Teemestarin kirja - Emmi Itäranta

'Kaikki maailmassa ei ole ihmisten. Tee ja vesi eivät kuulu teemestareille, vaan teemestarit kuuluvat teelle ja vedelle. Olemme veden vartijoita, mutta ennen kaikkea olemme sen palvelijoita.'

'All in the world is not men's. Tea and water don't belong to the tea masters, but tea masters belong to tea and water. We are the guardians of water, but most of all we are its servants.'

I finished this book at my favourite tea place on the
day it closed down ;o;

Hello again!

Yet another dystopia, yes, I am aware. I've been meaning to read this one ever since I picked it up some two years ago, and I finally got around to it as part of my Finland 100 thing. It has a blue and white cover too! Here's also a Finnish book I recommend you read in English, as the Finnish and English versions of the book were written side by side, so you'll get the authentic experience, kind of. Pikkuunen is actually going to host a web reading group on this book on her blog soon, so it was a good time for me to read it.

Teemestarin kirja (lit. The Book of the Tea Master, but the English edition is called Memory of Water.  There's also lots of translations to other languages!) is the story of Noria Kaitio, a tea master in a world where some sort of catastrophe has turned water into a scarce resource. She finds herself guarding a secret that could cost her everything, but her and her best friend are also working on uncovering something long lost...

It was a great read, to me. It was refreshing to read something that felt, at the same time, so Finnish but also so foreign. There's a lot of Chinese tea ceremony -remnant elements in this book, blended with the normal, and it just worked. It's also beautiful writing in general.

Both Noria and her friend Sanja were really cool characters. It's always nice when the female mains are so self-sufficient (there's no romance in this book whatsoever, weird. I made a no romance tag since some people just hate that very deeply, you're welcome!). Noria especially spends most of the book completely on her own, and she grows a lot throughout it.

It was also a very well-written and thoughtful book. It flows both slow and fast, like water, and pauses to wonder and question. It felt depressingly real, with hints of global warming and other such catastophes. I also really enjoyed the 'not everything is humans'' aspect I picked my top quote for. It's a good thing to remember in this time of seemingly endless human greed. I suppose really the only reason I didn't give it five stars but four is because as a whole, the experience wasn't quite as life-changing as it could have been (it's easy to compare it to The Handmaid's Tale since I read these so close to each other).

For the Helmet 2017 reading challenge I couldn't find a place for this (haha, surprising isn't it?). I mean, I guess it would count for something I only know a little bit (tea ceremony?) but I bet myself I'll find something I know even less about before year end!

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

"There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are given freedom from. Don't underrate it."

Hello!

I've been meaning to read this book for a while because dystopias. On the other hand, I anticipated it being a depressing experience so I've not been in any hurry to do it... And yeah, it was pretty grim.

The Handmaid's Tale is another one of those always upsettingly current dystopian books like Brave New World and 1984 (The Handmaid's Tale was written in 1984, which Margaret Atwood said was 'corny'). It's set in a world in which women have been stripped of their autonomy, prohibited from reading, owning things, and 'freedom to'. Any sort of plot synopsis honestly feels like I'd be butchering this story, because there's so much depth to it that I could analyse it for hours and still be just at the tip of the iceberg. Here we go anyway.

Offred, the main character who never gets an actual name, is placed as a handmaid for a Commander to give him and his wife a child. She is of the unfortunate transfer period as the country that was the United States of America becomes the Republic of Gilead. She had a husband and a child and a life, so she's able to sharply contrast the current world order to the old and is unwilling to accept the change the way she should.

It's purposefully vague and somewhat out of order, and you find out about the world bit by bit. I thought it would annoy me at first, but after I got into it, I was so interested in finding out more, even if it was at a slower pace.

'It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.'

The book has a very heavily metafictional epilogue of sorts which I don't want to further spoil from you, but it's very interesting and intelligent. It was so metafictional that I thought the book had ended and I was listening to the afterword.

