This read: fantasy about translators, memoirs of a NASA astronaut, warm Christmas stories and other book novelties

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December is a special time in the world of readers. On the one hand, everyone sums up the year and determines their top most important books. On the other hand, it is a time of Christmas stories, faith in miracles and cozy reading. We try to combine these two aspects of the moon in one material.

UP. Life recommends a new book review made especially for us by a book expert from Let’s read – cozy Christmas reading with tasks for every day, a hit fantasy about translators, a biography of one of the most important Crimean families and other interesting books.

Translated prose

Rebecca Kwan. Babylon. A hidden story

translated by Hanna Lytvynenko. – Kyiv: Georges, 2023. – 584 p.

The debut fantasy trilogy of the American writer of Chinese origin, Rebecca Kwan, “The Poppy War” has become wildly popular among readers around the world. And if we can still talk about these texts as a student test of the pen, then Kwan’s further novel searches are intriguing. Her second novel “Babylon. The Hidden History” is built around nuances and meanings that are lost in translation. And it is these senses that drive the magic in the universe of the novel.

The action of “Babylon” develops in Victorian England and Oxford. The main character of the book is Robin Swift, a young Chinese orphan who finds himself under the care of a wealthy professor Lovell. Was this guardianship motivated by love and compassion? Not at all. Robin is valuable as a native Chinese speaker, as someone who can be trained properly and then used. The fact is that this novel delves not only into the magic of languages ​​and translation. It is also a book about the colonial ambitions of the British Empire, inequality and racism. And already in the first days of his stay in Oxford, Robin intersects with a secret society that seeks to stop the empire and fairly distribute silver in the world – a metaphorical source of wealth and power.

Building all the magic of the novel on linguistics is a brilliant idea. First of all, because the phenomenon of archaic magic is closely related to the peculiarities of the sounds and meanings of words. In addition, while translating through Google and writing texts through AI, this novel reminds readers how complex the process of translation and mastery of a word is. It really is magic. The characters of the novel spend many pages thinking about the meaning of certain words, arguing about translations, etymological searches, etc. So before readers a brilliant novel about language, created in the setting of classic British novels of the 19th century.

Janell Brown. Alluring things

translated by Serhiy Kovalchuk. – Kyiv: RM, 2023. – 576 p.

“Alluring Things” is a dark novel with an intense plot, the plot of which you watch in exactly the same way as the unfolding of your favorite series on Netflix. Social inequality, fraud, crime, a series of psychological traumas, as well as a desperate attempt to live a normal life, which drags around the heroines like a nightmare.

Nina is a swindler with a diploma in art history. No, she is not adventurous. However, her mother’s cancer and bitter disappointment in the American dream push her down this slippery path. Vanessa is a rich daughter from an ancient family who lives in an expensive historical estate and displays her seductive rich life on Instagram. However, inside herself, the woman feels a black hole of emptiness and depression, which eats away at her every day. One day these two women cross paths. Each of them sees in the image of the other a carefree and happy life – a seductive picture. Each is secretly jealous of the other. Both of them have enough secrets in their past. Will each of them achieve what they want in the novel? And who will end up in the depths of Lake Tahoe, which the author describes from the very first lines as an ideal place to hide a dead body.

One of the plot lines of this book is an ironic grimace of the story of Cinderella, which tells us a fairy tale where people from different classes can come together due to circumstances, and their feelings can be sincere and not burdened by additional class inequalities (not to mention cultural differences). As a teenager, Nina was a typical Cinderella who had an affair with a millionaire’s son. And up to a certain point, his parents’ money in the safe and his cold domineering nature (he could have kept a secret wife in the attic, like the hero of “Jane Eyre”) did not interfere with the sincere feelings of teenagers and their desire to fill inner emptiness and loneliness. But such a beautiful picture cannot last forever.

Ukrainian prose

Slava Svitova. Names

Kyiv: Creative Woman Publishing, 2023. – 296 p.

The first adult prose collection of the writer and verbal skills trainer Slava Svitova is a gallery of women’s images that reveal their most intimate experiences. Why do you need to open your most intimate? Women of older generations were taught not to talk about their anxieties and worries and, if possible, to ignore them. However, if one does not systematically see one’s own neuroses, postpartum depression, obsessive thoughts, they do not disappear anywhere and also reduce the quality of life, or even completely destroy it.

The heroines and their neuroses and traumas are at the center of the texts of the “Names” collection. A hole in nylons, which completely absorbs the thoughts of the heroine of one of the texts, or the focus on the flaws of her skin in another heroine turn into full-fledged heroes of stories. And it turns out that the characters interact not so much with other people, but with their own anxieties, fears or disgust. They experience many strong emotions that remain completely invisible in the outside world. So “Names” tell the inner invisible story of the people around.

The texts from Slava Svitova’s collection are very physiological and frank. They expose the inner world of neurotics and anxious people. They show that in reality our lives are not governed by great and lofty ideas, but by mother’s condemnation or father’s dislike. Parents may not be in the lives of female characters for a long time, but they continue to rule the inner world of these adults.

Emphasis on hidden history is a strong point of this book. Modern literature is actively moving away from the classic romantic image of strong and special people. After all, real people, like the heroines of Slava Svitova, fight with their invisible psychological demons every day.

Matiyash’s call. 27 days until Christmas

Kharkiv: Vivat, 2023. – 200 p.

