I found this book on my shelf and was delighted -- no idea how it got there (okay, so I might have a book-buying addiction -- or so I'm told). I knew it was on someone else's wishlist and was glad to be able to send it along after reading it.

This book was on my wishlist for quite some time and I really enjoyed reading it. It was more religious in nature than I was expecting, but still a gem. Nonna was a very wise woman and I wish I had known her, although I also feel in some ways as if I did. My favorite tidbit and one that gives you a sense of the whole book: "We are always expected to do what is needed in the time given us. God knows and keeps the other times for Himself. If we did everything, who would need God? If God did everything, who would need us?"

This book is on its way to Finland. I am choosing to use today, when we are experiencing a change of leadership in my country which fills many of us with sadness and fear, to send good things into the world.

Any future reader or recipient of this book is encouraged to leave a journal entry here on the BookCrossing site to let prior readers know the fate of the book. You can make an anonymous entry without joining the BookCrossing movement, but if you are interested in joining, it is a free and spam-free community where your contact information is not shared with others. Best of all, members receive private messages via e-mail from books like this one when those books are journaled, allowing for long-term relationships between books and readers.

Thanks 6of8 for the two books you sent. So far these are the only good things that have come out your election. Not a week has gone by since the change of leadership and already new anti-abortion laws, gas-pipes through protected nature areas and water-torture are "in" and Obama-care, freedom of speach and fight against global warming are "out". I thought you were going to get a new Hitler, but I was mistaken. Stalin is back. I wonder how long it will take until somebody shoots him.

Began to read this already as I might know somebody who could take this book to a faraway trip.
I'm learning new things about skunks. If Jesus would have allowed one to protect him, we would have had to rewrite history.

One week gone. 207 left of Trump Power.
The US kindly celebrated the 50-year-old Finland in 1967 in the form of a special stamp. I guess there won't be a new stamp this year, when we turn 100, as from now on it is America First.

Nearly done. I have never met my grandfathers, as they were both dead when I was born. My father's mother came to live with us for seven years, but I can't remember much about her, except that she was very absent-minded. Mother has told dozens of stories of those years, as granny wasn't the easiest person to get along with, but my own recollections are few.
I spent a lot of time with my maiden aunt and mother's mother who lived together, but it was Auntie Mia who organized everything, made food, played with me, taught me to ski and took me to places. Granny more or less just existed. Can't remember her telling any stories or being particularly nice. She had a funny smell which I thought was due to her old age, but my mother and Mia never smelled like that even when old but to my great surprise I've every now and then sensed the same smell coming from - MYSELF! Am I old now? Can a smell be hereditary and jump over one generation?
So far I've liked best the chapter when the beggar came to their door. My Mom did just what Nonna did. She didn't give them money, but if they said they were hungry, she made sandwiches to them and gave a banana to go with it. It is odd how the same upbringing can make two out of three siblings very 'proud' (in the negative sense of the word, as in looking down at others) and one humble and compassionate. Auntie Mia and Uncle Heikki acted like they were royalty and treated lesser people like they were trash. Mum was a bum magnet; whenever we stood waiting for a tram and an alcoholic came along wanting to have a chat, no matter how big a crowd there was, it was always Mom he walked up to. And if a drunk had slipped on the pavement, it was Mom who was asking if he was all right and helping him up. When I was little I wished she would be more like Mia, who nobody bothered when she put on her cold stare. Mia would never have made sandwiches to beggars, either.
Mia was the first born and a real mother's (granny's) help. Mum was clumsy, a dreamer, and not that interested in cooking or housework. Mia was praised by all elderly people, how good a wife and a mother she would be one day. Well, she never married as she never found a good enough man to meet her high standard. It must have been hard on Mia that her baby sister, a no-good in household work, married and had four children. I have to say that Mia had a much better rapport with small children than Mom. If you put Mia in a room with children she would be sitting on the floor in no time with all the kids around her. No wonder Mom used to send us over to visit Mia and granny when we were small. We stayed for several nights and Mia came up with nice things to do.
I slept in the same room with Mia who always slept naked. She said nightgowns stragle her. She was otherwise rather old-fashioned, so this stroke me as exotic when I was young. I have always been a night-owl, so I begged her to tell stories as I wasn't sleepy at all. She told stories about times when my brothers were small and what we had done when younger, but if I had to repeat even one story, I would not remember it. That's one thing why I think this book is extraordinary, how come this boy remembers everything in such a detail? Or perhaps he doesn't and it is he who is the good storyteller in the family?
Mia passed away on Finnish Independence Day 2015, at the age of 94. She had been unconscious for a couple of days and we knew it was only a question of when it would happen. I said to Mom that if Mia knows anything of this world anymore, she will die on Independence Day. Mom said I was silly, like people could decide when they die. I rememered the old Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man, where the Indian Chief tried to die a few times as he thought it would be a good day to die and I said: "Let's see." It would be so her style, very patriotic and everybody would remember the date correctly, all flags would be up and in the evening everybody would light a candle, because that is what Finns do on Independence Day. And indeed, she died in the evening, just as the television broadcast ended from the president's castle where the yearly Independence Day Party was held.
My cousin gave a nice speach at her memorial service, saying that Mia was the family's Facebook before Facebook was invented. She kept touch with relatives near and distant and told everybody else who was having a baby, graduating, moving, getting a new job and what not, so we more or less knew what was going on with cousins once , twice or three times removed. The clever thing was that she didn't ask several people over at the same time or encourage us to phone each other directly - she wanted to be the important centre person.The last years which Mia spent in an old folk's home (making the nurses' life hell as she still wanted to sleep naked and there was a problem with continence) we didn't hear what was happening to relatives anymore, so at the memorial service we decided to form a Facebook group which would replace Mia. I have met online and in person relatives I had never seen before, only heard stories of. A group of female cousins and second cousins, named The Gigglers, have started to meet at somebody's home, wining and dining until the wee small hours. Family skeletons have been dug up and Mia is probably rolling around in her grave, because part of being proud of the family meant also that skeletons were never mentioned. It has been really interesting and educational. THOSE stories would really make a good book (series).

