Herrndorf, Wolfgang "Why We Took the Car"

Herrndorf, Wolfgang "Why We Took the Car" (German: tschick) - 2010

My book club recommended this book to me; they had read it some time ago.

Two boys from different backgrounds but with a similar fate. And both outsiders.

I found the novel very entertaining, but also very compassionate. You could both laugh and cry at the experiences of the two.

What can I say, it was really a great reading experience.

From the back cover:

"A beautifully written, darkly funny coming-of-age story from an award-winning, bestselling German author

Mike Klingenberg isn’t exactly one of the cool kids at his school. For one, he doesn’t have many friends. (Okay, zero friends.) And everyone laughs when he has to read his essays out loud in class. And he’s never, ever invited to parties — especially not the party of the year, thrown by the gorgeous Tatiana.

Andrej Tschichatschow, aka Tschick (not even the teachers can pronounce his name), is new in school, and unpopular as well, but in a completely different way. He always looks like he’s just been in a fight, he sleeps through nearly every class, and his clothes are tragic.

But one day, out of the blue, Tschick shows up at Mike’s house. It turns out he wasn’t invited to Tatiana’s party either, and he’s ready to do something about it. Forget the popular kids — together, Mike and Tschick are heading out on a road trip across Germany. No parents, no map, no destination. Will they get hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere? Probably. Will they make bad decisions, meet some crazy people, and get into trouble? Definitely. But will anyone ever call them boring again?

Not a chance."

Top 5 Tuesday ~ Baked Goods

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.

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This week’s topic is a Freebie. Which means we have a topic of your choosing today!

It's the beginning of the baking season, so I thought I should post something with baked goods on the cover.

I have done Top Ten Books with Food on their Covers and Spell the Month in Books before but I have found some other titles that I would like to present to you today.

Collister, Linda; Berry, Mary; Hollywood, Paul "Great British Bake Off: How to Bake: The Perfect Victoria Sponge and Other Baking Secrets" - [kdÜ] - 2011
I love the Great British Bake Off and this was one of their first books.

Eggels, Elle "The House of the Seven Sisters" (NL: Het huis van de zeven zusters) - 1998
Seven orphaned sisters run a bakery. One of my favourite Dutch books about different kind of women who try to do their best, who try to live their life in a society that has a certain idea of how women should lead their lives.

Numeroff, Laura "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" - 1985
Brilliant children's book with beautiful illustrations. It teaches about consequences.

Scott, Mary "Tea and Biscuits" - 1961
The third book in the series by Mary Scott about the farmers' wives Susan and Larry. This was my favourite series in my youth.

Sponge, Miss Victoria "Scone with the Wind: Cakes and Bakes with a Literary Twist" - 2015
A combination of two things I really like: reading and baking. Bake your way through the classics.

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🍰 Happy Reading! 🍰

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Spell the Month in Books ~ November

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

November: Food or Autumn Decorations on the Cover

I've done challenges with food on the cover before, but - of course - most of them don't help with the spelling of the month November. If you'd still like to see them, here is one:
Top Ten Books with Food on their Covers 

In order to get all the letters, I used books that had food or eating in the name of the title or in the picture on the cover. I also used a German book. I think I am allowed since I read books in many different languages, so I should benefit from that. I always have to think about the time my son was in the Boy Scouts (an English speaking group) and he got a patch for his German and other foreigners got patches for their language. One of the English speaking boys complained and said they had to take a test in order to get a patch like that. The Boy Scout leader said, okay, we can do the whole session in German or Danish, because that's what these boys do all the time, they use a foreign language in order to participate. There were no more words about that.

NOVEMBER

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

Robertson, Adele Crockett "The Orchard: A Memoir" - 1995

V
Nicoletti, Cara "Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books" - 2015

E

Truss, Lynne "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" - 2005

M

Montasser, Thomas "Monsieur Jean und sein Gespür für Glück" [Monsieur Jean and his sense of luck] - 2015

B

Harris, Joanne "Blackberry Wine" - 2000

E

McCall Smith, Alexander "Espresso Tales" (44 Scotland Street #2) - 2005

R
Mo, Yan "Red Sorghum. A Novel of China" (Chinese: 红高粱家族 Hóng gāoliang jiāzú) - 1987

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Happy Reading!

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Six Degrees of Separation ~ Intermezzo

Sally Rooney
Rooney, Sally "Intermezzo" - 2024

#6Degrees of Separation:

from Intermezzo (Goodreads) to East of Eden 

#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.

The starter book this month is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. 

I still have Normal People (Goodreads) on my TBR pile. So, as usual, I didn't read the starter book. Therefore, here is the description.

"From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking."

I often use words in the title for my links. However, I don't have a book with the word "intermezzo" in the title. But, this is a book about two brothers. And I have read quite a few of them, so, this is what I chose. Books with siblings.

Guterson, David "The Other" - 2008
The story of the prince and the pauper, two boys with completely different backgrounds, John and Neil.

Konar, Affinity "Mischling" - 2016
The twins Pearl and Stasha, two Jewish girls, end up in Auschwitz and are brought into the "Zoo", the experiment chambers of Josef Mengele, also known as "The Angel of Death".

Lamb, Wally "I know this much is true" - 1998
This is a very moving book, wonderful and awful at the same time, about the twins Dominick and Thomas. It's incredible how much a person can bear if they have to.  

Setterfield, Diane "The Thirteenth Tale" - 2006
A gothic novel about an author and her biographer. They find they have something in common, they are both twins. Through Emmeline and Adeline, they find a lot of connections.

