Book Quotes of the Week

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"A book that is shut is but a block." Thomas Fuller

"If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison

"Reading means borrowing." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

"I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage." Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses

"For friends ... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble." Francis Bacon

"Reading. That place where you're by yourself but you're never alone." N.N.
Find more book quotes here.

Murphy, Jill "Five Minutes Peace"

Murphy, Jill "Five Minutes Peace" - 1986

The Large family consists of Mrs. Large, Mr. Large, Lester, Laura, Luke and baby Lucy (although she is only added in one of the later books). They are a family like yours and mine, only they are elephants. But Mama and Papa have to go through all the troubles human parents have to go through, as well.

In this book, Mrs. Large wants to take a bath and just wants five minutes peace. Does she get them? I don't think I spoil the pleasure of reading the book too much if I mention that she does not.

I have often asked myself whether the authors of children's books write for the parents or the children.  The stories of the Large family are just as funny for both. Children of all ages will enjoy these as well as mum and dad. They belonged to the favourite ones in our family when our boys were little. This is my personal favourite.

Other titles in this series:
Five Minutes' Peace
All in One Piece
A Piece of Cake
A Quiet Night In
Mr. Large in Charge
Laura Bakes a Cake
Luke Tidies Up
Lester Learns a Lesson
Lucy Meets Mr Chilly
Grandpa In Trouble
Sebastian's Sleepover

From the back cover: "All Mrs. Large wants is five minutes' peace from her energetic children, so she heads to the bathtub for some well-deserved quiet time. But the kids want Mom to join in their fun, so they follow her wherever she goes! With a relatable dilemma and hilarious art, Five Minutes' Peace is a favourite among moms."

Cervantes, Miguel de "Don Quixote"

Cervantes, Miguel de "Don Quixote, vols. 1 and 2" (Spanish: El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) - 1605/1615

Even if people haven't read Don Quixote, they know about his horse Rocinante, his faithful servant Sancho Panza and his beloved Dulcinea, his fight with the windmills and several other of his stories.

When reading any classic story, one has to consider the time it was written, the language used at the time. When reading the translation of a classic story, one has to think about that, as well. So, I wasn't too surprised when the language didn't flow as well as if I read a novel by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, for example.

A lot of short stories are told, almost like in "The Decameron" which is about 300 years older. Still, you can tell the medieval character.

This might be one of the reasons why I enjoyed the second part more than the first, I had made my way through all those little stories and the whole thing came together more and more and developed into a large book rather than just little short stories.

Don Quixote lives in a world of his own which makes the story at times almost fantasy-like. However, this is always accompanied with a twinkle in the author's eye so we can all have a good laugh together. We fear with Don Quixote for the outcome of his next task, with Sancho for the outcome of the whole adventure. Will he ever return home to wife and children?

I was I had an edition that was parted in two halves, even they were very heavy. In cases like this I can understand that people tend toward an eReader, even though I normally don't like that at all (see here).

So, if you do like classic books, or large books, you should definitely put this on your reading list. And remember, especially when reading Don Quixote "Things are not always what they may seem."

From the back cover: "Cervantes' tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant, tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games. Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the 'books of chivalry', this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. Cervantes' greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, all suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out to encompass the reader."

Book Quotes of the Week

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"Reading furnishes the mind with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours." John Locke

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” William Faulkner

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” George Orwell

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you." Ernest Hemingway

"Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different". Stephen King

Find more quotes here.

Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

You probably all know by now that I love lists. So, I was very happy when I found this list of the supposedly 100 best novels by Modern Library.

So far, I have read only a few of them but there are quite a few on my TBR pile.

1. Ulysses - James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
4. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
7. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
8. Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
11. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
12. The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler
13. 1984 - George Orwell
14. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
15. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
16. An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
17. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
18. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
19. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
20. Native Son - Richard Wright
21. Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
22. Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) - John Dos Passos
     -- The 42nd Parallel
     -- 1919
     -- The Big Money
24. Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
26. The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
27. The Ambassadors - Henry James
28. Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell
     -- Young Lonigan
     -- The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
     -- Judgment Day
30. The Good Solider - Ford Maddox Ford
31. Animal Farm - George Orwell
32. The Golden Bowl - Henry James
33. Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
35. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
36. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
38. Howard's End - E.M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin
40. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
41. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
42. Deliverance - James Dickey
43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series) - Anthony Powell
     -- A Question of Upbringing
     -- A Buyer's Market
     -- The Acceptance World
     -- At Lady Molly's
     -- Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
     -- The Kindly Ones
     -- The Valley of Bones
     -- The Soldier's Art
     -- The Military Philosophers
     -- Books Do Furnish a Room
     -- Temporary Kings
     -- Hearing Secret Harmonies
44. Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
45. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
46. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
51. The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
53. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
54. Light in August - William Faulkner
55. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
56. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade's End - Ford Maddox Ford
58. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity - James Jones
63. The Wapshot Chronicles - John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
65. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
69. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
70. The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell
     -- Justine
     -- Balthazar
     -- Mountolive
     -- Clea
71. A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
72. A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
73. The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
74. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
77. Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
78. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room With a View - E.M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
81. The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
82. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
85. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
87. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
88. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
89. Loving - Henry Green
90. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
91. Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed - William Kennedy
93. The Magus - John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
95. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
96. Sophie's Choice - William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
99. The Ginger Man - J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington

I agree with Thomas from the blog "My Porch" who mentioned in his list that the list is very white and very male. Maybe we will have to come up with a best list for all women.

