The benefits of breathing, by Christopher Meeks

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Christopher Meeks

I received a copy of this book thanks to Virtual Author Book Tours
in exchange for an honest review.

The coronavirus confinement started on March 14 in my country and the subsequent days felt a bit hectic, me being unable to concentrate on anything but the news, so I began reading short novels and also short stories, because they somehow provided a so much needed sense of completion in the midst of those first weeks.

The benefits of breathing is a collection of short stories, all of them set in an urban environment where human relationships are stripped bare. Most of the stories are based on romantic relationships that either are beginning or finishing, and they explore the way human beings mess things up with our own worries and the weight we carry from past experiences, or the difficulty we find when we have to examine and understand our own feelings to make others understand them as well.

In one story the protagonist starts dating a man who is fun and kind but, despite feeling right by his side, she decides to end the relationship because she finds him too devoted to her and this arouses her fear of commitment, even to a good man. In another, we find a man recently separated who tries an online dating app for the first time, only to feel more and more confused by the rules of these encounters – by what date do you consider you are in a relationship? Are you allowed to make friends or do you just need to search for a partner? These are everyday life stories with everyday life people of all ages who are looking for their dream jobs, a loving partner, or just a way to be happy again.

From the point of someone foreign to the US, I felt surprised by some of the customs that are reflected in the stories through the characters, such as the variety of cuisines and restaurants in the cities of California, or the way everybody seems to relay on therapy when facing a breakup.

In a sense, the stories address ordinary events happening to ordinary people, so the reader can put her or himself in the shoes of the characters. They appear in all lengths, which sometimes made me feel some stories were quite long, but I ended up thinking that this was the purpose of the author, trying to show that sometimes life events seem not to have an end while, in other occasions, they end too abruptly for our liking.

You can follow the tour and enter the giveaway to get your own copy here.

The benefits of breathing
Christopher Meeks
White Whisker Books (May, 2020)
Ebook, 238 pages

The benefits of breathing on Amazon.com
The benefits of breathing on Goodreads

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Let me be Frank with you, by Richard Ford

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Richard Ford

As I am writing this, I am trying to decide whether I want to finish this book or not…

This was a book club pick, probably based on the fact that Richard Ford was the Princess of Asturias (Spain) award-winning for literature in 2016, but this particular book is a collection of short stories in which the main character, Frank Bascombe, is the character of three previous novels that, needless to say, I haven’t read. So I think this is not the most appropriate choice to start reading Ford.

Now regarding the stories (the book contains four short stories), Ford uses Frank Bascombe as an instrument to explain how it is to be American; and this has a good side and a bad side for a foreign reader. First the bad, which is basically the amount of references to situations or places that I can’t understand because I don’t share the author’s culture on this regard: I don’t know if he is being critic, sarcastic or funny when he addresses a certain neighborhood or town because it is assumed that the reader knows what he is talking about. And I have no idea; I didn’t get many of the points he tried to make. I don’t want to blame Ford entirely, for I am sure that some of the unseen references are plain ignorance of my part, but the cultural gap is there too.

However, what I did understand made me think I was reading a great book on American life. The two stories I read were basically an internal monologue of Bascombe, with no action, and through this character he addresses interesting issues like being black in a white neighborhood, how to be politically correct without being overwhelmed about being politically correct, or the problem with the American soldiers returning from Iraq to find that the idea of themselves and the country they were fighting for was just wrong. Bascombe is amusing because he is unable to act as a normal person, but I got to like the man – I agreed with him most of the time.

Well, maybe I have convinced myself a little towards finishing Let me be Frank with you, but what I am sure of is that I want to try another novel of Richard Ford. Perhaps Canada…

Have you ever experienced this cultural gap with a book? I think it could be solved with a proper work of the translator explaining the things the reader has not knowledge of. It might be tricky because, as I said, I assume the reader’s ignorance plays its part, but not entirely impossible.

Let me be Frank with you
Richard Ford
Bloomsbury Publishing
240 pages

Memoirs, tales and short stories: mini-reviews from October’16 Readathon

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Anna Gavalda, Marga Minco, Sjón

As I told you, I chose short books for the Readathon, and that was the best idea I ever had: I read five books during the event! And, this is remarkable, all of them were interesting and enjoyable reads. This was a surprise because I just browsed the library and borrowed books based entirely on their number of pages, without any further information about them but the synopsis on the back cover.