The actual afterword by Atwood on this book was also very enlightening. She says that she was inspired by her travels behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and she was determined not to add any concepts, ideas or technology that did not already exist. It's set in the US because it's her way of retaliating against the 'it couldn't happen here' mentality of the people she told about her experiences. She also calls it an anti-prediction: if a story like this can be told in such a detail, then maybe we can make sure it won't become reality. I'm definitely on board with that.

All in all, The Handmaid's Tale is a very harrowing read, with kind of an open ending. It plays on human emotion and humans themselves, and I find I keep thinking about it almost every day, even now that I finished it some two weeks ago. When is it acceptable to start reading again a book you just finished?

I gave this a 5/5 without thinking about it much, because I'm not sure if a book has ever affected me quite so much. It's probably my favourite dystopia, and I read quite a lot of those. I'd recommend it without qualms to anyone and everyone, though I'm not sure how the reading experience would change if you were not a woman and inherently, Offred.

For the Helmet 2017 reading challenge I put this in category 12: A book about politics and politicians. Because at least in part, that's what this book is, among so many other things. Politics.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

''A gramme in time saves nine,' said Lenina, producing a bright treasure of sleep-taught wisdom. 
Bernard pushed away the proffered glass impatiently.
'Now don't lose your temper,' she said, 'Remember, one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.'
'Oh, for Ford's sake, be quiet!' he shouted.
Lenina shrugged her shoulders. 'A gramme is always better than a damn,' she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.'

Heyo!

So, this is one of the books that are all the rage right now because of the current political situation... yeah. Daniel bought it for me in Edinburgh and I had wanted this specific edition because it came with 3D glasses! And a 3D cover! It's very cool stuff, trust me.

This book was written in 1932, which is easy to forget because of how futuristic it
is. Sure it sometimes goes into talking about radios as if they're the biggest invention ever (aww) and all the such, but the ideas it presents are fresh and creepy and could easily be an imaginable future. Kind of.

Anyway, the world presented in this book is quite complex and finding out more about it was one of my bigger pleasures while reading it, therefore I won't go into too much depth describing it. In short though, people are put into castes from embryos, the lesser ones deprived of oxygen and so on. These people are then conditioned to act in the best interest of the society and to take the world order as it is. They are consumers that buy into Fordism and agree that eveyone owns everyone else and if you want someone - well, you just have them. They also take a drug called soma to take a holiday from the world whenever they are not fully happy.

Cool 3D glasses are cool!

The plot of this book isn't very cohesive or even functioning at all times, but I was willing to forgive that and 4/5 anyway. This is because it's obvious to me that Huxley never set out to write a story as much as he wanted to create a dystopian society. The accomplishments of his imagination are clear, and the writing is very intriquing - at least if you can stop looking for the plot too hard. My favourite scene has characters of different backgrounds arguing about this world order, because it was quite exciting to see how one would go about defending this world order.

The characters also fall equally flat and are definitely not ones you would remember too far into the future. This is what I took a star away from the book for, but it didn't ruin it for me. Bernard Marx is kind of the main character, an Alpha-Plus constantly getting in trouble for acting unconventionally and who is in love with Lenina. Lenina is my favourite character, for she is the best window into this society. She's quick to take soma whenever something is wrong and doesn't understand it whenever someone is acting differently from what she's used to. She's so painfully happy with this world order, and that's very creepy. There's also the World Controller, who's very interesting in his... controlling, and John, whom many people seemed to like but I didn't. I won't go into any more depth about anyone since I don't want to spoil anything for you.

I suppose my verdict is clear: I see why this book is considered so important, so interesting. It's not perfect, but it is very good. It has had an important part in defining this sort of a genre and also, it's very creepy. I would have never thought anything about the 1930's could inspire something so contemporary. I suppose humans never really change, do they? Also, I found the ending of this book very satisfying, so that worked to cement my decision.

For the Helmet 2017 reading challenge I put this into category 12: A book about politics and politicians! I suppose this counts as politics. It sure felt political quite a lot of the time.

