The Sunday Salon and Talking Turkey... Gobbler's and Good Books

Welome to the Sunday Salon!  It's that time of the week we sit back, relax and talk books! Grab a cup of joe, find a comfy chair, and let's talk... Turkey! Next week is Turkey Day, but instead of the turkey visiting us, let's talk about visiting the Turkey, or rather visiting Turkey, the country, through the pages of a good book! Here are a couple books that will whisk you away...

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières ... from Goodreads: Louis de Bernières creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history. The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. But all of this will change when Turkey enters the modern world.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk... from Goodreads: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red. It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late. For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart. 

This is one of those books that has been in my TBR pile for some time. This post is a nice reminder of why it's there and I should finally read it! 

AND, something for the little ones on Thanksgiving Day...

Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano... Turkey is in BIG trouble! It's almost Thanksgiving and he doesn't want to be the main course! So, what's a turkey to do?!? A disguise of course! First, he ties a brush to his head and wears a tiny saddle to look like a horse, because no one would eat a horse, right? But the barnyard animals recognize him anyway. Open the pages of this delightful picture book and follow Tom's idea's on out smarting the Farmer with these funny disguises! You're children will enjoy it and so will you! Written with 3 - 7 year olds in mind, this would be a great book to read to the little ones at Thanksgiving!


Do you enjoy reading stories set in far away countries? Have you ever read any set in Turkey? I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving!AND enjoy visiting Turkey through a good book!

Happy Reading... Suzanne

*P.S. Stop by on Thanksgiving Day and listen to a reading of Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano!