Jonna Helin

Reading diary, lately.

The fact that my last book post was two weeks ago says something about life lately. I’ve basically been working, with occasional hockey and Champions League football as life support.

So I haven’t really read, as in, held a physical book in my hands. But I have listened.

Sara Stridsberg’s The Goodbye to Panic Beach stayed with me. Alcoholism moving through generations. The strange ways children normalise what should never have been normal, carry adult responsibilities without knowing that’s what they’re doing, and grow a kind of strength they never asked for.

Then Olivier Norek’s The Winter Warriors. I studied history for years, especially the world wars and their aftermath, so I wanted to hear the Finnish Winter War told by a French writer.

What stayed with me wasn’t heroism. It was the cold, the loyalty, the absurdity. Ordinary people doing impossible things because there was no alternative. No glorification, because there is nothing glorious about war.

And then, inevitably, I went to a bookshop.

Martyr! came home because of Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club. I know almost nothing about it yet, which is exactly how I want it.

And Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has been calling me for ages. A tiny book about something enormous. Right now I want beautiful sentences. Rhythm. Language I can stop over and reread simply because someone put the words together that well.

Apparently, even when I don’t have time to read, I still have time to buy books. A very specific kind of optimism.

#bookrecs #bookstagram #booktok