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sallie🐇

@sirinteeth

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🧸1997🇸🇪
I read and think a lot and sometimes I make sense
📖: Taipei Story, R.F. Kuang
🎧: Fruit Fly, Josh Silver

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Gothenburg book fair book haul 📚

Every year since I was 10 I’ve attended Gothenburg’s book fair with my mom. It’s an annual tradition just as sacred as birthday or Christmas. Here’s the books I got this year☕️

Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh — an Indian mystery novel set in Calcutta 1969, a little girl remembering another life with another mother. I thought it sounded interesting.

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami — An existential novel about exclusion, bullying and friendship set in 90’s Japan.

I find it funny that the only two Swedish books I got this weekend were books in translation. But not surprising. I read so little in Swedish nowadays that I try to get my hands on the Swedish translation of a book whenever the og language is anything other than English.

Mieko Kawakami was a guest at the fair and I managed to snag a spot right at the front of her seminar. It was such a lovely interview and the translator did such a wonderful job. I was so immersed through it all and left thoroughly inspired—isn’t it just the best feeling when an author you admire turns out to be just as brilliant in person? Listening to Mieko Kawakami explain her thought process when writing her stories and sharing about her own life experiences definitely heightened my appreciation of her. Beautiful experience.

Heaven is the third of her books translated into Swedish (among Breasts and Eggs and All the Lovers in the Night).

I’ve only read Breasts and Eggs so far which I told her when she signed Heaven for me, and she informed me that Heaven is a much different story but that she hopes I’ll like it still (which I am very sure I will).

The cue to get a book signed was soooo long but I got lucky because the girl before me had the most adorable service dog which made waiting easier🐕 (and it charmed Kawakami to pieces, it was so cute)

I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking by Joan Didion — I’ve never read Didion before but she’s been on my radar for a long time, so when I saw this I couldn’t help but snag it.

New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver — do I need to explain myself? The soft animal in me that loves what it loves loves Mary Oliver and I saw this collection lay all alone amongst a bunc by @sirinteeth

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10 days ago

Arrived in Gothenburg for the book fair today and immediately my budget burst into flames. Oh 🐋

Jamaica Kincaid was there but she had left by the time we arrived :’) Abdulrazak Gurnah too! Ugh, I don’t want to say I have bad luck because I am truly so lucky to get to go here annually, but ohhh how I wish I could’ve been here earlier to see them.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to some interviews, buying books, got to snack on some meat from the hunting stand (wild boar, seal and geese were my favs) and walking walking walking.

Apparently an Olympic gold medalist physically attacked a journalist and another guy got arrested because he threw red paint on an Israeli flag, there were a lot of eye witnesses to both incidents and to my slight disappointment I was not one in either case.

Tomorrow I’ll be there too, so I’ll show you all the books I got once I get home 📚 by @sirinteeth

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12 days ago

Oh you want the tea? Ok here. Lenu’s relationship with Nino is Sophia Tolstoya and Zelda Fitzgerald subordinating their own talents to champion the careers of their husbands. I know Lenu and Nino aren’t married or even a couple (at least not by the end of The Story of a New Name but the end of that book was so he-texted-me-again-coded it’s pretty clear we’re not getting rid of the fucker) but I’ve thought a lot about the relationship they might have from here on, not to mention the dynamic they already share.

Historically it hasn’t been unusual for women to shrink their own intellect to amplify the egos of the ~important~ men in their lives and Lenu falling into this trap is making me want to pull my hair outttt. Whenever she’s around Nino she somehow pivots from being an independent thinker to just becoming his audience, measuring her own worth by how much she understands him, treating his intellectual output as more important than hers. Just look at the way she pours her energy into reviewing and validating his work, reading his articles and academic papers etc etc, treating them as more monumental than her own thoughts—WHICH ARE ARGUABLY THE MORE BRILLIANT OF THE THE TWO. Lenu my girl, you must let go of the imposter syndrome. You are NOT to be the inspiring muse and trusted editor of a Great Man™️ (HE’S NOT EVEN GREAT ohhh im so irritatedh

And the way she thinks her academic success is not achieved by any raw genius of her own but merely a result of… hard work? And that somehow undermines her success…? …????? Girl. And so, she projects this effortless genius onto Nino, as if he is the authority of opinion on philosophy and politics, when all he does is using Lenu (AND Lila) as a sounding board to refine his ideas.

