Top Ten Tuesday ~ High Page Count

"Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created on the blog "The Broke and the Bookish". It was created because they are particularly fond of lists. It is now hosted by Jana from That Artsy Reader Girl.

Since I am just as fond of them as they are, I jump at the chance to share my lists with them! Have a look at their page, there are lots of other bloggers who share their lists here.

This week's topic is Books with a High Page Count (Share those doorstop books!))

Good thing that I do the chunky book challenge, so I could find my longest books quickly. Maybe some of you have a different page count (especially if I read the German translation of a foreign book), depending on the edition. But these books all have more than 1,000 pages.

Tolstoy, Leo "War and Peace" (RUS: Война и мир = Woina i mir) - 1868/69 - 2,099 pages

Rutherfurd, Edward "Sarum: the Novel of England" - 1987 - 1,376 pages

Mak, Geert "In Europe. Travels Through the Twentieth Century" (NL: In Europa: Reizen door de twintigste eeuw) - 2004 - 1,351 pages

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Brothers Karamazov" (RUS: Братья Карамазовы) - 1879-80 - 1,249 pages

Follett, Ken "World Without End" - 2007 - 1,237 pages

Undset, Sigrid "The Magic Mountain" (GE: Der Zauberberg) - 1924 - 1,120 pages

Dickens, Charles "Bleak House" - 1852/53 - 1,088 pages

Schami, Rafik "The Dark Side of Love" (GE: Die dunkle Seite der Liebe) - 2004 - 1,043 pages

Clarke, Susanna "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" - 2004 - 1,024 pages

I don't think I need to mention that I love large books. The bigger the better!!!

📚 Happy Reading 📚

Sullivan, Margaret C. "The Jane Austen Handbook"

Sullivan, Margaret C. "The Jane Austen Handbook. A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World" - 2007

Part of my #Reading Austen project is to read a book by the author in the uneven months and a book about the author and/or her books in the even ones. This month, it was a book about her time with a lot of background information to why some characters acted the way they did. There were a lot of lovely illustrations and even more funny allusions to the novels.

I can heartily recommend this little book to any Jane Austen fan. Whether you have read her books or watched them on TV or in the cinemas (hopefully both), you will be delighted by this. And if time travelling was a thing, you could even learn how to behave in Regency times without anyone noticing you're from the future.

From the back cover:

"Jane Austen published her first novel in 1811, but today she's more popular than ever. Film adaptations of her books are nominated for Academy Awards. Chick lit bestsellers are based on her plots. And a new biopic of Austen herself Becoming Jane arrives in theaters this spring.

For all those readers who dream about living in Regency England, The Jane Austen Handbook offers step-by-step instructions for proper comportment in the early nineteenth century. You'll discover:

How to Become an Accomplished Lady
How to Run a Great House
How to Indicate Interest in a Gentleman Without Seeming Forward
How to Throw a Dinner Party
How to Choose and Buy Clothing

Full of practical directions for navigating the travails of Regency life, this charming illustrated book also serves as a companion for present-day readers, explaining the English class system, currency, dress, and the nuances of graceful living."

Book Quotes

"Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go." Clay Christensen

That's a quote that gets me thinking.

"I don't think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn't one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones." Elena Ferrante

Definitely. Those are the best books.

"Reading is not a value in itself! Much more nonsense has been printed since Gutenberg than poor television has been able to broadcast in its 60 years of existence." Helmut Thoma, Austrian media manager

Also true, if you always read the same stuff, you are going nowhere.

Find more book quotes here.

#ThrowbackThursday. August-October 2014

I've been doing ThrowbackThursdays for a while but I noticed that I wrote a lot of reviews in a short time when I first started. So, I post more than one Throwback every week. These are my reviews from August to October 2014.

Gaarder, Jostein "Sophie's World" (Norwegian: Sofies verden) - 1991

This is not a book you will want to read within a couple of days. There is a lot of information in this book. We could call it a philosophy class. 

McCulloch, Colleen "The Thorn Birds" - 1977
An epic saga. The story of the Cleary family over two generations coming from New Zealand to Australia in the early Twenties of the last century and also moves to London and Rome. But the main story is told in New Zealand, how a family settles in a strange country and goes through all the hardships you can imagine.

Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud) "Anne of Green Gables" - 1908
An orphan girl is taken in by a childless couple and she really loves both her new parents as well as the school and the neighbours and everything but still gets into a lot of trouble all the time. The novel is both humorous as well as serious.

See, Lisa "Peony in Love" - 2007 

This is a magical story about a young girl called Peony who lives in the seventeenth century.

Top 5 Tuesday ~ Dinner Party

Top Five Tuesday was originally created by Shanah @ Bionic Book Worm, but is now hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads. To participate, link your post back to Meeghan’s blog or leave a comment on her weekly post. I found this on Davida's Page @ The Chocolate Lady.

And here is a list of all the topics for the rest of the year.

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This week’s topic is Characters to Invite to a Dinner Party. 