I read almost all of them in Spanish, but I have seen they have also been translated into English, so I am free to recommend them here on my blog  🙂

Bitter Herbs: The Vivid Memories of a Fugitive Jewish Girl in Nazi Occupied Holland (Marga Minco)

This is a memoir of the author, and I think it is considered a classic in some Northern European countries, like The diary of Anne Frank.

The story starts when the German soldiers enter Marga’s town and, when she asks her father if they are going to deport the Jews, like they were doing in Germany, he says that ‘Something like that could never happen here‘. Her family didn’t want to leave the country and none of them survived except Marga.

It is a terrible story, of course, but the author doesn’t put any sentimentalism on the text; she just gives us her memories as facts for us to cover the passages with the fear and pain Marga must have felt in her youth.

Book on Goodreads.

The blue fox (Sjón)

This is a short tale set in the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Iceland. I thought I was going to read a story of men against nature, but I was very wrong.

The story starts with a priest chasing a fox for its fur but, as they move towards the mountains through the snow, the narration is interrupted to tell us what has happened those days in the village. There has been a death, and thanks to the preparations for her funeral, we are going to know the story of a girl who was “different”.

This is that kind of book you don’t want to talk about so much, for the prospective readers to discover the story by themselves. It is thought-provoking, sad and beautiful.

Book on Goodreads.

I wish someone were waiting for me somewhere (Anna Gavalda)

This is a collection of short stories and, even though it is not a genre of my liking, I have to recommend it, because most of the stories are shocking, affecting the reader in one way or another.

What they have in common is the impact of one single event that, in less than a minute, changes everything. Apart from this, there are different genres, characters, situations, etc.

I specially liked three of them: a humorous story about two rich boys who take their father’s car without permission; one about a female veterinarian who has trouble making herself a place in a small village; and one about a salesman whose life has been destroyed by himself alone.

Book on Goodreads.

Travel the world in books Readathon: mini-challenges and reviews

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Tove Jansson

As I told you in my last post, I’m participating in Tanya’s Readathon but only for the last days, so I chose a short book in order to finish at least that one.

Review: The listener, by Tove Jansson

The listener is a collection of short stories written by a Finnish female author called Tove Jansson. I had never heard of her before, but I saw that cover in a tiny bookshop window of my hometown – the only one where you can buy books in English, actually – and I knew I had to read it. I looked for further information on goodreads and, even though it is a short stories book (not my favourites), I decided to give it a try.

As it always happens, I liked some stories more than others, but the ones that focus on one character are touching; The listener, the first story, talks about a woman who makes her loved ones always feel special and comfortable by her side, but now she is older, her behavior suddenly changes, and that’s what a younger relative is telling us in the story.

All of them leave you with a feeling of sadness; you feel sorry for the characters and there are no happy endings, but they are beautiful in a way. Most of them are explicitly set in Scandinavian lands and the characters live alone in a small island, or they only know the time thanks to their watches, because it’s always dark in winter.

They are stories to read slowly by the fire when it’s cold.

Book scavenger hunt Mini-challenge:

This is the only mini-challenge I’m participating in, with tree categories:

7. Book cover with a foreign country name or city in the title: Shanghai.

3. Book cover from one of your favorite books from around the world: New Zealand.

2. A book cover with a flag, map or people dressed in their culture’s traditional clothes: a woman dressed in ancient Rome clothes.

And that’s all. I would like to try Tanya’s challenge for next year, because I like the idea and the activities she prepares for us brave and traveller readers 😀

The cats of Savone, by David-Michael Harding

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David-MIchael Harding

I was contacted by the author some weeks ago in order to read and review his new book, which is a compilation of short stories, and I couldn’t say no after enjoying that much his previous novel, How angels die (review).

2013 has been the first year I’ve read short stories; this was not my favourite genre because most times I feel like the stories are too short to my taste; as if they lack something to be complete. But then I discovered some authors who made me change my mind, for example the Spanish classical author Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose stories are just perfect in less than three pages; so since then, I don’t run away from short stories. Not to mention that thanks to the new Nobel Prize, short stories have become fashionable.

