long afterwards in seven other languages, but when a German language edition was published in Geneva six years later it was very controversial and had a hostile reception in Germany. As a result, the author decided the book should not be published again while she was still living.

Her writing is considered important as a firsthand account as many of the atrocities committed against women, in particular, at the time have been repressed by both the Soviets and Germans. Not to mention the fact that history is often rewritten to fit in with current agendas.

‘This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war.’

The author’s account is harrowing and dreadful but she wrote in an objective, almost dispassionate manner at times which lessened the initial punch for me...for a little while, at least. Thinking back on her story, I almost wish I hadn’t read it. It's a book I'd be hesitant to recommend unconditionally because of the nature of the content so I'd suggest checking out these websites to know what you're in for if you do read it:

Here & here.

‘Our radio’s been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere...At the moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.’

The author found some flowers growing and took them to a Frau Goltz, a lady she knew:

‘“What flowers, what lovely flowers.” The tears were streaming down her face. I felt terrible as well. Beauty hurts now. We’re so full of death.’

The author observed that she was ‘...coming down a level in way I speak...these are strange times - history experienced first hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen close up, history is much more troublesome - nothing but burdens and fears... 

We are debasing our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.’

Before the Nazis surrendered, Hitler and Goebels sent out handwritten notices to rally the inhabitants of Berlin, but the residents were so used to the noise and fanfare of Nazi proclamations that these handwritten commands were ignored. One woman was heard to comment, “Well, just look what those two have come to.”

‘The handwriting looks pathetic and inconsequential, like something whispered.

Yes, we’ve been spoiled by technology. We can’t accept doing without loudspeakers or rotary presses...

Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing.’

‘The cold doesn’t want to go away. I sit hunched on the stool in front of our stove, which is barely kept burning with all sorts of Nazi literature. Assuming everyone is doing the same thing - and they are - Mein Kampf will go back to being a rare book, a collector’s item.’

Linking to Reading Europe: Germany and Nonfiction Challenge: Wartime Experience

Reading Challenges in 2021 - Updated

I've been looking over the books I own or want to borrow from the library and they fit into these two challenges. The first challenge is mostly my attempt to read through what is already on my shelves and also to help me choose books for my daughter who will be studying the 20th Century in 2021. So lots of books set in WWI & II and the former USSR. I mentioned below that I'd like to include more nonfiction and I'll likely include that in a European context. 

Updated to add some books I'm reading or planning to read:

Belgium - William: An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton 

Russia - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Netherlands - The Return of the Prodigal by Henri Nouwen

Italy - The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Armin

France - The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden

Romania - Dracula by Bram Stoker

The European Reading Challenge is hosted by Rose City Reader and the details are here:

The second challenge is the 2021 Nonfiction Reader Challenge which I did in 2020 because I wanted to balance out my reading more. I used to read more nonfiction than fiction until I started to make my way through as many classics as I could, which I've loved, but I want to level things out a bit more. I've also been pleasantly surprised and interested in so many of the new books that have come out in this category. I think the standard of literary nonfiction that is written for the layperson has increased significantly in more recent years, especially in the area of science. This challenge is hosted by Shellyrae at Book'dOut. She has twelve categories and there are four I'd like to do: Biography, Travel, Wartime Experiences, Disease and maybe some others.

Biography: Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

War Time Experiences: A Woman in Berlin (Anonymous)

Challenge details are here.