Clarissa's Blog

I found a website in Ukraine where I can buy electronic versions of books in Ukrainian. I’m ridiculously happy.

Obviously, it’s easy to find pirated copies but I couldn’t live with myself if I cheated Ukrainian authors out of well-deserved income. A new, recently published novel costs between $2 and $3.50, so it’s a steal as it is.

I don’t want to persecute my regular readers with detailed discussions of Ukrainian books that haven’t been translated, so I want to open a different blog where I’ll post about my readings in Ukrainian. I looked around, and literally nobody is doing it on a serious, consistent basis. As a result, the book market in Ukraine is filled with expensive, translated – and normally extremely woke – garbage when books by national writers, which by their very nature are the opposite of woke, languish in undeserved obscurity.

Yes, my Ukrainian is currently in a pretty bad shape but I’m nothing if not obsessive. I’m memorizing vocabulary lists to recover the knowledge I had 20 years ago. To my great shame, my only published article of literary criticism in Ukrainian was originally in Russian. My father had to translate it for me. So I have a lot of work ahead of me to learn to write well.

Then I’ll come here and gossip about my experiences as a Ukrainian-language blogger.