Top Ten Tuesday; Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelves

It's Tuesday, which means it's probably time for yet another Top Ten Tuesday post courtesy of That Artsy Reader Girl and today's topic is the most recent additions to my bookshelves.

Here's the ten most recent additions that's placed on my bookshelves, and it's a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

The Romantic Poets

Description from Goodreads

Feelings come alive through the words of the Romantic poets.

Romanticism gained traction in the late 1700s as writers moved away from the intellectualism of the Enlightenment and toward more emotional and natural themes. The major works of the movement’s six most famous poets—William Wordsworth, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and William Blake—are represented in this handsome Word Cloud Classics volume, The Romantic Poets. One of the largest and most influential artistic movements in history, Romanticism valued intuition and pastoralism, and its themes are well represented in the verse of its stars.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Description from Goodreads

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada

Description from Goodreads

A love story to climbing all the way down a book's rope, free diving to its bottom, and then resurfacing at its close, ready to breathe a different kind of air.

Nanako Hanada's life is in crisis. Recently separated from her husband, living in youth hostels and internet cafes, her work is going no better. Book sales at the eccentric Village Vanguard bookstore in Tokyo, which Nanako manages, are dwindling. Fallen out of love in all aspects of her life, Nanako realises how narrow her life has become, with no friends outside of her colleagues, and no hobbies apart from reading and arranging books.

That's when Nanako, in a bid to inject some excitement into her life, joins a meet-up site where people meet for 30-minute bursts to find romance, build a network, or just share ideas. She describes herself as a sexy bookseller who will give you a personalised book recommendation. In the year that follows, Nanako meets an eclectic range of strangers, some of whom wanted more than just a book, others she became real friends with.

Written with a subtle but sharp sense of humour, The Bookshop Woman is a heart-warming book about a bookseller's self-discovery. It offers a glimpse into bookselling in Japan and the quirky side of Tokyo and its people. Books, once again, offer inspiration and serve as channels for human communication.

Days at the Torunka Café by Satoshi Yagisawa

Description from Goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of the Morisaki Bookshop novels comes a charming and poignant story set at a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles.

Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.

While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives where we feel lost—and how we find our way again.

Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie

Description from Goodreads

A beautiful novel detailing the life and loves of a Pakistani girl living in the U.S.

Aliya may not have inherited her family's patrician looks, but she is as much a prey to the legends of her family that stretch back to the days of Timur Lang. Aristocratic and eccentric-the clan has plenty of stories to tell, and secrets to hide.

Like salt and saffron, which both flavor food but in slightly different ways, it is the small, subtle differences that cause the most trouble in Aliya's family. The family problems and scandals caused by these minute differences echo the history of the sub-continent and the story of Partition.

A superb storyteller, Kamila Shamsie writes with warmth and gusto. Through the many anecdotes about Pakistani family life, she hints at the larger tale of a divided nation. Spanning the subcontinent from the Muslim invasions to the Partition, this is a magical novel about the shapes stories can take- turning into myths, appearing in history books and entering into our lives.

Ulyghur Poems edited and translated by Aziz Isa Elkun

Descripton from Goodreads

The Uyghur people of Central Asia have a long and distinguished tradition of poetry - indeed, their first oral epic was circulating as early as the 2nd century BCE. In the medieval period Sufi poetry flourished, embracing Persian forms such as the ghazal, which spoke eloquently of beauty, love, loss and separation. A major poet, Alshir Navayi (1441­-1501) fully established classical Turkic or Chagatai as a perfect vehicle for poetic expression. Some contemporary poets continue to find inspiration within the traditional forms, while others experiment with a freer style of verse.Uyghur poetry reflects the magnificent natural landscapes where the Uyghurs have lived for two millennia - endless steppes, soaring mountain ranges and mysterious deserts, crossed by the historic Silk Road. It is also shaped by their turbulent past, caught between warring empires or marauding warlords - and their deeply troubled present.The Uyghurs form a minority in China, where the government is now making a systematic attempt to erase their language and culture. Many intellectuals have been imprisoned, and many poets are now writing from exile, including the editor and translator of this volume, Aziz Isa Elkun, who lives in London. Uyghur Poems is not only a celebration of an ancient and vibrant poetic tradition, but also a vital witness to a culture under threat.

Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk

Description from Goodreads

Apricots of Donbas is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk's voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems' artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.

Scottish Poems edited by Gerard Carruthers

Description from Goodreads

In time for Burns Night (the annual celebration of Scottish culture that takes place on January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns)—a sweeping literary tour of Scotland from the Middle Ages to the present, the only single-volume collection of Scottish poetry currently available.

Scottish poetry has a long and distinguished history in three languages—English, Scots, and Gaelic—and all are well represented here. The most renowned and beloved poets—Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Muriel Spark among them—mingle with their lesser-known but equally distinctive compatriots, including many of those who have emerged from the recent Scottish poetry renaissance. The poems are organized by from matters of the heart to subjects spiritual and philosophical to the poetry of place. All of the verse is marked by a characteristic energy, wit, satire, and passionate lyrical intensity, and all demonstrates the power of art that proudly emanates from, but is never limited by, the place of its birth.

Books and Libraries edited by Andrew D. Scrimgeour

Descrption from Goodreads

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed.

Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere, commanding their love, earning their veneration. For Emily Dickinson they are frigates that 'take us Lands away'; for Wordsworth they are 'a substantial world, both pure and good'; Alberto Rios calls them 'the deli offerings of civilization itself'. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: libraries where one can best hear "a choir of authors murmuring inside their books," as Billy Collins has it; bookshops, especially second-hand ones, 'too small for the worlds they hold, where words that sing you to sleep, stories that stalk your dreams, open like windows in a wall' (Gillian Clarke).

The poets collected here include Catullus, Horace, T'ao Ch'ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Marvell, Blake, Pope and Keats; more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.

Beat Poets editedby Carmela Ciuraru

Description from Goodreads

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range.

The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones's plaintive "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" and Bob Kaufman's stirring "Abomunist Manifesto" appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers.

Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.