Bookish Thoughts

I really, really wanted to like this book. I've been meaning to read it for years, and I enjoyed the other book by Elif Shafak that I read. But something was off. It might have been that I just wasn't in the right headspace for a sweeping epic like this. It might have been a mistake to try and read it digitally, which is always harder for me. Whatever it was, I never quite clicked with this book. Which is a shame because it was fascinating. It covers a lot of the history of Istanbul, as viewed through the buildings that are built and the wars that are fought to finance those buildings. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime in the future. This is a bit of history I wish I knew more about.

I picked this book up in the airport in Istanbul when we were there in October. I'd been meaning to read Elif Shafak's work for a while, and since she's one of Turkey's most popular authors, it seemed like a good souvenir. I wasn't really sure what it was about, except that my mother-in-law really enjoyed it as an Armenian American. And boy, does this book dive into the Armenian-Turkish conflict. I'm glad I married in to an Armenian family and had some context for this book going into it. Granted, that's all from the Armenian side of things. But it was still good background to have. The book follows two families. One is Armenian-American, living in San Francisco after the grandmother was forced out during the genocide. The other lives in Turkey. The Armenians are focused on the past. Everything they do and believe is shaped by the genocide, even for young Armanoush who is threee generations removed from it. The Turkish family is more focused on the pr...