A Strangeness in My Mind

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
599 pages

Long time since I've read a novel this good! Love the connections between marriage and vocation, religion and family, the struggle to make ends meet and happiness, city and village. These themes are wonderfully connected in the life and loves of a boza seller who moved to Istanbul at age 10 and came to a keen awareness of the meaning of love in his mid 50s. Marvelous!

Elgin Affair

The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity's Greatest Treasures and the Passions It Aroused by Theodore Vrettos, 220 pages

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Lord Elgin, acquired permission from the Ottoman Turks to conduct excavations on the Athenian Acropolis and to take various antiquities back to Britain.  In perhaps the most extensive act of vandalism in history, Lord Elgin used this permission as a blank check to strip the Parthenon of every piece of decoration his team could pry from the structure, including much of the sculpture from the pediments and roughly half of the internal frieze, as well as a column capital and a caryatid from the Erechtheum, both of which were literally sawn off in order to remove them.  Elgin answered protests with the claim that modern Greeks were unworthy of their heritage.

In Vrettos' account, all this is secondary to the Elgins' domestic woes, culminating in a high profile divorce and a lawsuit by the aggrieved husband against Lady Elgin's lover.  Aside from the identity of the actors and the suggestion that Lord Elgin's preoccupation with the marbles may have contributed to his wife's estrangement, there is no connection between the archaeological and the personal dramas.  Exasperatingly, Vrettos includes a 13 page excerpt from a letter by Lady Elgin and a 24 page trial transcript, both of which merely repeat information which is present elsewhere in the narrative.  The incorporation of this filler is sadly consistent with the superficiality of the work as a whole, which reduces "the abduction of antiquity's greatest treasures" to a subplot in favor of a not particularly passionate tale of adultery.

Orhan's Inheritance

Orhan's Inheiritance by Aline Ohansesian
340 Pages


"They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Türkoglu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather, who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs, is found dead in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather's will raises more questions than it answers. Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in a retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather would have left their home to this woman rather than to his own family. Intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There, over many meetings, he will unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards--the story that, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which Orhan's family is built, the story that could unravel Orhan's own future. "

A novel about the effects of the Armenian Genocide that took place during World War I, this book was good and you become invested in the characters.