I'll probably pick up Brave New World Revisited sometime soon. If you're not familiar with it, it's nonfiction and written 25 years later in which the author discusses whether or not society has moved closer to Brave New World in that time. I didn't know how much I needed it in my life before finding out about its existence. So, you can look forward to that!

What's Left of Me - Kat Zhang

 ‘With other boys, she could craft a mask of smiles and laughter. She seemed to hardly want to glance at this one. Why? Because he wasn’t really one boy, but two? Because hidden inside his body were twin souls, nestled side by side? If so, then Addie looked away for exactly the same reasons I wanted to stare until I memorized the shape of his face. But I wasn’t the one in control.’

I picked up What’s Left of Me because the premise sounded interesting. Each person is born with two souls in the same body, but usually one of these gains dominance by the time they turn ten, and the other one disappears. For Eva and Addie, this doesn’t happen, and they have to live in fear of being discovered, because Hybrids are considered dangerous. It’s a bit Divergent-like, if Divergent was less interesting and the main character even more dull. Yeah. It also starts a trilogy of its own, called The Hybrid Trilogy.

The main character is Eva, who is the recessive soul in her body, the one who was to disappear but never did, putting herself and her sister, the dominant soul in danger. I couldn’t tell you much about Eva even if I tried. She hasn’t been in control of her own body for years and doesn’t have any interests, either. Addie likes drawing, Addie is level-headed, Eva is just there. While it was interesting to see how the recessive soul saw a world she didn’t interact with, she also made for an incredibly dull protagonist.

I was also annoyed with Eva because she knows that in order to protect herself, Addie and their whole family, they have to pretend they've settled - that she has disappeared. Does she do this? No, because freedom is more important than everything else. At a very crucial moment when she's ruined everything, she starts laughing. It's these kinds of things that just didn't make me like her all that much.

The book can be easily separated into two parts by looking at the setting and the pacing, and neither of them did much for me. The first part I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and when it did, I didn’t become very invested. Also, interestingly, the book has zero important characters who aren’t Hybrids, which also reminded me of Divergent; “People like me are rare and dangerous but everyone and my love interest is one of them.” Dull. I would’ve preferred at least for the here unnamed – this is for spoiler reasons – love interest to be “normal” and not “super special awesome” in the same way the main character is, for a more dynamic story.

The writing style isn’t bad but it’s also not good. There’s a lot of disinteresting description and going in circles around the same issues. What’s Left of Me also doesn’t have those beautiful thoughts about life that I often look for in books. Even the parts that I thought were good were only so in context and when I tried to pick a favourite, I ended up pretty much deleting all my highlights because they were so dull. Bleh.

There were some discoveries Eva and Addie made about Hybrids towards the end that were definitely interesting in their own right, but I as wasn’t very invested in the story itself, they didn’t really make a difference to me. Also, can I just say how unrealistic I thought it was that American kids get taught about an American war pretty much every year? I thought they were sheltered beyond common sense from everything they might find frightening. Whatever.

What’s Left of Me wasn’t completely terrible – especially in the beginning I was hopeful it would be a book I could actually like – but it wasn’t good, either. Kind of sucks to leave Addie and Eva (and all the characters who were so disinteresting I already forgot their names) where they are, but I won’t be picking up the other two books in this trilogy.

Surunhauras, lasinterävä - Siiri Enoranta

‘Sadeiassa jokin sai hänet varpailleen, jokin sai hänet toivomaan, että hän voisi koskettaa tämän hameenhelmaa, edes vain helmaa, kuin kangas olisi osa Sadeiaa, ja Tirilaiaa raivostutti, häntä raivostutti nyt, hän ei ollut samanlainen kuin kaikki ne typerät lampaat, jotka sokeina aukoivat suutaan odottaen Sadeialta herkkuja, vai oliko hän juuri sellainen, hän ja valkosuklaakanit, hän ei tosiaan voinut vastustaa niitä, hän oli kaikkien muiden yläpuolella, hän oli Sadeian alapuolella, hän olisi musteenmusta prinsessa!’

