A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

Read the full post at - A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk is one of the Top 5 best novels I’ve ever read. I don’t say that lightly. And I almost missed it entirely. I was browsing a vintage bookstore, snapped a photo of a shelf, and asked Claude for recommendations based on two books I’d loved — Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Both are books that share something hard to define: immigrant experience, dark humor, and a kind of earned humanity that sneaks up on you. Claude pointed me toward Pamuk. I’m grateful it did. What It’s About The novel follows Mevlut, a boza seller working the streets of Istanbul across several decades of the 20th century. Boza is a mildly fermented, lightly alcoholic drink with deep roots in Ottoman culture — it thrived partly because it occupied a gray area when alcohol was banned, something like a kombucha that everyone agreed not…