So far, I read only 16 of these but it looks like a great chalenge.

Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines

I bought these three books in one edition: "Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines", and two of them are really very short, so I will also review them in one post.
I love dystopian novels (see  here) but had never really read a utopian one.



More, Thomas „Utopia“  - 1516

 Utopia: Less a novel than a "little red book" that states rules for a dream country. Of course, the rules very much apply to the age in which it was written but even then I cannot believe they would have worked. It's like communism, the world could be so wonderful if it worked but there are people who have to live like that and people are not like that. So, I was curious as to what the next book had to tell me, it was written a couple of years later.

 Bacon, Francis „New Atlantis“ (lat. Nova Atlantis) - 1624 

The New Atlantis: Again, a dream of the perfect world that will never really exist. However, at least in this book we get introduced into a society that works like that, an island West of America hat hadn't been discovered but was populated by a model society.








Neville, Henry „The Isle of Pines“ - 1668

Isle of Pines: The author pretends to have found a new island somewhere in the Southern hemisphere (before Australia was discovered) and writes letters about it to Europe. Again, a lot of "phantastic" fiction, something that is never going to happen.
Of course, that's what a Utopian novel describes.





I liked the idea of putting these three books in one edition in order to see the development of the beliefs in Utopia. However, I think by now we have realized that we will never get there. Maybe on a different planet with a different species ... but they'd have to be selfish to begin with in order to survive and then that wouldn't work either. Still, a good introduction into philosophy.
I do prefer dystopian novels, even if they will not happen exactly as the author describes, it highlights the fears of a generation. And if we look at 1984, don't we all have a "telescreen" in our houses? We call it computer. And Big Brother is the internet, even though we think that we can give it as much or as little information about us as we want. Dream on!

From the back cover: "First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it remains a foundational text in philosophy and political theory. Preeminent More scholar Clarence H. Miller does justice to the full range of More's rhetoric in this new translation. Professor Miller includes a helpful introduction that outlines some of the important problems and issues that Utopia raises, and also provides informative commentary to assist the reader throughout this challenging and rewarding exploration of the meaning of political community.

The New Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon is a utopian novel written in the early 17th century. This classic book depicts the mythical land, Bensalem, believed to be located off the western coast of the continent of America. Bacon recounts the description of a wise man on the details of their system of experimentation and method of recognition of inventions and their inventors. This is key work on the idea of an Atlantis and is a popular work by one of the most important English writers. This title should be read by those interested in beliefs of Atlantis, and those who are fans of the writings of Francis Bacon.

The Isle of Pines: The Isle of Pines is a book by Henry Neville published in 1668. An example of Arcadian fiction, the book presents its story through an Epistolary frame: a "Letter to a friend in London, declaring the truth of his Voyage to the East Indies" written by a fictional Dutchman "Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten," concerning the discovery of an island in the southern hemisphere, populated with the descendants of a small group of castaways."

Shriver, Lionel “We need to talk about Kevin”

Shriver, Lionel “We need to talk about Kevin” - 2003

What is going through the mind of a mass murderer? What is going through the mind of his mother? This book is trying to answer that question.

Eva is writing letters. Letters trying to explain to her husband how she never got close to their son. An interesting approach to the problem.

Being the mother of two sons myself, it was very hard for me to read this book and, yet, I couldn't put it down. Personally, I never met a child like that. I can hardly believe they exist. And, if he was really, how come she didn't get any help at all, nobody noticed that she couldn't do it on her own?

The marriage between the two seemed doomed from the beginning. And we all know that it is the worst idea to have a child in such a circumstance. A child, any child, will change the life of their parents, and they need to stick together in order to get through this. Even an uncomplicated child has sleepless nights, even the slowest child will try to "train" their parents and if they don't have a common rule, the child notices that straight away and will play the two against each other.

I don't think it's Eva's fault that her son turned out the way he turned out. I also don't think it's the father's fault but if he had been a little more understanding, things might have gone a different way. Of course, he probably sees it completely different and we would learn more if he had been able to tell his part of the story, as well.

Anyway, Lionel Shriver managed to get under the skin of both the mother and the son. I can't believe she has no children of her own, she described everything so well.

Even though the book itself was a shocker already, the end is even more shocking. I won't spoil it here for anyone who hasn't read the book, yet, but I did not think this was going to happen. And, yet, despite everything that has happened, it is very hopeful that Eva visits Kevin in prison and even wants him to come back to her after he has done his sentence.

Definitely a book everyone should read.

From the back cover: "The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails."