Monday 18 March 2024

Harris, Robert "Fatherland"

Harris, Robert "Fatherland" - 1992

What an awful thought. Hitler resp. the Nazis had won the war. I always say, the Germans didn't lose the war, that were the Nazis. The Germans effectively won the war. In this book (and in various others, like my favourite "The Children's War") we can all see why.

The story itself concentrates on one particular case. A policemen who is not a fan of the Nazis but still has to wear their uniform for his job, tries to find the secret behind a murder. And with that, he could transform the whole world.

We need people like that everywhere, people who don't just blindly follow some dicatators, even if it is an advantage for them.

I think, right now is the right time to read this book again. Right now, where the Right is on the rise in many, many countries. Too many, if you ask me. How can people forget what it was? Even if you haven't lived during the war, most of us haven't, lets be honest. My parents would have been ninety had they still lived. And they were five when the Nazis were elected, so anyone responsible for the regime must be about a hundred. Not many of them alive anymore. But we have to remember what our parents or grandparents told us and see where we are heading if we elect those idiots that tell us the foreigners are our enemies. Nope, those who want to abolish our hard-earned democracy are.

We should all be happy that the war ended the way it did, this book shows us what could have been had it been different.

From the back cover:

"April 1964.

The naked body of an old man floats in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. In one week it will be Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday. A terrible conspiracy is starting to unravel…

What if Hitler had won?
"

Thursday 14 March 2024

#ThrowbackThursday. My first books by Wally Lamb

I have read quite a few books by Wally Lamb and I hope he will write more. These are the first three books I read by him and I have wanted to read more and more ever since.
 
Lamb, Wally "She's Come Undone" - 1997

Mother-daughter relationship, religion, death and coming to terms with it, obesity, self-delusion, women-men relationships, change in our culture, this book has it all. A lot of familiarity with the characters, sometimes you have to laugh about that, sometimes you feel "touché".

If you like a book that addresses problems and is fun to read, this will be a book for you. I liked it a lot.
Lamb, Wally "I know this much is true" - 1998

This is a very moving book, wonderful and awful at the same time. It's incredible how much a person can bear if they have to. Dominick has to deal with so many issues and there is no-one who can help him here but himself. The author has a very talented way of describing people in any kind of despair. His accounts are very emphatic, you really can understand the characters. I loved this.
Lamb, Wally "The Hour I First Believed" - 2008

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, 1999. Caelum Quirk is a teacher at that school, his wife works there as a school nurse. He is in Connecticut visiting his aunt after her stroke while his wife hides in the school hoping not to be killed by the two students to are out on a warpath.

This book is not about those unfortunate students and teachers that were killed on that terrible day, it is about those "lucky" enough to survive, those that got away.

Read my original reviews here, here and here.

Monday 11 March 2024

Brontë, Charlotte "The Professor"

Brontë, Charlotte "The Professor" - 1857

This novel has been on my wishlist for quite a while. It was recommended to me by another blogger who, like me, has also lived in Brussels and from her I learned that they have a Brontë society there now. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about that when I lived there but they might have started this after my time.

Anyway, if you have not read anything by Charlotte Brontë, you definitely must have heard of Jane Eyre, her most popular book, probably the most popular one of all the books by any of the Brontë sisters.

I have yet to find a book by any of them that I don't like at all, they are all fascinating and gripping. Just as this one. I must admit, I might like it even more because it takes place in Brussels but it would have been just as interesting had the protagonist lived elsewhere.

What makes this book as interesting as her others, you have the feeling you are in the midst of the story, even though it took place almost two centuries ago. It is so lively. You can feel the problems of the protagonists, you understand how difficult it was for women in former times and how much as changed and how much hasn't.

Unfortunately, like Jane Austen, the Brontës all died far too early.

From the back cover:

"Charlotte Bronte's first novel, The Professor, is narrated from the viewpoint of an ambitious and self-made man.

Rejecting his aristocratic inheritance William Crimsworth goes to Brussels to find his fortune. He takes a job teaching at a boarding school for young ladies, where he begins a flirtation with Zoraide Reuter, who, out of jealousy, attempts to frustrate his courtship of Frances Henri, an attractive young woman determined to make her way in the world.

In
The Professor Charlotte Bronte holds up to scrutiny the Victorian ideals of self-help and individualism. The result is an unusual love story, and a novel profoundly critical of a society in which the relationships between men and women are reduced to power struggles."

Monday 4 March 2024

Spell the Month in Books ~ March

        

Reviews from the Stacks

I found this on one of the blogs I follow, Books are the New Black who found it at One Book More. It was originally created by Reviews from the Stacks, and the idea is to spell the month using the first letter of book titles.

March: Caffeine (National Caffeine Month – Books with a beverage on the cover or in the title)

It was not that easy to find books that fit the topic but I managed, somehow:

MARCH
M
Clarke, Stephen "Merde actually" (aka In the Merde for Love) - 2006
Paul West, the author's alter ego, has opened a British tea room in Paris. He struggles with the French authorities who don't accept anything not precisely written in French and with French girls, their families and the French in general.
(Follow-up to "A Year in the Merde")


A
Şafak, Elif "
Araf" (aka The Saint of Incipient Insanities) - 2004
An interesting book. Three roommates from Turkey, Morocco and Spain in Boston, one has  a Mexican-American, another an American girlfriend. All of them have to fit into the society they are in, they struggle in their own different ways. The author managed to describe these diverse characters in such a way that you could feel with them. I loved the way the various stereotypes and prejudices were dealt with, or not.

R
McCarthy, Pete "The 
Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland" - 2002
Pete McCarthy traveled through Ireland to find any bar with his name in "McCarthy's Bar".
This time he travels from Ireland to Morocco, New York, the Caribbeans, Tasmania, all sorts of destinations that somehow have to do with the name McCarthy, places you wouldn't even imagine having a link to Ireland at all. But Pete McCarthy found it.

C
Mortenson, Greg "Three 
Cups of Tea" (with David Oliver Relin) - 2006
A Pakistani proverb says "
when you share the first cup of tea you're a stranger, with the second cup you are a friend, and with the third cup you become family."

Greg Mortenson gets lost on his way back from K2. He reaches a tiny little village in Pakistan and meets the most helpful people in the world. He see the conditions they live in and promises to come back and build them a school. He keeps his promise and carries on to build more than 50 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

H
McCall Smith, Alexander "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" - "The 
Handsome Man's De Luxe Café" (15) - 2014
Mma Ramotswe and her No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency will always have a special place in my heart. I love her kindness and cleverness, she is the type of person you would like to have as a friend. And there are not twenty murders in every book, there are hardly any. Just other everyday problems anyone of us could have.

* * *

Not all of them are about caffeine drinks or beverages at first sight but, believe me, they all match the brief.

Happy Reading!
📚 📚 📚

Saturday 2 March 2024

Six Degrees of Separation ~ From Tom Lake to Silent House

 

#6Degrees of Separation:
from Tom Lake (Goodreadsto Silent House

#6Degrees is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. I love the idea. Thank you, Kate. See more about this challenge, its history, further books and how I found this here.

This month we start with "Tom Lake" by Ann Patchett. I have read several books by this author. Some I liked, others not so much.

This is the description of the book:
"In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today."
 
I will use a word in the title from one book and find another book with that same word in the title. The starter word is Lake.

Lawson, Mary "Crow Lake" - 2002

MacDonald, Ann-Marie "The Way the Crow Flies" - 2003

Carey, Peter "A Long Way From Home" - 2017

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

Trollope, Anthony "Barchester Chronicles": The Small House at Allington - 1864

Pamuk, Orhan
"Silent House" (TR: Sessiz Ev) - 1983

📚📚📚

"Crow Lake" by Mary Lawson is one of my favourite books and she is one of my favourite authors. And the link to the last book is that Orhan Pamuk is also one of my absolute favourite writers. And both the stories are about families with problems.

Friday 1 March 2024

Happy March!

   Happy March to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Hanka Koebsch

"Guten Morgen neuer Tag"
"Good Morning New Day
"

Hanka says to this picture:
Every morning - between the starry sky and sunrise - I go out with our dog. ... of course the birds also welcome the first rays of sunshine. Frank was in the right place at the right time and took a photo of the sparrow checking the situation from its nesting box early in the morning.

Jeden Morgen - zwischen Sternenhimmel und Sonnenaufgang - bin ich mit unserem Hund unterwegs. … natürlich begrüßen auch die Vögel die ersten Sonnenstrahlen. Frank war zur richtigen Zeit am richtigen Ort und hat den Spatz, der aus seinem Nistkasten am frühen Morgen die Lage checkte, fotografiert.
(see here)

And Hanka then beautifully immortalized it on her drawing pad Enjoy!

Read more on their website here. *

* * *
 
Spring has sprung. Not officially but after our mild winter, this is definitely the beginnning of the next season. I doubt I can wear it much longer, so here is a picture of the scarf my son gave me for Christmas last year. Isn't it beautiful?

 * * *

It's still theatre time. There are a lot of amateur groups in our district and so we had quite a few theatre plays in our calendar. Wonderful.

* * *

The German word for March is März. The old German word is Lenzing or Lenzmond. Lenz is the old German word for spring.

* * *

* You can also have a look under my labels Artist: Frank Koebsch and Artist: Hanka Koebsch where you can find all my posts about the two artists. 

* * *
🌷 I wish you all a Happy March! 🌷

Thursday 29 February 2024

#ThrowbackThursday. Half the Sky and A Path Appears

 

Kristof, Nicholas D. & WuDunn, Sheryl "Half the Sky. How to Change the World" - 2009

"Half the Sky" - The most extraordinary book ever. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are an American-Chinese journalist couple who have travelled the world and give us a heart-rendering account of women's lives all over this globe, women struggling to make ends meet, women who have to fight for every little thing but especially for their life.

This book can change your life. Read it.

Kristof, Nicholas; WuDunn, Sheryl "A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity" - 2014

This is a fabulous book, so many great causes that the couple draws our attention to and what we can do to help those unfortunate people either on the other side of the globe or even next door who only need a little money to change their life for the better.

The authors have done some great research. If you want to donate money, find a cause that you consider is worthy and make sure you give it so that this money really makes a difference to someone. The authors make us understand that even a small donation can make a big change. Or if we don't have money that there are still things we can do, volunteer or write, for example.

An informative and inspirational book.

The authors won the Pulitzer Prize for their reports about China in the New York Times. They also have started a foundation, read more about it here: "Half the Sky Foundation".

Read my original reviews here and here.