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.

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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."

#ThrowbackThursday. June/July 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 June/July 2014.

Heller, Joseph "Catch-22" - 1961

If you love dark humour (which I do), this is a great book. I never thought I could laugh about a war book. But I did. A lot. The novel still illustrates the insanity of war, probably even more than any serious book every would. Even though there is a lot to laugh about, it's the kind of laugh you do despite the situation not because of it.

Palma, Félix J. "The Map of the Sky" (E: El mapa del cielo) - 2012  

Félix J. Palma makes a spin on an H.G. Wells novel, this time it was "The War of the Worlds".

In this novel, we have a lot of adventures to pass. We are stuck on a ship in the frozen North Sea and we have to fight alien machines who want to overtake the whole world. At that point, we arrive in a dystopian environment.

Sienkiewicz, Henryk "Quo Vadis" (PL: Quo Vadis) - 1895
This is a surprisingly easy book to read with an astonishing story and a lot of historical background. I have read other books about the early Christians in Rome and I have always been fascinated by them. 

Barbery, Muriel "Une Rose Seule"

Barbery, Muriel "A Single Rose" (French: Une Rose Seule) - 2020

I read Muriel Barbery's "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" and found it truly beautiful.

This book was recommended to me as a lovely, light French book. Well, it was light, but perhaps a bit too long-winded for me. Asian thinking is foreign to me, I'm not a yoga or Zen fan, and I can't empathize with myself as much as is often desired.

The author and her protagonist certainly succeeded in doing this, but it wasn't really comprehensible to me. The first few chapters are all about landscapes, flowers, food and drink, temples, etc. I also couldn't warm to Rose, who only thawed out a bit towards the end.

And although I normally enjoy reading philosophical books, this was a bit too much of a good thing for me, too forced.

A Japanese story, a fairy tale, or a fable, was interspersed between the chapters. I found some of them interesting, while others made me wonder what they had to do with the book.

Well, it was nice to read a French book again, and also a good read for our "Paris in July" challenge, but that was about it.

From the back cover:

"From the bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes a story about a woman’s journey, in which she discovers the father she never knew and a love she never thought possible.

Rose has turned forty, but has barely begun to live. When her Japanese father dies and she finds herself an orphan, she leaves France for Kyoto to hear the reading of his will. Paul, her father’s assistant, takes Rose on a mysterious pilgrimage designed by her deceased father. Her bitterness is soothed by the temples, Zen gardens and teahouses, and by her encounters with her father’s friends. As she recognises what she has lost, and as secrets are divulged, Rose learns to accept a part of herself that she has never before acknowledged.

Through her father’s itinerary, he opens his heart posthumously to his daughter, and Rose finds love where she least expects it. This stunning fifth novel from international bestseller Muriel Barbery is a mesmerising story of second chances, of beauty born out of grief."