Svetlana's Reads and Views

  Name of Book: Caledonian Road  Author: Andrew O'Hagan  ISBN: 9781324074878 Publisher: W.W. Norton Type of book: Classicism, 2021-2022, performative allyship, gender, parent/child relationships, friends, illegal immigration, LGBtQ+ relationships, art, marijuana, dark web, Eastern European, gang, Robin Hood, technology, elite, downtrodden, death  Year it was published: 2024 Summary: From the author of Mayflies, an irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel - the story of one man's epic fall from grace. May 2021. London. Campbell Flynn - art historian and celebrity intellectual - is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn't take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Manghasa, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which exc...

  Title of the book: The Oak and the Larch; A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires  Author: Sophie Pinkham  Publisher: W.W. Norton Publishing Date: 2026 ISBN: 978-1-324-03668-5 Summary: A majestic cultural and environmental history that reveals how forests have made—and resisted—Russia’s many empires. From the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the steppes of Central Asia, Russia’s forests account for nearly one-fifth of the world’s wooded lands. The Oak and the Larch is the first-ever English-language exploration of this vast expanse—a dazzling environmental history of Russia that offers an urgent new understanding of the nature of Russian power, and of Russia’s ideas of itself. Inspired by the majestic oak, which towers over the country’s western heartland, and the hardy Siberian larch, an emblem of survival in the east, award-winning scholar Sophie Pinkham’s magisterial account spans centuries, revealing how forests have nourished ancient Siberian indig...