A month before Christmas, bookshelves are filled with numerous new editions of atmospheric holiday literature. This mostly applies to children’s books, but adult literature, which offers to believe in the Christmas miracle and undergo a small Advent transformation, is not far behind. And Dzvinka Matiyash’s new book is one of them. In general, most of the books by this author are Christmas editions for children and adults. So Matiyash has already had a hand in creating Christmas stories and offers readers consistently good and bright stories.

“27 Days to Christmas” is a book created according to the principle of the Advent calendar. Every day, her characters, the narrator, her boyfriend Amvrosy and her friend Khrystyna come up with a task and share their experiences and discoveries during its implementation. If you have always wanted non-trivial tasks for Advent, but could not find the strength to invent them, join the heroes of this book. A significant part of the tasks concerns prominent Ukrainians who were born during Advent. You should listen to their music, read their poems or look at their paintings. Thanks to this book, there is an excuse to look at the canvases of Vilhelm Kotarbinsky (and also to find a street named after him), to find out who invented the advent calendar, to get to know prominent Ukrainians better, and to spend the time before Christmas for a leisurely inner transformation.

Psychologists say that it takes three weeks to form a new habit. Advent tasks that systematically immerse you in Ukrainian culture are a clever move. The author tirelessly interests the adult heroes of her story, as well as her readers, in masterpieces of culture and makes distant and long-dead geniuses close and understandable people.

Nonfiction

Mike Mullane. Horses on the shuttle

translated by Yaroslava Panko. – Bearded Tamarin, 2023. – 528 p.

The landing of the first people on the moon, as well as the first man’s flight into space, caused an avalanche of emotions in mankind. The sky overhead became sacred again: after Nietzsche kicked God out of heaven, announcing his death, in the second half of the 20th century, something divine settled there again. Only now it became astronauts and science. However, should we overly idealize and idolize everything that happens in space? NASA astronaut Mike Mullane desacralizes the sky in his memoirs. And he begins this process from the very first lines of his book, describing the insertion of an enema during the medical examination in the selection of astronauts. Because yes, the commission had to be impressed not only with its outstanding achievements. And Michael’s desire to get into space knew no bounds.

Before us is the biography not of a hero, but of a boy who has been in love with adventures and flights since he was young. So Mullane’s space dream resembles the American dream: you can achieve it if you try really hard. In the book, Michael describes his childhood – a father with a thirst for adventure and crippled by poliomyelitis. And an absolute childhood fascination with space. At a time when the era of great geographical discoveries has long passed, space itself has become a new territory of desire. As soon as NASA appeared, Mullane fell in love with it. As a child, he made rocket fuel in the oven and arranged other not very safe children’s games, which his parents fully approved of.

But children’s dreams are in stark contrast to the reality to which they had to adapt. In the book, we see the funding cuts to NASA, which made the work of newly minted astronauts dangerous. The new mission put astronauts at risk where drones could handle it. Another unexpected aspect of working at NASA for Mullane is social. A child of his time and a Catholic school graduate, Mullane describes seeing women in the 1960s exclusively as sex objects and not understanding how to communicate with them at all. He recalls that when looking at the women who were selected, no one thought about the topics of their research, only about beauty. And this, for a moment, we are talking about space! About the most advanced field and about the best experts of the 1960s.

Maryna Hrymych. Umerovs: The story of one family against the background of the Crimean Tatar national movement of the 20th–21st centuries.

Kyiv: Nora-Druk, 2023. — 432 p.

The year 2023 unexpectedly became the year of actualization of the Crimean Tatar theme in literature. Anastasia Levkova’s resonant novel “There is a land behind Perekop” and Crimean fantasy “The House of Salt” by Svitlana Taratorina were published. In addition, the national corpus of the Crimean Tatar language was presented this year, so its study and popularization are becoming more accessible. Writer Maryna Hrymych addressed the topic of Crimean Tatar history and resistance. However, her new book “Umerov” is not a novel, but a biography. In it, the author examines the life of the Crimean Tatar politician Ilma Umerov, his brother Bekir, and their family and environment in general.

There was no such nationality as the Crimean Tatars in the USSR. In official papers, there were citizens of Tatar nationality living in Crimea. So the dream of returning to the Motherland after deportation was combined with the struggle for survival. From this book, we see how the Crimean Tatars managed to preserve their identity while being far from home in Uzbekistan. How children endured bullying from their Russian teacher just because they were Crimean Tatars.

Such a teacher left one of the school’s students for the second year, lowered his grades and allowed herself to beat him only because he expressed joyful hopes that one day he would go to live in Crimea and be taught the Crimean Tatar language there. This same teacher appeared in the homes of all students as a supervisor. She had to know what the children’s parents were breathing, and she caught all the careless and naively frank words of her students in order to use them against them later. The interrogations and political accusations against the children of the Umerovs began at school. When they, on their own, from their parents, during the thaw, held an event dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the deportation. Tenth-graders gathered around Ilma and wrote on paper and distributed leaflets with a call to remember their homeland.

Today, in conversations about the era of Stalin’s purges and the era of the 1960s, we mention the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, but we ignore the fact that Jewish and Crimean Tatar artists were also destroyed. “Umerov” complements this map and provides a detailed history of the struggle of the Crimean Tatars for their rights and their culture. This book fills in many white spots in our understanding of the history of the 20th century from the perspective of the Crimean Tatars and their experience.

Read also: This is readable: a dopamine dystopia, motivational tales and the Russian-Ukrainian war through the eyes of historian Plohiy

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