‘Something about Sadeia got her on her toes, something made her wish that she could touch the hem of her skirt, even just the hem, as if the fabric were a part of Sadeia, and it made Tirilaia angry, she was angry now, she wasn’t like all those stupid sheep that blindly opened their mouths waiting for Sadeia to give them treats, or was she just like that, she and the white chocolate bunnies, she really couldn’t resist them, she was above everyone else, she was beneath Sadeia, she would be the ink-black princess!’

This is a book I have so much to say about and no idea where to start. Surunhauras, lasinterävä (literally ‘Fragile as sadness, sharp as glass’, though the English translation offered by Bonnier is ‘The Sorrow-deer Tamer’) is Siiri Enoranta’s sixth novel, and continues with the familiar recipe: long, stream of consciousness –type sentences, strange names, a desperate dystopian world and deep, passionate romance. These are also the reasons why Enoranta’s previous novel, Nokkosvallankumous, is at the top of my favourite books of all time, so I’m far from complaining. And I really liked this novel as well… at first, anyway.

Surunhauras, lasinterävä is a story of the Sorrow-deer islands, where every six-year old is told by the sorrow-deer how much sadness they’ll have to endure in their life, and the Sidrineia kingdom, deeply matriarchal and led by a sixteen-year old tyrant. The story has over a dozen characters through whose eyes the intricate plot is told, hopping from place and time to another and recapping the same events from different minds, different principles and morals.

There are definitely good things about the book, and I’ll lead with those because I really wanted to like the story more than I did. I liked Sadeia and Kurkuma’s characters a lot at the beginning, but as the story processed, I came to like Tirilaia more than anyone else. She had her twisted admiration for the young tyrant and her childlike tendencies that made me believe she could really be a ten-year old girl who had been dealt the worst possible hand in life. Her story also didn’t get a quick fix ex machina like most of the other characters’ did, and she continued to have her own, strong voice the whole way through.

The style of the book is flowing but very heavy, the sentences drawling and reaching on and on in the most beautiful ways – if that’s your thing. There’s also something very deeply ingrained and Finnish about Enoranta’s word choices that made me feel like I was reading an old epic that took place in the future, faithful to my home country but set somewhere very far. She has an exceptional grasp on the language as well as a creative mind to put it into use, to the point where the novel’s flimsy plot didn’t prevent me from enjoying the work.

The characters are very different, at least in theory, but the more I read, the more I felt like most of them were blending together, similar voices and thoughts and all-around losing their characteristics in the mess that the book became after the two worlds collided. Some of the characters didn’t get much of a personality at all, and I think it would have been better to leave some of them out and focus on developing the relationships and characters that really mattered.

Speaking of relationships, I think Surunhauras, lasinterävä really suffers from its portrayal of teenage instalove. The novel wanted me to care about two separate romances that started too quick, developed too frantically and were too physical to really relate to, not to mention how these people just very conventionally found each other and fell in love in a heartbeat. I was also meant to care when one of these romances was brought to a bitter end, with the other character going as far as remarking that they’ll never love again. Sure, true love is a thing but here they hardly had enough time to even get past the pathetic crush -phase.

One more thing that might seem irrelevant but made the world of a difference to me: I really liked the last sentence of the book. It was out of nowhere and sudden, but it was hopeful and just so cute. I read it to my mum and she thought it was so cute that she actually started crying. That was definitely a great ending for the book.

All in all, I’d like to give the book 3,5 stars out of 5, because it was good, even though it just didn’t do it for me. I’ll round that down just because I liked Nokkosvallankumous so much more, but I’ll forever be looking forward to Siiri Enoranta’s new works (and read the previous ones when I’m in the country/run into them), because her talent is undeniable and her novels are always interesting, miserable and a pleasure to read. I hope one day her works will be translated into other languages as well, because I've spent so much time rambling about them to non-Finnish friends and because I'd love to see more Finnish quality YA novels out there in the world.

(PS. I promise I’ll start going to Starbucks less… or maybe not. Sorry not sorry! I’ll take a picture somewhere else next time though (maybe))