#ThrowbackThursday. July 2016

These are my ThrowbackThursday reviews from July 2016. 

Eliot, George "The Mill on the Floss" - 1860

A story about a childhood in the early 19th century, not a poor family, but also not a particularly wealthy one. You might want to call them middle class nowadays.

There is a lot in this book about the education at the time but it is also a great story about a family relationship. 

Grossman, David "The Zig Zag Kid" (Hebr.: יש ילדים זיגזג/Jesh Jeladim) - 1994
A fascinating story about a boy growing up and finding his way, finding answers to so many questions he didn't even know he had. Nonno, the zig zag kid, the kid that is different from other kids, and not only because his mother died when he was little.

Oates, Joyce Carol "Sexy" - 2015

Most of the books by Joyce Carol Oates are not happy books about happy people. They are real books about real people.

Like here. It's fascinating how she manages again and again to get into people's brains, how to explain to us how others think, what their ideas are, their conviction. Her grasp of language is just as great as her empathies.

Perkins, Sue "Spectacles" - 2015

Sue Perkins is one of my favourite comedians. She is witty, she is funny, she is smart, she is kind, there is nothing about her not to love.

I was not surprised that I liked the book but I can honestly say that I think Sue Perkins is also a great writer, she can tell a story on the page as if you are right there. You have the feeling, she is sitting there right next to you and you can hear her voice.

Sendak, Maurice "Where The Wild Things Are" - 1963

I think everyone born after the year 1960 must have had this book read to them when they were little.

The story reminds me a lot of the fairy tales we used to listen to and read when we were little. This story is IS a fairy tale, even though it wasn't written at the times of the Brothers Grimm.

Shakespeare, William "Macbeth" (aka The Scottish Play) - 1599/1606 

I still believe plays should be seen and not read but since I don't have the Globe around the corner, this will have to do for the time-being.

The characters in this play are magnificent. There is a strong woman who influences her husband and thereby history.

Happy July!

    Happy July to all my Friends and Readers
New Calendar picture with this

beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch
"The Small Copper Butterfly's Play of Colours"

"Farbspiel des Kleinen Feuerfalters"

 Frank says to this picture:

"Für das Kalenderblatt Juli haben wir ein Schmetterlingsaquarell ausgewählt. Das Bild zeigt eine Szene mit einem Feuerfalter auf den Blüten des Rainfarns."

"For the July calendar page, we have selected a watercolour painting of a butterfly. The image depicts a scene featuring a small copper butterfly on the blossoms of a tansy plant."

Such a cute picture, don't you think. And it shows the yellow of the sun that we have every day at the moment.

Read more on their website here. *

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I wrote last month, that I had been ill for several weeks. I am getting better, the worst part is over, only a few little ailments stay behind.

However, my illness foreshadowed an even worse event. My brother passed away after battling a brain tumour for three years. We will all miss him tremendously.

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

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For the German word of the month, I will repeat one that I used earlier in a post. It is used used to refer to general disorder or a jumble. 

"Kuddelmuddel". 

I was trying to find the origin of the word but it is not totally clear. It's assumed to be from Low German origin. "Muddeln" means something like "mud" or "muck" (Modder in low German).

Wikipedia tells us: "The onomatopoeic compound 'Kuddelmuddel' most likely spread from Berlin in the mid-19th century." They even mention my favourite author, Thomas Mann who, like me, spoke Low German, and used this word in his novella "The Transposed Heads" (Die vertauschten Köpfe) which I should probably read.

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Since I have not read any great books this month, I will go back to Thomas Mann and one of my favourite books ever: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family. I really recommend it.

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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 very Happy July! 😎☀️

Cela, Camilo José "The Hive"

Cela, Camilo José "The Hive" (Spanish: La colmena) - 1951

The Classicics Spin chose #9 from our list this month. Great, I thought, a Nobel Prize winner. Two birds with one stone.

Often, I find a new favourite author when I read a Nobel Prize winner. Was that the same this time? I don't think so. The book was alright but nothing too special. Apparently, this was his best, his most important novel.

It was a bit too much of a jumble for me. In German, we have a good word for that, "Kuddelmuddel". There were too many short stories that somehow had a connection but the break between one and the next was so large that you often didn't even remember who he was talking about. Yes, he wanted to show how much life in Spain during the Franco regime resembled a beehive. Unfortunately, he succeeded all too well in that.

Funnily enough, he mentions a book that has been published by F. Sempere & Co. in Valencia. I don't think he has any relation to the one in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" series but I've been speculating whether it is or is not a coincidence. Now, Ruiz Zafón was a great Spanish author, one of my favourites.

Anyway, the story was distorted, the characters not very amiable, the whole book didn't give us a way to see into the lives. What a pity.

This appears on the cover of my book (translated):

"The morning rises ever so gradually. It crawls like a caterpillar across the hearts of the city’s men and women. Almost coaxingly, it taps against half-awakened gazes—gazes that never discover new horizons, new landscapes, or new settings. The morning—this eternally recurring morning—plays a little, seeking to alter the face of the city. It is a grave, a climbing pole, a beehive."

And this is the book description I found on the internet:

"The Hive presents a panoramic view of the degradation and sufferings of the lower-middle class in post-civil war Spain. Readers are introduced to over a hundred characters through a series of starkly rendered interlocking vignettes. Filled with violence, hunger, and compassion, The Hive captures the buzzing ambitions and set-backs of Spanish society under the rule of Franco."

Camilo José Cela received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989 "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability."

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Here are all the books on my original Classics Club list.
And here is a list of all the books I read with the Classics Spin.

