Among my long list:

📚 Notes from an Island,
by Tove Jansson
Anteckningar från en ö
Translated by Thomas Teal
Nonfiction / Memoir / Nature
1996
96 pages
Will buddyread it (September 17-20)
with Mallika @ Literary Potpourri

With Mallika, we’ve been buddyreading several books, and mostly by Tove Jansson, but I believe this will be our first nonfiction together!

“In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland.
The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietilä, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the shifting seascapes and the island’s austere rocky charms.
Notes from an Island, written in 1996, is both a chronicle of this period and a paean to the mature love that Tove and ‘Tuuti’ shared for their island and for each other. Tove’s spare prose, and Tuulikki’s subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative and plangent beauty.”

📚 Orwell’s Roses,
by Rebecca Solnit
Nonfiction / Biography / Essays / Nature
2021
320 pages
Counts for BookBound

I have decided to try to add to my own BookBound challenge some of the connections suggested for a special challenge by The 52 Book Club.
The second prompt invites us to read a book the title of which shares a word with the previous book title – a prompt I often use actually.
The last book I finished was Une Rose seule (link to my older review, planning to write a newer one soon), so I looked in my TBR for any book with the word rose in the title, and landed on Orwell’s Roses.
I’m really thrilled, as I am so impressed by Rebecca Solnit’s writing – I loved Wanderlust.
Plus I have read another nonfiction on Orwell, and it was so fascinating: Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin.

“”In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life journeys though his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.”

📚 Greek Lessons,
by Han Kang
Literary fiction
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
희랍어 시간 was first published in 2011
2023
192 pages

Another fun project I have is to read the first book I run into, that was already on my TBR.
I landed on this one on January 1st, but never got to tackle that project yet.

I have really enjoyed The Vegetarian, by the same author, and have read so many good things about Greek Lessons, so I’m really curious about this one and its use of language.

“In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.”

📚 Blue Pastures,
by Mary Oliver
Essays / Nature
1995
122 pages

I’m reading all of Mary Oliver’s collections in chronological order.
At first glancd, this one doesn’t seem to have poetry per se.

“Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning poet Mary Oliver.
With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature.”