I’m so tired of seeing brilliant women instinctively position themselves in the shadow of a mediocre man. Can my girl please not offer up her intellect as a sacrifice to feed the ambitions of that dude. I kinda dread jumping into the next book.

Anyway, 5/5 stars by @sirinteeth

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24 days ago

Just a tired government girly reading Ferrante on her 15 minute break of an evening shift 🏛️

It’s election season and I’m part of the election secretariat in the municipality where I work, and while it’s very fun to get to work so close with my colleagues (we’re four people keeping this together) as a team (as the only archivist I’m pretty much a one woman show on ordinary work days) the evenings and the weekends has made the job extremely time consuming and left me too exhausted to do much else on my free time than come home, eat and sleep most days. Yay for democracy. (That sounded sarcastic, it wasn’t, I’m a big fan of democracy)

The election isn’t until September 13th but the early election began last week, so we’re already out in the polling places overseeing the process and supporting the election workers.

Tomorrow we have another training for some new election workers so it’ll be another late shift, BUT I won’t need to come into work until two in the afternoon so I’m thinking of going to a cafe for breakfast and just sit and read for a few hours. We’ll see, I feel like there’s a risk I might sleep til noon though haha. But if not, cafe and book it is!

The Story of a New Name is making me wonder about the title of the first book btw, My Brilliant Friend. When I first started this series, I thought the brilliant friend was Lila, until she called Lenu that and I was like oh so Elena is the brilliant friend…? But no, the more I read this one, I go back to believing that title is intended for Lila. Or I guess the statement is a mirror between the two girls. Both of them see the other as their brilliant friend, Lila calls Lenu her brilliant friend, but Lenu as the storyteller is telling us a story about her brilliant friend, who is Lila. God, they admire and resent each other so much. I love them. by @sirinteeth

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a month ago

I recently stumbled upon the n-word in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and fell down a rabbit hole about slavery within imperial Russia. I knew of the serfdom, but I’d been under the impression that Russia did not participate in the transatlantic slave trade, so having a wealthy lady flee Moscow with her “n-words” really stuck out.

(I realize my choice of cake on the day I took these pics are way too picturesque for this topic, feels a bit weird now. Well, hopefully the aesthetic helps the post’s reach, the algorithm doesn’t seem to be a fan of discussions like these)

Well, I’m out of the rabbit hole now and feeling a little naive for having been so surprised.

Basically, while it’s true that Russia didn’t participate in systematic slavery (at least the kind that happened in America, not sweeping the serfdom and gulag system under the rug here) there WAS a few individuals from Africa who did end up in Russia by being purchased in the Ottoman slave market and brought to Russia as diplomatic gifts. It was a sign of status within the imperial Russian high society to have “exotic servants”, in other words it was a fashion among the ultra-wealthy aristocracy to keep Black people at court as page boys or valets, viewed as “rare curiosities” by the elite…Yikes.

The most famous Black person in Russia’s history was Abram Petrovich Gannibal who was captured by the Ottomans as a child and brought to Peter the Great as a gift. The tsar is said to have taken a liking to “the boy’s intelligence and potential for military service” and made him his godson? Crazy. Abram was freed, baptized, got an education, traveled alongside the emperor on his military campaigns, and became a prominent member of the imperial court. Everything seemed to go well and then…

—>

Peter the Great died and Abram was exiled to Siberia for a while on grounds of “suspicious origins” (huh?) or something like that. But he somehow came back, and he had 10 children, most of whom became part of the Russian nobility. Talk about being dealt the most shitty cards in life, kidnapped from your home and enslaved, and then play the shitty cards so well you charm the tsar into becoming your godfather. Russia’s most by @sirinteeth

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a month ago

In my gummy boat, savoring what remains of summer!

Reading The Story of a New Name where my girl mere 30 pages in is trying to get laid in an alley full of rats (“average lenù behaviours” stated @conversationswithkara) and things only got worse from there (Lila’s wedding night? I want to drop a very sharp and heavy axe on Stefano’s balls.)

Kara also put me on Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia after I mentioned Lenu throwing away Lila’s diary entries, that I’m SO curious about what the story would look like from Lila’s pov and I wish we could see the actual diary entries but maybe Ferrante kept them unwritten because otherwise we’d see the extent of Elena’s delusion, her inner world colors the way she sees the course of events in the real one so much that I’m constantly thinking “is this what’s actually happening or is it only what she is perceiving” and that’s when Kara said this topic (and so much more) is covered in Frantumaglia! The book arrived from an Uppsala second hand store today and I can’t wait to read it once I’m done with the quartet, I’m sure it will be a great medicine for the hangover I’ll undoubtedly have once finishing this series.