Tough question. I would love to invite all my favourite authors to a dinner party and ask them about their books. But I can only have five. Our dinner parties are usually a lot larger, so it is not a good decision for me to be made. We always invite everyone we can think of and often end up with 20+. Well, this is not a normal dinner party, so I understand.

So, I thought I'll invite those authors that have a special birthday, either themselves or their book. And I have tried to find a dinner-related clue.

Mann, Thomas "Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family" (GE: Buddenbrooks) - 1901

Thomas Mann was born 6 June 1875, so he would have been 150 years in  2025. There are a lot of dinners in his book.

Pool, Daniel "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" - 1993
Well, I don't know Daniel Pool and this is the only book I read by him. But I guess you all know why this book is on this list. Exactly:
It's Jane Austen's 250^th birthday on 16 December (see #Reading Austen project) and just would have loved to meet her. Of course, many many dinners in her books ("at least three courses" LOL).

Scott, Mary "Dinner Doesn’t Matter" - 1957

The dinners in Mary Scott's are not great dinner parties but all of the books in her Susan & Larry series have meal in their title and since I always loved Mary, I would be delighted to have her at my dinner party.

Trollope, Anthony "The Way We Live Now" - 1875

Another birthday, this time that of the book, 150 years since it was published. And, of course, no book by Anthony Trollope without a formal dinner, either.

Woolf, Virginia "Mrs. Dalloway" - 1925

And now we come to a 100^th birthday, Mrs. Dalloway. I believe she would have thrown a huge party for that.

Unfortunately, all my authors have passed away. I mean, no wonder, with those birthdays. Maybe I should get someone to stand in for them, like Miss Sophie in "Dinner for One". I hope I found the correct link but if not, google it on YouTube, this one might be blocked in your country.

* * *

Happy Reading! 🍲🥗🍖🥔🍨

📚 📚 📚

Top Ten Tuesday ~ Cheer you up

 

"Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created on the blog "The Broke and the Bookish". It was created because they are particularly fond of lists. It is now hosted by Jana from That Artsy Reader Girl.

Since I am just as fond of them as they are, I jump at the chance to share my lists with them! Have a look at their page, there are lots of other bloggers who share their lists here.

This week's topic is Books Guaranteed to Put an End to Your Book Slump (Which books would you recommend to someone (it’s me, I’m someone) dealing with the dreaded book slump? No book is grabbing their attention or making them excited to sit down and read and they are suffering for it.)

Oh, interesting. And tough. It really depends on what kind of books you like. Let me think of some funny and easy reads that even I enjoyed. They should be great for a lot of people.

Bryson, Bill "Notes from a Small Island" - 1995

Bythell, Shaun "The Diary of a Bookseller" - 2017 

Ephron, Nora "The Most of Nora Ephron" - 2014

Grisham, John "Skipping Christmas: A Novel" - 2001

Johnson, Maureen; Cooper, Jay "Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village" - 2021

Khorsandi, Shappi "A Beginner's Guide to Acting English" - 2009

Roach, Mary "My Planet. Finding Humor in the Oddest Places" - 2013

Rosendorfer, Herbert "Letters Back to Ancient China" (GE: Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit) - 1983

Trotter, Derek "Del Boy" (Family of John Sullivan) "He Who Dares" - 2015

Wodehouse, P.G. "The World of Jeeves" (Jeeves #2-4: The Inimitable Jeeves #2, Carry On, Jeeves #3, Very Good, Jeeves! #4) - 1923/1925/1930

📚 Happy Reading 📚

Pierce, Patricia "Jurassic Mary"

Pierce, Patricia "Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the primeval monsters" - 2006

Ever since I read "Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier, I've been interested in the life of Mary Anning who lived from 1799 to 1847 and was the first person who discovered dinosaur bones.

And this was on my wishlist, so my son bought it for me. It was just as nice as I had hoped.

A thorough account of the life of a young girl who would become one of the most important figure in discovering dinosaurs. But, because she was only a woman, she didn't have a lot to say. Even though there were some men who acknowledged her, most of them only used her findings for their won. She didn't really get any recognition. What else is new?

From the back cover:

"Spinster Mary Anning, uneducated and poor, was of the wrong sex, wrong class and wrong religion, but fate decreed that she was exactly the right person in the right place and time to pioneer the emerging science of palaeontology, the study of fossils. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary learned to collect fossils with her cabinet-maker father. The unstable cliffs and stealthy sea made the task dangerous but after her father died the sale of fossils sustained her family. Mary’s fame started as an infant when she survived a lightning strike that killed the three adults around her. Then, aged twelve, she caught the public’s attention when she unearthed the skeleton of a ‘fish lizard’ or Ichthyosaurus. She later found the first Plesiosaurus giganteus, with its extraordinary long neck associated with the Loch Ness monster, and, dramatically, she unearthed the first, still rare, Dimorphodon macronyx, a frightening ‘flying dragon’ with hand claws and teeth.Yet her many discoveries were announced to the world by male geologists like the irrepressible William Buckland and Sir Henry De La Beche and they often received the credit. In Jurassic Mary Patricia Pierce redresses this imbalance, bringing to life the extraordinary, little-known story of this determined and pioneering woman."