Wordless Wednesday ~ Peace

Alphabet Authors ~ Z is for Zweig

I found this idea on Simon's blog @ Stuck in a Book. He picks an author for each letter of the alphabet, sharing which of their books he's read, which I ones he owns, how he came across them etc.

This is the last letter in my alphabet. I had no problem whatsoever to choose the author. Stefanie Zweig is one of my favourite authors ever, she has written so many great novels with quite some different backgrounds, all of them part of her life.

Zweig, Stefanie "The House in Rothschild Lane" (GE: Das Haus in der Rothschildallee) (Familie Sternberg #1) - 2009 
- "The Children in Rothschild Lane" (GE: Die Kinder der Rothschildallee) (Familie Sternberg #2) - 2009
- "Coming Home to Rothschild Lane" (GE: Heimkehr in die Rothschildallee) (Familie Sternberg #3) - 2010
- "A New Start in Rothschild Lane" (GE: Neubeginn in die Rothschildallee) (Familie Sternberg #4) - 2010
- "A Mouthfull of Earth/Soil" (GE: Ein Mundvoll Erde) - 1980
- "Home was Nowhere. My Life on Two Continents" (GE: Nirgendwo war Heimat. Mein Leben auf zwei Kontinenten) - 2012
- "It started back then in Africa" (GE: Es begann damals in Afrika) - 2004
- "Nowhere in Africa" und "Somewhere in Germany" - 1995+1996 * Book Club Questions - Nowhere in Africa - Somewhere in Germany (GE: Nirgendwo in Afrika + Irgendwo in Deutschland) - 1942
- "Owuor's homecoming" (GE: Owuors Heimkehr) - 2003
- "The Dream of Paradise" (GE: Der Traum vom Paradies) - 1999
- "Reunion with Africa" (GE: Wiedersehen mit Afrika) - 2002 

Facts about Stefanie Zweig:

Born    September 19, 1932 in Leobschütz, Upper Silesia
Died    April 25, 2014 in Frankfurt/Main (aged 81)

Her Jewish family fled to Kenya in 1938 when she was five years old. After the war, her father was offered the position of a judge in Frankfurt and they "returned" to Germany. Stefanie Zweig became a journalist and wrote first children's books and later many others. A lot of her works are based on her own life as a Jew both in Africa and in Germany. Her most successful book "Nowhere in Africa" was made into a film and received an Oscar for best foreign language movie.

Find here all my German reviews.

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This is part of an ongoing series where I will write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Osman, Richard "We Solve Murders"

Osman, Richard "We Solve Murders" - 2024

I absolutely loved Richard Osman's first books because I do love him as a person and also got to love him as an author, So, I was quite happy, when my son gave me this for Christmas.

If this was a movie, this would be an action thriller rather than a murder mystery. I love watching murder mysteries (though I don't read them much) but I really don't like action movies. Far too loud for me.

I must say, this was almost the same with this book. I heard people complain about his first books that there were too many characters and that you did confused. Well, if you got confused with the first lot, this one will certainly not do for you. It took me quite a while to even understand who was who and what they were up to. My book has 464 pages and I think I got into the story at around page 200. Far too late and I would have given up if it weren't for the author.

There is some humour in this book but not the humour I am used to from Richard Osman. Such a pity.

From the back cover:

"Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?"

#ThrowbackThursday. October 2013

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 October 2013.

Basti, Abel & van Helsing, Jan "Hitler in Argentina" (GE: Hitler überlebte in Argentinien) - 2011
A great and interesting book, whether you believe the authors or not. According to their research, Hitler survived the end of the far and fled to Argentina.

Bernières, Louis de "Birds Without Wings" - 2004
Greece and Turkey at the beginning of the last century with a lot of information about their history, a great addition to Victoria Hislop's "The Thread" which I read earlier.

Binet, Laurent "HHhH" (F: HHhH) - 2010

German subtitle: "Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich". The translation: "Himmler's Brain is called Heydrich". The story is not about Hitler or Himmler but about Reinhard Heydrich, a high ranking German Nazi officer and Jozef Gabčík, a Slovak soldier, and Jan Kubiš, a Czech solider and their "Operation Anthropoid" whose goal was Heydrich's assassination.

Civardi, Anne; Cartwright, Stephen "Things People Do" - 1986
Little kids just love the illustrations of animals and people in all sorts of jobs and activities. When they get older, they love the humour behind the names. 

Collins, Wilkie "Armadale" - 1866
Like in his other books, the author partly lets his characters tell his different characters tell the story, either through their letters or their diaries. It takes us from the deathbed of an old man in Germany to various other places in Europe but is definitely an English novel through and through.

Guterson, David "Ed King" - 2011
This is the story of Ed King as well as his parents and foster parents, a child born out of wedlock at a time where this was definitely not possible to raise a child alone without the support of anybody. You only notice to the very end that you know the story already and I am not going to reveal here what I mean but if you read any other description

Pamuk, Orhan "Silent House" (TR: Sessiz Ev) - 1983
Turkey in the late 20th century. Three siblings, a sister and two brothers, visit their grandmother who lives outside of Istanbul. Everyone seems to have their own problems. 

Alphabet Authors ~ Y is for Yousafzai

I found this idea on Simon's blog @ Stuck in a Book. He picks an author for each letter of the alphabet, sharing which of their books he's read, which I ones he owns, how he came across them etc.

Y is not a letter with many authors but I knew immediately which person I wanted on this list, even if she only wrote one book - so far.

Yousafzai, Malala

- "I am Malala. The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban" - 2013 (with Christina Lamb)

Facts about Malala Yousafzai:
Born    July 12, 1997 (age 27), Mingora, Swat, Pakistan 

Married Asser Malik 2021

In 2012, she was shot because she opposed Taliban restrictions on female education in her home country of Pakistan. She has since become an international symbol of the fight for girls' education.

She has received numerous international awards for her work.

Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi  received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education." She is the youngest laureate in history

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

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This is part of an ongoing series where I will write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Hornby, Gill "Miss Austen"

Hornby, Gill "Miss Austen" - 2020

As I mentioned before, as part of the commemoration of Jane Austen's 250th birthday, the Classics Club has started a #Reading Austen project. We are reading a book by her every other month, and I want to do read something Austen-related by her in between.

In April, I read a German book by Catherine Bell, "Jane Austen und die Kunst der Worte" [Jane Austen and the Art of Words].  I was not impressed, I probably read too much about Jane Austen before and this one could have been written by any Jane Austen fan without doing any more research. Such a pity.

Mind you, "Miss Austen" wasn't all that much better, only a little. The Miss Austen mentioned in the title is not Jane but her sister Cassandra. We hear about her last self-given task, the intention to destroy the letters her sister had written that contained something Cassandra didn't want anyone to know, that would look bad on her sister's legacy. But, since those letters were destroyed, we don't know what it contained and the author just invented them.

I don't like people writing a sequel to a book where the original author died. I never did and I doubt I ever will. So, I guess my next book about Jane Austen (in August) will be a non-fiction again.

From the back cover:

"1840 : Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury.

She knows that, in some corner of the vicarage where she is staying, there is a cache of letters written by her sister Jane.

As Cassandra recalls her youth, she pieces together buried truths about Jane's history - and her own ; secrets which should not be revealed.

And she faces a stark choice : should she act to protect Jane's reputation?

Or leave the letters unguarded to shape her legacy..."

The Classics Club: The Classics Spin #41

"Words and Peace" is a blog I've been following for a couple of years and I have always found some interesting new (or old) books there, especially French ones.

On her page, I found the posts by "The Classics Club" asking us to create a post, this time before next Sunday 15^th June 2025, and list our choice of any twenty books that remain "to be read" on our Classics Club list. They'll then post a number from 1 through 20 and we have time until Sunday 24^th August 2025 to read it.

This time, I read only the one book from my old list (Classics Spin #40) ("Madame Bovary"). I do want to concentrate on a couple of books in the near future, so I have listed only ten books and repeated them. The books are all in chronological order.

1. Aristophanes "Lysistrata and Other Plays" (Lysistrata) - 411BC
2. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von "Urfaust. Faust Fragment. Faust I" (Faust) - 1772-1808
3. Dickens, Charles "Martin Chuzzlewit. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit" (Leben und Abenteuer des Martin Chuszlewit) - 1843-44
4. Dumas, Alexandre fils "Camille: The Lady of the Camellias" (La Dame aux Camélias) - 1848
5. Turgenjew, Iwan Sergejewitsch "Fathers and Sons" (Отцы и дети/Otzy i deti) - 1862
6. Conrad, Joseph "Victory: An Island Tale" - 1915
7. Hamilton, Cicely "William - an Englishman" - 1920
8. Hesse, Hermann "Wir nehmen die Welt nur zu ernst" [We just take the world too seriously] - 1928
9. Faulkner, William "The Sound and the Fury" - 1929
10. Hemingway, Ernest "A Farewell to Arms" - 1929
11. Aristophanes "Lysistrata and Other Plays" (Lysistrata) - 411BC
12. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von "Urfaust. Faust Fragment. Faust I" (Faust) - 1772-1808
13. Dickens, Charles "Martin Chuzzlewit. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit" (Leben und Abenteuer des Martin Chuszlewit) - 1843-44
14. Dumas, Alexandre fils "Camille: The Lady of the Camellias" (La Dame aux Camélias) - 1848
15. Turgenjew, Iwan Sergejewitsch "Fathers and Sons" (Отцы и дети/Otzy i deti) - 1862
16. Conrad, Joseph "Victory: An Island Tale" - 1915
17. Hamilton, Cicely "William - an Englishman" - 1920
18. Hesse, Hermann "Wir nehmen die Welt nur zu ernst" [We just take the world too seriously] - 1928
19. Faulkner, William "The Sound and the Fury" - 1929
20. Hemingway, Ernest "A Farewell to Arms" - 1929

This is a great idea for all of us who want to read more classics. Go ahead, get your own list. I can't wait to see what I get to read this time.

This time, the number that has been picked is #11. That means for me:
Aristophanes "Lysistrata and Other Plays" (Lysistrata) - 411BC

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.