Thomas, Dylan "Under Milk Wood"

Thomas, Dylan "Under Milk Wood" - 1954

I read this for the "1954 Club".

This book challenge takes place twice a year and concentrates on one year and one year only. I call it "Read theYear Club". This time, 1954 was picked. For more information, see Simon @ Stuck in a Book.

I had already read "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding and "I am Legend" by Richard Matheson but there are always books in every year that I still want to read.

There were a few books that would have interested me and I might pick up a few of them in future:
Amis, Kingsley "Lucky Jim"
Rose, Reginal "Twelve Angry Men"
Murdoch, Iris "Under the Net"
Mishima, Yukio "The Sound of Waves"
Remarque, Erich Maria "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" (GE: Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben)
Wodehouse, P.B. "Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit"
Frisch, Max "I'm not Stiller" (GE: Stiller)

But I chose this one, "Under Milk Wood". Somehow, I always thought it was an adaptation from a novel and I thought the title sounded interesting. However, it is a play and it doesn't really have a plot. I mean, yes, the subject is "thoughts of people in a fictional village" but I couldn't follow them or make any sense of it let alone combine different thoughts from different people. Nor did I find any humour in this. Sometimes, a book is described as funny but I don't think it is but I can still like it (e.g. "Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka), sometimes I am just bored ("Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons). This one belongs to the latter category. I mean, I love British humour, this has nothing to do with it. Thank goodness it wasn't that long.

From the back cover:

"Commissioned by the BBC, and described by Dylan Thomas as 'a play for voices', 'Under Milk Wood' takes the form of an emotive and hilarious account of a spring day in the fictional Welsh seaside village of Llareggub. We learn of the inhabitants' dreams and desires, their loves and regrets. The play introduces us to characters such as Captain Cat who dreams of his drowned former seafellows and Nogood Boyo who dreams of nothing at all. It is a unique and touching depiction of a village that has 'fallen head over bells in love'. The First Voice narration reveals the ordinary world of daily happenings and events, while the Second Voice conveys the intimate, innermost thoughts of the fascinating folk of Llareggub. There have been myriad productions of 'Under Milk Wood' over the years and Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Elizabeth Taylor, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Tom Jones have all starred in radio, stage or film adaptations."

And here is Simon's list with all the books from 1954 other bloggers read.

Kennedy, Emma "Shoes for Anthony"

Kennedy, Emma "Shoes for Anthony" - 2015 

When it was suggested in our book club to read this novel instead of another one we had planned to read because it was something lighter' and less serious after a few 'heavy' books, I had to laugh because it is another war story.

However, it's true, the book is a lot lighter than the ones we read in the last couple of month. It's more or less the story of the author's father who grew up in Wales during the war. It's interesting to see all the events through the eyes of a little boy and his friends, his family who was as poor as church mice and all the other people in the village who stuck together in the grim times.

But we also learned about the hard life the miners had anyway, the risks they took every day, the accidents that could happen and the illness they'd eventually all ended up with.

I had to compare it with the stories my parents told me, they were probably about the same age as Anthony. The biggest difference was that in Wales, nobody had to hide their disgust whereas in Germany, if you were against Hitler, you really had to keep quiet. It didn't take long for someone to report you and you ending up in a concentration camp. At least the miners in Wales had a mutual enemy.

I was glad my book club chose this because it was a beautifully told story with a lot of charm and humour. I'll happily read more by Emma Kennedy.

From the back cover:

"This 1944 World War Two drama tells the story of Anthony, a boy living in a deprived Welsh village, anticipating the arrival of American troops. Suddenly, a German plane crashes into the village mountain. A Polish prisoner-of-war survives and is brought into the community where he builds a close relationship with Anthony. Later, the villagers discover one of the Germans on the plane has survived and is still on the mountain.

Joyous, thrilling, and nostalgic, Emma Kennedy’s Shoes For Anthony will have you wiping your eyes one moment and beaming from ear-to-ear the next. This is a small gem of a novel that reviewers (and readers) will cherish."

We discussed this in our book club in March 2018.

Follett, Ken "Fall of Giants"

Follett, Ken "Fall of Giants" - 2010

What a book. And it's only the beginning of a trilogy. From the coal mines of Wales to the communists in Russia, from the English to the German aristocracy, from the American president to the Russian Tsar, we can see from the poor and thee rich in all these countries, how World War I happened. We can see that nothing is as black and white as the historians would like us to believe. We grow to love the characters just as much as if we would know them in real life. The interweaving of fictional with real life people makes us even believe they really exist. All these stories could have happened, they probably did happen to several people in any of these countries.

We meet a Welsh miners family, two Russian orphans, an English Earl and his family, a German diplomat, an American politician and many many more. Through their eyes we can see their fear of a looming war, what they can do or can't do to prevent it and how they have to arrange their lives to get through it.

"Fall of Giants". I would say it compares very well to "The Pillars of the Earth" and "World without End" which also belong to my favourite novels and that's why I got this one. This is just as brilliant. It is just a very different time. Europe in the twentieth century. This one takes place during WWI, the next one will be WWII and then the third the Cold War.  This way of showing history reminds me a little of Edward Rutherfurd, another favourite author of mine, who always describes the history of a country, region or city through the ages by using several fictitious families and also some real historical figures. This one is very similar. The families in the book come from Wales, England, Germany, Russia and the USA and they all have very different backgrounds, you have the feeling you are there when the war starts but you have been living through all the anxiety with the characters.

Ken Follett's style of writing is beautiful, his research into a subject astonishingly perfect. I have read a lot of books on this subject and still learned  many new details.

The only bad point of the book is that you can hardly put it down and really want to start the net one the minute you turned the last page. I was lucky to have waiting long enough until all three parts of the series are out so I don't have to wait too long until the next one.

In any case, we can all learn a lot from this book. If we didn't know it before, I'm sure everyone agrees after reading this. War is evil. Everyone loses in a war.  Let's not start another one.

The next two books, "Winter of the World" and "Edge of Eternity", will treat WWII and the Cold War respectively. Can't wait to read them.

From the back cover:

"Five families are brought together through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the struggle for votes for women.

It is 1911, and the coronation day of King George V.  Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams begins his first day at work in a coal mine.

The Williams family is connected by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of Gus Dewar, ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Two orphaned Russian brothers soon become involved, but Grigori and Lev Peshkov’s plan to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. 

FALL OF GIANTS combines richly developed historical details with fast-moving action and powerful emotion to deliver this absorbing narrative."