The stories in this volume, The cats of Savone, don’t have a common link; they include a wide range of genres such as historical fiction, contemporary fiction and even fantasy, with different characters, plots and sceneries, so every reader can find a story to like in this book.

You can also vote for your favourite in this link, because David-Michael is going to develop a full long novel from the most voted story. I think mine is the one titled Forever beneath the Celtic Sea, which tells the story of the crew in the German submarine U-20, the one which torpedoed the Lusitania and caused the US enter the First World War. It’s a story about guilt in war time: are you guilty of killing other people, or is the superior who gives the command the one to blame? I love war time novels; there are lots of topics to talk about and you always learn something new about history.

Do you read short stories?

Book on Amazon.com ♦ Book on Goodreads

Wakefield, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

What would you think if someone leaves his house and wife one day, rents a flat in a street nearby, and comes back 20 years later, as if nothing had happened? This is what the author read some day in a newspaper and then he tried to imagine in this short story what that man, Wakefield, did at that time: if he could meet his wife in the street by chance, if he changed his appearance not to be discovered, and why did he come back after all those years, not after nor before.

The author doesn’t give us a reason why Wakefield did that actually, and more important, he doesn’t say what his wife thought about the disappearance and the following reunion, he just guesses a little about the story and it is the reader the one who has to guess the rest.

One of the beautiful illustrations of the Spanish edition

I got the book from the Spanish publisher and the edition is beautiful: it is an illustrated and bilingual edition, with lovely pictures of Wakefield and his wife included within the Spanish translation, and the original version at the end of the book. They make these kind of editions with short stories and poetry books of classical authors (Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Swift, etc.), and I have some of them to read – in both languages, of course.

My review in Spanish here.

Three mini reviews of three erotic stories

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Jaci Burton, Jennifer Thomas, Makenna Jameison

A few weeks ago one of the Spanish bloggers hosted an erotic fortnight: we had to read and review one or more erotic novels during 2 weeks and then we entered in two erotic book giveaways too, so I decided to read as many as I could in English. By the way, I didn’t win any of the giveaways.

First of all I have to say the book and the short stories were entertaining, but they are always the same: a romantic plot with sex scenes (like Fifty shades or Crossfire trilogy), or sex scenes without any plot, so until now I think that the only really erotic book I’ve read is The ages of Lulú, by Almudena Grandes, which I recommend.

Now I LOVE American football

The first book I read for the erotic fortnight was The perfect play, by Jaci Burton. This is the first novel of a series in which the main characters are sportsmen. Tara is an event planner and she is organizing a party for an American football team. The previous day of the party she gets lost trying to find the offices in the stadium and Mick Riley, the star of the team, who had just had a shower, appears half-naked and helps Tara to find her way. Later, in the party, they meet each other again – with more clothes on – and at the end they spend the night together in his hotel room – this time without clothes again, (hope you don’t get confused with the clothes thing). For Tara this was only an adventure because she doesn’t believe he wants a relationship with her since she is not a famous top model, and also because she has a teenage son to look after, but Mick really wants to stay with her.

That was entertaining and easy to read, without remarkable surprises in the plot except for Mick Riley’s amazing muscles and lots of money. As a friend of mine says, the characters of these novels are science fiction 😉 .

Score: 3/5

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With the thousands of books I have to read, I didn’t have time for another novel, so I looked for short stories in Amazon (there are always some of them for free) and I chose these ones.

How do we know he is a soldier? How do we know she is an event planner???

Valentine from a soldier, by Makenna Jameison. This is also part of a series in which the main characters are soldiers or former soldiers. I really don’t know why I purchased this one because in Spain we don’t have any romantic ideas about soldiers or men in uniforms in general.

Well, in this case we meet Sarah, who works as an… event planner! This made me think seriously about my career: should I change it and become an event planner to have an absolutely amazing sexual life? Is there any event planner reading this? Could you, please, give me some advice? Thank you very much.