Smith, Zadie "White Teeth" - 1999
A great book with interesting plots, good descriptions, good language. It tells the story of different groups of immigrants to London in the seventies. Especially the next generation, for example the twins Millat and Magid show what they have to deal with.

Steinbeck, John "East of Eden" - 1952
This is the story of Cain and Abel retold, only here they are called Caleb and Aaron (the father is still Adam, though), and they live in his native California.

All the books have in common that they talk about siblings, mainly brothers.

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Happy November!

 Happy November to all my Friends and Readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Hanka Koebsch

"Glück gehabt - Maus im Winter"

"Being Lucky - Mouse in Winter"

Hanka and Frank say to this picture:

"By November at the latest, wild animals must have stored up their winter provisions or eaten their reserves for the winter. Hanka captured a mouse in a watercolor painting in exactly such a situation. The picture 'Being Lucky' is therefore the perfect motif for the month of November."

"Spätestens im November müssen die wildlebenden Tiere ihre Wintervorräte angelegt oder ihre Reserven für den Winter angefressen haben. Genau in einer solchen Situation hat Hanka eine Maus in einem Aquarell eingefangen. Das Bild "Glück gehabt" ist damit das passende Motiv für den Monat November."

I love mice. I think they are so cute. Well, I don't want them in my house and when we had some when we moved into our house in the Netherlands, we captured them and put them out into the wild. I couldn't have killed them and my kids would have been very unhappy.

I want to imagine that they used to carry on living as they were destined to.

Read more on their website here. *

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October was a lovely autumn month. We had some good weather and could have some lovely walks in our area.

Here's a picture, taken not a hundred meters from our house. There's a little brook surrounded by trees. Just beautiful and calming.

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I always try to find an interesting German word. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon 

🔮sagenumwoben 🔮

"Sage" means legend, "umwoben" can be translated as "enmeshed", so an "enmeshed legend", "shrouded in legend" or "steeped in myth. It refers to being the subject of legends, occurring in many legends, also figuratively, elevated: very significant, but lying in the dark.

It can mean people, places, or events that are surrounded by legendary stories or have an almost mythical quality due to the tales told about them.

 

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 My favourite book last month was "The Armour of Light" by Ken Follett.

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There are some old German words for October and they are
Nebelung, Nebelmond, Windmond, or Wintermond.

"Nebel" is the German word for "fog", so the first two words mean, the "foggy one" and the "foggy month", then there is the "wind month" and the "winter month". Both don't have to be explained since they are exactly the same in English and German.

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* 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. 

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🎃 I wish you all a Happy November! 🎃

#ThrowbackThursday. November 2011 Part 3

I've been doing Throwback Thursdays for a while but I noticed that I wrote a lot of reviews in a short time when I first started. One of my blogger friends always posts the reviews of one month but that would be too much. So, these are my reviews from the third part of November 2011.

Denuzière, Maurice "Louisiana" (F: Louisiane. Trilogie) - 1977
A fabulous description of the life in Louisiana during the time of river steamboats and plantations.

Mağden, Perihan "Two Girls" (TR: İki Genç Kızın Romanı) - 2002
A story of two girls in Istanbul. They come from totally different backgrounds but form a unique bond.

McCourt, Frank "'Tis: A Memoir" (Frank McCourt #2) - 1999

What happens after "Angela's Ashes"? Frank McCourt leaves Ireland and goes back to the States. We all know that he became a teacher and then wrote his book but haven't heard anything from the time in between. This can be learned in his second book.

Powers, Charles T. "In the Memory of the Forest" - 1997
The novel talks about Poland after the Second World War, about the skeletons in the closet. A community tries to forget its past, its involvement in the Holocaust. It tells the story of ordinary people trying to survive in an ordinary world.

Truss, Lynne "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" - 2005
It's a hilarious book for those people who do know the use of the apostrophe (and other parts of the English grammar that seems to be so difficult to learn for some) and see a mistake right away. A book for us grammar nerds.

Read my original reviews, for the links click on the titles.

Rulfo, Juan "Pedro Páramo"

Rulfo, Juan "Pedro Páramo" (Spanish: Pedro Páramo) - 1955

This was our international online book club book for October 2024.

I really like South American and Central American authors, they are always interesting, they are different from our European or the North American ones,.

Juan Rulfo is not that different from the other authors of that genre. Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges had nothing but praise for him.

The book was interesting though quite confusing at times. You think you are at the beginning of November celebrating Dia de los Muertos (All Souls Day) because we accompany a young man into a village where his parents grew up but it is a ghost town.

It is an unusual kind of writing, so the story is hard to follow, you don't know whether you are in this world or the next, whether someone is dead or alive. The narrative is non-linear, so it jumps around all the time. But the novel is definitely worth reading.

Some comments from members at the meeting:

• The book was strongly magical realism, we did not get a good grasp of the plot, but found it poetic.
• It was quite eerily ghostly, at first it not being clear where the story is going, who is alive and who is dead and what is going on. Then the horrors started creeping up on what was going on in the town becoming just worse and worse. The lawlessness, the enabling of violence and murder and rich and powerful dominating the poorer people and women. It was a really interesting book to read, but not one I would pick up to read again.
• As we had read 2 other Latin-American authors, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez , who had been said to have been deeply influenced by Rulfo, I could definitely see the connection, but found Rulfo to be more subtle in his approach to describing evil. At moments the writing was beautifully poetic giving a lot of feeling and nuance to the story.

Book Description:

"The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met - Pedro Páramo - but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso.

Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century."