A whole episode essentially at reader request! Thank you, friend and subscriber. Suggestions and submissions are always welcome. This week is all about the women of the frozen north, because it’s cold and dark outside and wow the research for this made me exceptionally pleased to be in a country that is not that northern, in an age of widespread central heating.

Did you know that Margaret Atwood wrote a series of poems based on the diaries of Susanna Moodie, an early immigrant to Canada? I’ve only skimmed the diaries so far but it sounds – as one might expect – like a hard life, shading into ghastly. Nevertheless:

Atwood traces the change — the growth and development — in Moodie’s response to the land. She moves from her initial alienation to her attitude at the end where, as Atwood explains in the Afterword, “Susanne Moodie has finally turned herself inside out, and has become the spirit of the land she once hated.”

http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol02/bilan.htm

Tove Jansson! She was great, so are her happy Moomin creations, and so, it seems, was her mother:

We learn that her mother, a clergyman’s daughter and the model for Moominmamma, was a crack shot and a horse rider who, before getting married, reportedly performed in a circus attended by Swedish royalty. The whole Hammarsten side of the family, it seems, somehow a fusion of scientists, thrill-seekers, and storytellers, left a strong impression.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-hands-that-made-the-moomins

I am sure you that you, like me, are busy making your 2015 reading plans. If the book list episode of several weeks ago did not meet all of your needs, how about this list of Russian women authors – including one from Siberia (it does not get much colder than that)

Nina Gorlanova born in 1947, grew up in the Siberian city of Perm where she lives still and where most of her stories and novels are set. By returning to one and the same place, she creates a somewhat fantastic world populated with curious characters and possessing its own mythology. The life in her invented Perm is squalid but merry, risky but indestructible.

http://www.glas.msk.su/glas%2030.html

Enjoy your weekends, everyone!

Alex.