What are you reading the week of Sunday, January 18, 2015?

[scarletwoman]

Late start today - but seeing as how no one else has started this week's reading thread, here it is.

Last Sunday I had started reading my second Velma Wallis book, Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun, which was another fairly quick read. Interesting story, a retelling of a pair of very old Alaska Athabaskan legends which the writer wove together into one extended tale. It was a fascinating look into pre-European contact tribal culture in the far north boreal forest and tundra.

Then I read Ordinary Wolves, which I finished on Friday night. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it. It was a difficult book to get into, and it told a difficult story - at times I wanted to just give up and shut the book, unfinished. However, once I managed to get into the author's writing style, I was glad I stuck with it to the end. I have to say, it was a powerful book and not one that I will soon forget. I actually opened it back up yesterday morning and started re-reading it from the beginning, although now having made it back through more than the first third of the book, I feel like I've "gotten" what I didn't quite "get" the first time through, so I'm ready to set it aside and move on to something else. Wheew. An intense read, for sure.

Happily, I have four new special order books to choose from, that I picked up from my library last week:

Raising Ourselves, by the same Velma Wallis who wrote the two Athabaskan legend books I read last week. This one is autobiographical, not fiction. However, I'm not quite ready for more Alaskan village "real life" after Ordinary Wolves, so this is going on the bottom of the pile for now.

I also have two books set on the North Shore of Lake Superior written by a Norwegian author, Vidar Sundstøl: The Land of Dreams and Only the Dead. They are the first two books of a murder mystery trilogy, I have the third on order, but it's not due out until this April, so I can expect a wait.

The backstory on this trilogy is almost as interesting as I hope the stories themselves will be. Sundstøl is a Norwegian who ended up living in northern Minnesota for a couple years and got interested in the history of the Norwegian immigrants who had settled in that area in the late 19th century and decided to set some novels there. They were originally published in Norwegian only, then got popular in a number of other European countries and were translated into German, French, Danish, Icelandic, and Dutch. It wasn't until a Minnesotan with Norwegian heritage travelled to Norway and heard about these books that they finally got translated into English by the University of Minnesota Press. Naturally, myself being a Minnesotan of Norwegian heritage, who absolutely LOVES the North Shore, and is a diehard Nordic Noir fan, I have to read these! So these two are next.

The fourth book is something quite different again, The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin - although it's also set on the North Shore. It's a novel that traces the lives of three different women set in three different time periods, who all live beside the Great Water. It was a book that showed up as a recommendation on GoodReads because of some other book I had rated highly.

I have one more book ready to be picked up at the library this week, These Granite Islands by Sarah Stonich - another book set in Minnesota, including Lake Superior.

Happy reading to you all!