She is an event planner, I said, and she is working in San Francisco and she is travelling to Chicago tonight to go to her best friend’s hen party, which has been planned by Sarah, of course. But there is a snow storm and her flight is cancelled, so she has to stay in the hotel. She goes to the bar and there she meets Ryan, a soldier that has some free days and is travelling along the West Coast. They have strawberries with cream for dinner in her room and then the story begins.

Score: 3/5

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And the last short story I have read is Male nanny, by Jennifer Thomas (sorry I have no picture of the cover, but it was worse than the previous one). I purchased it because of the title, of course, and I found out that is just sex without a plot. A 21-year-old nanny – the kind of nanny who lives in the house he (or she) is working – the young mother of the boy he is babysitting and a husband who travels a lot because of his job. All I can say is this was repetitive: sex in the sofa, sex in the laundry room; sex here, there, etc. The absence of a plot has its consequences.

Score: 1/5

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Keep calm and read 20 books in English challenge: 3/20

Literary Exploration challenge: Erotica

The love of Erika Ewald, by Stefan Zweig

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Stefan Zweig

I have been looking for this short story in English, but I haven’t found it; I suppose it is included in some of the compilations of Zweig’s stories but not as a single book as in Spain, so I’m showing you the Spanish cover. Anyway, I thought I would never say this about Zweig, but I don’t recommend this story.

I love Stefan Zweig’s novels and short stories, and when I am hesitating because I don’t know which book to read, I usually try to read a book I know I will love while I decide between the others, so I have three or four authors reserved that I will like “for sure”. And that’s why I started this short story: I knew I would enjoy it very much – because it’s Zweig’s story – but it finally disappointed me a lot.

Erika Ewald is a pianist that meets a violinist she has to play in a concert with. Both are talented composers and Erika falls in love with him, but this love is only in her mind, imaginary and perfect, and she doesn’t want it to materialize because when the boy confesses he also feels attracted to her, she refuses him.

Just as I didn’t understand Erika’s behavior, neither did I understand her sensitivity about music. Of course she is a musician and she loves music and art, but I found the girl overly sensitive to the point that she burst into tears, screaming and suffering, when she heard a song that thrilled her. It was difficult not to see her as an exaggeration, instead of thinking of her as a real character.

So for the first time Zweig has failed me. My life is over.

My Spanish review here.

This year it will be different, by Maeve Binchy

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Maeve Binchy

Maeve Binchy is not a well-known author, at least in the blogs I follow, but people who have read her novels usually recommend them, so I tried this one. I took it from the public library of my hometown; I saw it in the English section and I didn’t think twice. Later at home, I realized it was a short stories compilation, all of them about Christmas, so it was ideal for these days.

The book includes 20 short stories and they are really-really short: they only have five or six pages and talk about different families in all kind of Christmas situations, and how this year things are going to change. For example, there is one story about a woman who has to deal in Christmas time with a teen step-daughter who really hates her, or another story about four unbearable elders in a nursing home that are ready to complain, as they do year after year, about every Christmas detail – menu, presents, decoration, nursing staff, etc.

Most of them have a little touch of humor; I liked very much a story about a woman who has a full-time job and she also has to do all the housework and cook the meals for her husband and her two adult sons because she thinks they have to spend their time studying their degrees instead of losing their time with this unsatisfying work. But this situation changes one day when she finds herself in the kitchen while the rest of her family is in the sitting room watching TV, and she says Enough!. The way the family faces the situation is really fun.

In addition to enjoy reading, I have also learnt a lot about British and Irish Christmas, which is a bit different from here. For example, we don’t have traditional meals for Christmas, so we “must not” cook turkey for hours on Christmas Day or special mince pies. Or Boxing Day, a day we don’t celebrate – we don’t give gifts to the poor in a specific date. It’s curious to know about other countries’ traditions.

I have to say I usually don’t like short stories, but I have discovered they are great when you are reading in another language because you can stop whenever you want and don’t forget the story, and you can read a little every day without worrying about the length of the chapter you are currently reading (I read very slowly in English); so I like them very much when I read in English, and particularly these ones because I also like Christmas time!

I won’t add any score today: I enjoyed all the stories, but some of them are better than others so, in general, they would be between three and four stars.

My Spanish review here.