Pic: Auntie Mia when young. And a bottle of Mia wine I always take to these gatherings, although she would not approve.

Not a day goes by without news from Trumpenistan. Trump holds on to his election promise of building a wall on the Mexican border - except now he says the Mexicans have to pay for it. If he wasn't (already) on such bad terms with the Chinese leader he would get good hints on how to build a Great Wall.

The end. I've removed the sequel of this book from my wishlist, because it said on the cover that these are the best stories of Nonna. I don't want read the sequel, if it is put up of leftovers.
I'm not a religious person, but the stories were good enough not to bother me. They were good stories and happened to use religion as their core.

Rationing, I've heard all about it. Mom is a war veteran, aged 92. She wasn't old enough to do the work of a proper nurse, but she was a so called Little Sister, one of those who got all the dirty and less glamorous hospital duties.
She almost died on the first day of Winter War, which began on the last of November in 1939 when Soviet Army bombed Helsinki without any warning or declaration of war. She was 14 years old and boarding a bus on the bus station when a bomb hit nearby. The blast was so forceful she lost her hearing for a while, run for cover, all windows had scattered and the bus she was about to take burned to a carcass.
Whenever we watched a movie where there was the air-raid signal she became shaky.

She moved to an old folk's home last year and we are still slowly emptying her flat. She had kept these sugar rationing coupons (pic) which had belonged to her aunt and were from 1921. The shortage after WW1 was still effecting people then.

I promised Nonna would travel far... A Finnish bookcrosser living in Uganda was visiting Helsinki and took Nonna along. They have a 'book club' there, but they get books mostly by hand delivery when somebody travels somewhere as for example Amazon won't deliver books there by post! Let's hope they will journal Nonna.
Ipsu, please tell us how the book club originally got started, that was a fun story.

The president of Uganda could teach Donald some tricks, like how to cut off the Internet whenever there is political turmoil or an election taking place.

Edit: Look at the map 6of8, our Nonna is heading there! Don't know about you, but that is further than I'll ever be. I'd say Wau, but noticed that Wau is a city in Ethiopia...

Thank you Karjakko! The book is now with me and heading to my suitcase. In due time I hope we both will arrive safely to Kampala.