Top Ten Tuesday ~ Top Ten Characters Who I Admire

"Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created on the blog "The Broke and the Bookish". This feature was created because they are particularly fond of lists at "The Broke and the Bookish". 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.

April 22: Top Ten Characters Who I admireTop Ten Characters Who X (you fill in the blank -- examples: piss me off, are the popular kids, are bookish, would be my bff, that stole my heart, etc. etc.)

Jo March from the "Little Women" Series by Louisa May Alcott

Anne Elliot from "Persuasion" by Jane Austen

Jacob Heym from "Jacob the Liar" (GE: Jakob der Lügner) by Jurek Becker

Hannah Broman from "Hanna's Daughters" (S: Anna, Hanna og Johanna) by Marianne Fredriksson

Orleanna Price from "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

Atticus Finch from "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

The whole group of "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

Shirin Gol from "Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep" (GE: Nach Afghanistan kommt Gott nur noch zum Weinen) by Siba Shakib

Tom Joad from "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

All the girls from "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

Zosia Król from "The Children's War" and "A Change of Regime" by J.N. Stroyar

There are so many more I could have mentioned but I had to stop somewhere ....

Pamuk, Orhan "Snow"

Pamuk, Orhan "Snow" (Turkish: Kar) - 2002

Ka is a Turkish poet who lives in Germany but visits a town in Turkey called Kars. While he is there, they have a heavy snowfall and nobody can leave or enter the town. The Turkish name for snow is "kar". What a coincidence!

Anyway, while he staying in Kars, a revolution is taking place in the little city. We can follow the way of this from the early beginnings, we can see every little piece of what those who want to overthrow the government want, what they are prepared to do, and what the government tries to do to repulse them. Because this takes place in a small town, it is easy to see the whole picture.

I know the author is not much liked in certain circles in his country and this is the book where I understand it best. Nobody likes criticism, especially if you know you're wrong. I admire him even more after this book which is certainly not his easiest one.

Orhan Pamuk manages to point out the differences between East and West, to draw a clear images of the political problems Turkey is facing and still writing a beautiful story in the midst of it all. I think I mentioned before that I love this author. Even if I wasn't interested in what is going on in Turkey at all, I still would like to read his books, he has a great writing style. And he manages to create a new world in every one of his books.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment."

Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Orhan Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2005.
I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Book Quotes of the Week

"My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for." Neil Gaiman

"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself." Marcel Proust

"The book you don't read, won't help." Jim Rohn

"There are worse things than a prison of words." Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"If you haven’t stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading with your eyes itching and burning with tiredness and your vision blurred as you fight to stay awake to finish the book, you haven’t lived at all." Sinnerlikedamon

"Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring ... 'How to Build a Boat'." Steven Wright

Find more book quotes here.

Seth, Vikram "Two Lives"

Seth, Vikram "Two Lives" - 2005

I had already read two novels by Vikram Seth before, "A Suitable Boy" and "An Equal Music", both of which are completely different but really good.

In this work, the author describes not just the life of his great-uncle and his Jewish wife, he describes his own life, he describes the life and death of ordinary people during the holocaust as well as the terrible fate of the Jews. But he also describes life in India pre- and post independence. Quite an undertaking.

Vikram Seth makes it extremely easy to follow the paths of Shanti and Henny, their families and friends through a whole century and several continents. He doesn't leave out any detail, relying on personal experience as well as interviews and old letters.

We get to know the three characters, yes we have to include the author, too, pretty well. Vikram Seth leaves no stone unturned, doesn't leave out a single character or incident that might seem too trivial at the moment but is important later on. We get a good insight into life before and during World War II both in Germany and in England, about the war itself and about the concentration camps. Also, and I found that even more interesting as we don't often get to read about it, life after the war in both England and Germany.

What can I say, a fantastic book. If the author ever writes another biography, I should gladly read it. Actually, I am going to put all his books on my wishlist.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Two Lives is the story of a century and of a love affair across a racial divide. It tells of the extraordinary lives of Vikram Seth's great-uncle Shanti, brought up in India and sent to Berlin in the 1930s to study, and of his great-aunt Henny, whose German-Jewish family took Shanti in as a lodger. What follows is an astonishing tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, Post-war Germany and modern Britian."

A quote from the book which the author found at the Holocaust Memorial Arch in the Memorial garden in Hendon Park, London:
"Lezikaron. The meaning refers tot he importance of looking forward as well as remembering the past."

Top Ten Tuesday ~ Top Ten Bookish Things

"Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created on the blog "The Broke and the Bookish". This feature was created because they are particularly fond of lists at "The Broke and the Bookish". 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.

April 15: Top Ten Bookish Things (That Aren't Books) That I'd Like To Own
(new bookshelves, bookends, cool bookmark, a bookish shirt, etc.).

I already own a few bookish things. I have a couple of mugs that refer to my love of books and quite a few bookmarks that are too precious to use.

However, there are always things one can dream of. So, I have tried to come up with some really nice things I dream of, even though I know that some of them will never come true.

1.    My own library (preferably like in Beauty & the Beast)
2.    A lovely reading rocking chair
3.    A British phone booth to store my books
4.    A dress that I could wear to the Jane Austen Festival
5.    Cushions with book covers
6.    Book shaped plates
7.    Bookish jewelry
8.    One of those book seats that offer space to store your books
9.    I already have a few but little statues of reading angels
10.    A doll house library

Nabokov, Vladimir "Lolita"

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich [Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков] "Lolita" - 1955 

And as you know, I love classics. So I embarked on "Lolita". But - I  didn't enjoy it at all. He reminded me of Kerouac and Salinger rather than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky which I probably expected. After all, he is Russian. But he says so himself at the end of his book, he is attempting to sound more American. I think if he thinks Kerouac and Salinger are the greatest American writers, he achieved that. Unfortunately, I know a lot more better American writers than those two.

Nabokov obviously likes to play with words and I appreciate that, I love that, too. But that still doesn't make a good story. Why this book has become such a classic is beyond me. I couldn't even follow the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist, I didn't "get" his obsessiveness of young girls. I don't think I say too much about the book when I divulge that it is the story of a paedophile. But it's not. It's also neither about the girl nor the guy. I have no idea what it's supposed to be about. As I said, I love classics but I have no idea why this is regarded as one.

One last quote he mentioned: "There are at least three themes with are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned [the first one being books like Lolita, with erotic scenes]. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious sccess resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total ateist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." I think here I can agree with the author.

And I do like another quote by him that I found somewhere else:
 "A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer."

From the back cover:

"Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. He also likes little girls. And none more so than Lolita, whom he'll do anything to possess. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? ...Or is he all of these?"

Book Quotes of the Week

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that." John Green

"There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." Jiddu Krishnamurti

"All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves." J. Anthony Lukas

"An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise." Thomas Wharton

"A child who reads will be an adult who thinks." N.N.

Find more book quotes here.