I don’t think any books ever has lived up to the hype the way that these have, call me basic, I’m such a fan.

I’ll repeat what I wrote to Kara, Ferrante is so articulate, her writing wriggles around in my chest like a maggot in an apple, like in a good way. I want the Ferrante maggot to eat ALL of the apple (my heart!!!!) by @sirinteeth

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a month ago

Come generate some art with me!

Ok ok apologies for messing with you there, but I hope you enjoyed the rest of it<3

The diary entry:
— “Look, it’s snowing!” called Catharina when I opened the door, and a thousand yellow leaves fluttered in the air like a gigantic school of fish.
Now the green lawn is all dotted as if someone threw a bunch of confetti here over the cottage.
Autumn is coming. — by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago

When I think of purple prose I think of flowers, like Lily of the Nile, Hyacinth, Crocus. Tove Ditlevsen’s prose is purple like a bruise.

Ah, Tove Ditlevsen, the Danish Sylvia Plath. I say this with a mix of adoring awe and some unnameable negative emotion. Let me be clear: I loved the writing. It’s bleeding rather than flowery, and beautiful all the same.

But I didn’t like Tove, and I guess that’s where my complicated feelings regarding this book lays. It was a joy to experience such a literary genius, the ways in which she weaved her words were downright delicious and if I could talk to her about the craft of writing I’d love to—but I’d never want to be her friend. She was an extremely difficult character (and thus, person, since this is a fictional memoir) to sympathize with.

The first book, Childhood, was my favorite installment, 5/5. And thinking back, I guess it kind of sets the tone and atmosphere of why she becomes the person she is in Youth and Dependency, I TRY to have grace here, but by the time I reached Dependency, I felt very detached from Tove emotionally and more or less only enjoyed the good writing. Ironically, I feel like she wouldn’t mind that, I feel like she’d rather be disliked as a person and revered as a writer than the other way around haha. But… yeah. She was too selfish for me. Her disregard for others feelings (hurting someone seemed to her more a nuisance than anything else), her aloofness regarding having a nazi lady as a landlord (I know she describes a fear of Hitler but it’s just too tame? imo. She’s quite a non-political person. And that scene where she feels some sort of tenderness towards the German occupying soldiers made me iffy, I hope that was rooted in the soldiers being around 16 and therefore seen as kids…?) and the neglect of her children made it hard for me to feel for her. At one point in the book she writes something about herself not being a woman any man should marry and all I could think was yeah… probably not.

swipe to continue—>

I really wanted to feel more warmth towards Tove than I did, especially as someone with a history of addiction in her family and a great grandmother who died the very same way as by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago

Some War and Peace annotations from this summer🪽 It weirdly scratched my brain nicely when the chapters that were set in June were those that I read in June (same respectively happened a lot with July, and now August, and I’ve thought about it some earlier months too) it’s like it was written to be read like this, the season outside the window matching the one in the book.

At times I’m pretty bored ngl, and don’t annotate for several pages, and then something will catch my eye and I’ll mull it over and over.

It’s also kinda fun to see the end of the year creeping closer and closer with every chapter, now that I’m more than halfway done it feels much more plausible that I actually will go through with this a-chapter-a-day-challenge. If you’re considering trying this out, I really recommend starting at January 1st!

I’m currently in Sälen with my boyfriend and his parents, he and his dad have been participating in the largest Nordic mountain bike event here for the last few years now, so they’ll be biking 92km (57.17 miles) on Saturday, so that’s why we’re here. But atm we’re just chilling in a cottage, and I’m hoping to finish The Copenhagen Trilogy!

#salliereadswarandpeace by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago

kinda chic to use yellow font and follow trends, kinda chic to be just like the other girls! <3

maybe a pt. 1 since i might want to do a non-bookish one too because this was fuuuun by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago

Today I visited my aunt, read the first chapter of The Copenhagen Trilogy, and ate a lot of soup!

Pretty good start to my August, very happy with my pick for women in translation month 🇩🇰 by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago

Went through my notes app and found a few nonsensical snippets from my early 20’s🧜🏼‍♀️

Need to start playing Animal Crossing again by @sirinteeth

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2 months ago