Frazier, Charles "The Trackers" - 2023

Frazier, Charles "The Trackers" - 2023

I love Charles Frazier. I have read four of his books, "Cold Mountain" is still one of my favourite books ever, I've read it several times. But if I had to list his stories, this one would come last. It was an alright read because he is a good writer but the story is nothing compared to his other books. You can always imagine being right there with the characters. Only, I didn't really like any of them. That makes it harder to connect to them, harder to like the book. And it didn't really grab my attention, the story was too slow.

Just one quote that I really liked and by which I live (my friends will certainly back me up there): "First rule of hosting, excess is always preferable to shortage."

From the back cover:

"Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he's landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office.

A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band. Long holds shady political aspirations, but was once a WWI sniper--and his right hand is a mysterious elder cowboy, a vestige of the violent old west. Val quickly finds himself entranced by their lives.

One day, Eve flees home with a valuable painting in tow, and Long recruits Val to hit the road with a mission of tracking her down. Journeying from ramshackle Hoovervilles to San Francisco nightclubs to the swamps of Florida, Val's search for Eve narrows, and he soon turns up secrets that could spark formidable changes for all of them.

In The Trackers, singular American writer Charles Frazier conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history that bears uncanny resemblance to our own. With the keen perceptions of humanity and transcendent storytelling that have made him beloved for decades, Frazier has created a powerful and timeless new classic."

Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois"

Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois" - 2021

This is such a beautiful book. Don't let yourself get scared by the 800+ pages, they are totally worth it. Barack Obama has it on his reading list. It's an Oprah book and it has been chosen by various other reading lists/awards. Definitely a good recommendation on all accounts.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the guy in the tile, was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist who lived from 1868 to 1963 and was the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University. This book mentions him a lot. I have read his book "The Souls of Black Folk" which is a very thorough study of black culture in the United States. This novel adds to that subject.

The story circles around Ailey Pearl Garfield, a black girl born in 1973, and all her ancestors, going back to the first known ones in the 1740s. She has both black and Native American ancestors and there is a lot about their history. She has to struggle through all the problems many women but especially black women have to overcome. She is a strong woman but many obstacles are thrown in her way. And we learn how her ancestors, especially the women managed.

The only criticism I have has nothing to do with the story or the book. There is a family tree at the beginning but it is sometimes quite confusing. Either a diagram or some numbers as to who belongs to whom would have been helpful. The way it is presented, there is too much searching involved if you want to know more. If you are still reading it, there is a diagram on Wikipedia.

But other than that, book was just fantastic, epic.

From the back cover:

"A magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself."

Spell the Month in Books ~ June 2026

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.

June: One Word Title

Jana is on maternity leave, so has not given us any new subjects. Therefore, I try to come up with a new subject myself So, I've decided to come up with a different new subject myself.

These are four totally different books. But all worth reading.

JUNE

J

Mak, Geert "Jorweerd: The Death of a Village in the late 20th Century" - 1996

The story is about a small village in Friesland and the changes it underwent in the first half of the 20th century, changing from farming to a commuting place, the influence of modern technology on a people that had lived off the land for centuries. 

U

Joyce, James "Ullysses" - 1922

Still, this is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. It is hard to follow the stream of consciousness, actually it is hard to follow the stream at all. A lot of books are easier once you get into them, not this one. I had the feeling with every chapter it got more confusing. However, the longer I distance myself from this novel, the more it makes sense and the bigger an impact does it have on me. I am glad I read it.

N

Wiesel, Eli "Night" - 1958
Elie Wiesel wrote this novel as a report about his life in the concentration camps Buchenwald and Auschwitz/Oswiecim.

E

Westover, Tara  "Educated" - 2018 

The author comes from a Mormon house and was home-schooled - or rather not. I'm not a big fan of home-schooling since I saw too many negative examples. This is one of the worst. Mind you, I have to admit that I know a few good examples, however, they still don't convince me that it is a good idea. In those cases, the parents themselves were highly educated and could pass that on very well. I have helped many kids to catch up in school in languages and math but I would have pitied my children if I would have had to teach them any science subject.

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Happy Reading!

#ThrowbackThursday. June 2016

Here are my #ThrowbackThursday reviews from June 2016.

Ali, Sabahattin "Madonna in a Fur Coat" (Turkish: Kürk Mantolu Madonna) - 1943

We are going back to the time between the two wars, we can see both the life in Ankara and Berlin during that time behind a classic set-up. A man and a woman, a love story that doesn't have much hope.

Joyce, James "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - 1916

The story of a young man trying to find himself, a story about James Joyce himself, his character Stephen Dedalus is partly autobiographical. Stephen comes from a poor Irish family who goes to a religious boarding school which he has to leave for financial reasons. 

Landers, Brian "Empires Apart. A History of American and Russian Imperialism" - 2010

This summarizes almost all of Europe's history as well as the North American one, compares both "empires" in chronological order and gives a great overview over today's' troubles, as well. There is so much information with so many details in this book, it's amazing how the author managed to put it all on under 600 pages.

Obama, Barack "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" - 1995

This memoir wasn't written by a president. It wasn't even written by a president-hopeful. Barack Obama had just finished his law school and was starting in politics, so I believe he wanted a real book about his inheritence.

One thing is for sure, he is a great author. 

Satrapi, Marjane "Persepolis. The Story of a Childhood" (French: Persepolis) - 2000 

I would have never thought I'd enjoy a graphical novel this much. This is not just another comic strip, it's a memoir, a historical novel. This is the story of a young child growing up in wartime.

Webster, Jean "Daddy Longlegs" - 1912

A favourite classic book for everyone who was lucky enough to read it at the time. A wonderful story about an orphan who gets the chance to get a higher education because a rich man is willing to pay for it. His only condition is that she writes a letter to him about her life once a month.