Good Morning, Sunshine

Today was a beautiful day with mild weather and beautiful sunshine. My father is getting better and better, and I see him smiling and laughing and that's about the best that can happen to us. Our relationship is swell with my little sister, we laugh a lot, and I think she adores us, her older sisters. She wants hair as long and beautiful as my sister's, and wants to be as clever as me, or so she says. She's found a little reading companion boy in her class, who inspires her to read more and more books, and she's head over heels into Harry Potter. She's very good at finding robes, shawls, hats, and other accessories at home to make fancy dresses. She dresses up as Harry Potter, and marches hither and thither, making all of us laugh. In addition, she spends hours memorising spells from the HP books.

I haven't had the time to write recently, but I've read plenty of books, so let's get down to writing about them. The second book I read this year was A hóoroszlán meséi. It's a collection of Tibetan folk tales translated from English and Tibetan. I got it as a Christmas present from one of my best friends. It came as a surprise in the sense that I don't often read tales and children's books, but she does. It isn't a book for children, though. Or not exclusively. The tales reflect a view of the world which is quite different from ours. Sometimes the characters win by luck or cleverness, at other times they just lose. Some stories end too suddenly for me, and the titles are not too complicated (or enigmatic). Other than that they are definitely worth reading, and I don't think I've read anything similar to it. It was interesting to see this world, even so when a tale resembled something I had already known from somewhere else. For example, there was a story about a flying horse, which reminded me of one of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights.
The third book I read was The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, which I'm going to write about in a separate post.

The fourth book was Expander, which is a collection of short stories (tárca in Hungarian) by four Hungarian contemporary authors: Dragomán György, Háy János, Parti Nagy Lajos, and Tóth Krisztina. These stories were published one by one in 2010 in a Hungarian newspaper. The ones by Tóth Krisztina are individual chapters taken from her later novel, Pixel, and from the stories I guess that was the case with the other writers, too. In the case of Parti Nagy I'm not sure because there aren't any characters in common within his selected short stories. I can't say much about the book. I've already known and liked Tóth and Parti Nagy. I might read Háy's A gyerek (The Kid) because I guess the stories were taken from that novel. It was on a reading list for a seminar in my last year at university but I didn't read it back then because I was doing my teaching practice at the time. This book was useful for me in the sense that it drew my attention to the beauty and wit of Hungarian literature.
So now I'm reading Az ajtó (The Door) by Szabó Magda.