Book Quotes of the Week

"Read books. Some of them have been written especially for that." Michail Genin

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief." Franz Kafka

"Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession … but about securing a portal." Laura Miller

"A home without books is like a tree without birds." N.N.

Find more book quotes here.

Ondaatje, Michael "Warlight"

Ondaatje, Michael "Warlight" - 2018

"In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals."

That's how the novel starts. At the beginning, I had no idea whether I would like it at all and how I would feel about it, there is another quote that I think goes with the feeling I had:

"Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning difficult. Heavy."

I think this was the intention of the author, he wanted us to be just as confused as the protagonists.

So, these two teenagers, Nathaniel and Rachel, are left in the care of a stranger, someone who lived in their house as a lodger for a short while. Their parents are going to Asia. But it's all a little weird, they don't trust the guy, they don't trust the people he brings into his house, they have a strange feeling.

The author manages to convey this strange feeling onto the reader which in itself is a good achievement. And his writing is superb.

Over the next hundred pages, you start to like the protagonist as well as the other characters and get more and more interested in what is going on.

In the end, everything is revealed and it is a highly interesting story. An extraordinary book.

I read "Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje several years ago. Very different story, just as great a book. And I still haven't read "The English Patient".

One more quote from the book which I have to comment on:
"He spoke French, as well as other languages, though he never referred to this ability.
Perhaps he assumed he would be mocked. There was even a rumour, or was it a joke, that he knew Esperanto, the supposed universal language, which no one spoke."

First, why would anybody mock someone for speaking several languages. I have always only encountered admiration for that.

Second, even before and during the Second World War, there was a huge number of people who spoke Esperanto. Both Stalin and Hitler did not like that very much as it enables more people to talk to foreigners. They not only forbid it but several of the speakers ended up in concentration camps and/or were killed. That led to a decrease of speakers after the war but in the meantime, numbers have grown again. I know thousands of people who speak it, including myself. But, of course, there are probably still people around who believe that nobody knows it and it's not good for anything whereas, in reality, it is a great language to know which enables you to communicate with people all over the world, now more than ever.

From the back cover:

"In a story as shadowed and luminous as memory itself, Warlight sets the careless freedom of adolescence against the turmoil of post-war England.  It is 1945, and London is recovering from the years of war.  Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, unexpectedly abandoned by their parents, are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth.  They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, who seem determined to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways), Nathaniel and Rachel.  But are they really what and who they claim to be?

Caught up in the escapades of youth and first love, Nathaniel ignores the uncertain signs of danger.  A dozen years later, he sets out to piece together - as much through recollection and imagining as through the truths he uncovers - all he didn’t know or understand in that times: a journey that will draw him in to a morally ambivalent, secret world."

Top Ten Tuesday ~ Top Ten Books I wish I read as a kid

"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".

There is no official Top Ten Tuesday anymore and I haven't published any of the lists for ages. But a few of the bloggers still carry on and since I haven't even done half of the topics, I shall also do so from time to time.

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.

The last time I picked Top Ten Childhood Favourites, this time it's:

Top Ten Books I wish I read as a kid 

A lot of those books did not exist, yet, when I was a child but others I just didn't come across or they were not translated into German at the time. However, I enjoyed all of them when reading them later, either to or with my boys or by myself. 

Alcott, Louisa May "Little Women" (Series)
Civardi, Anne; Cartwright, Stephen "Things People Do" (Series)
Deary, Terry "Horrible Histories" (Series)
Ende, Michael "The Neverending Story" (Die unendliche Geschichte)
Handford, Martin "Where's Wally?" (Series)
Hodgson Burnett, Frances "The Secret Garden"
Ingalls Wilder, Laura "Little House Books" (Series)
MacLachlan, Patricia "Sarah, Plain & Tall" (Series)
Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud) "Anne of Green Gables" (Series)
Scarry, Richard "What Do People Do All Day" (Series)

Atwood, Margaret "Oryx and Crake"

Atwood, Margaret "Oryx and Crake" (MaddAddam # 1) - 2003

I always like reading dystopian novels. It makes you think about what might happen if we carry on living the way we live now and makes us more aware of what we should or shouldn't be changing. It usually exaggerates the problems we have today but that's the point, it makes us more aware of it.

This story is about a genetic engineering world where the plan to destroy humanity through "medication" is almost successful. The "Children of Crake" who are supposed to replace humans are more like children, they remind me of the Eloi in "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells. Just as innocent, just as naïve.

I hope I won't be around to see the world change that much but if we carry on like that, I might. In the meantime, let as many people read these kinds of books and hopefully see that we need to try to save this planet as long as it's still possible.

From the back cover:

"With the same stunning blend of prophecy and social satire she brought to her classic The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood gives us a keenly prescient novel about the future of humanity and its present. 

Humanity here equals Snowman, and in Snowman's recollections Atwood re-creates a time much like our own, when a boy named Jimmy loved an elusive, damaged girl called Oryx and a sardonic genius called Crake. But now Snowman is alone, and as we learn why we also learn about a world that could become ours one day."

Margaret Atwood was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "Oryx and Crake" in 2003.

Margaret Atwood received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2017.

Book Quotes of the Week

"I feel like I have friends all over the world, through space and time, who I can visit whenever I need a break from my own life." Kat *

"To read well is to prepare oneself to live wisely, kindly and wittily." Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

"We read fiction to satisfy a more basic need - to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten." Tom Perrotta

"A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say, 'How to Build a Boat'." Stephen Wright

Find more book quotes here.
[If anyone can tell me the originator of this quote, I'd be very thankful and would happily include the name.]

Rhodes, Ben "The World As It Is"

Rhodes, Ben "The World As It Is. Inside The Obama House" - 2018

A while ago, I bought three books that all related somehow to Barack Obama and his presidency:
"Promise Me, Dad" by Joe Biden, "Becoming" by Michelle Obama and this one by one of the most important staffers Barack Obama had in those days.

Ben Rhodes began his career in the White House as a speech writer in 2008, working for the presidential campaign.

He soon became even more important than that. As the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, he was the main contact with Cuba in the negations to reestablish diplomatic relations. He seems to have been one of the closest advisers the president had.

In the book we learn about all the success and the failures of the presidency, the problems they had with their opponents and their successor, all the lies we have heard so often. I always wondered how so many lies can be told about one single person and how many people are willing to believe it. Now I know.

But he also mentions their own problems, not just those caused by others. A very honest and thoughtful account of a decade of politics.

If you've enjoyed the TV series "West Wing", you will enjoy reading about the real place. Lots of details.

Ben Rhodes is a good writer which makes this book even more readable than many other non-fiction books.

He also wrote Obama's 2009 Cairo speech "A New Beginning" which I will be reading soon, as well, I hope (in his book "We are the Change We Seek").

What a shame this wonderful presidency had to come to an end. Better luck next time, I hope people will have learned from their mistakes.

From the back cover:

"This is a book about two people making the most important decisions in the world. One is Barack Obama. The other is Ben Rhodes.

The World As It Is tells the full story of what it means to work alongside a radical leader; of how idealism can confront reality and survive; of how the White House really functions; and of what it is to have a partnership, and ultimately a friendship, with a historic president.

A young writer and Washington outsider, Ben Rhodes was plucked from obscurity aged 29. Chosen for his original perspective and gift with language, his role was to help shape the nation’s hopes and sense of itself. For nearly ten years, Rhodes was at the centre of the Obama Administration - first as a speechwriter, then a policymaker, and finally a multi-purpose aide and close collaborator.

Rhodes puts us in the room at the most tense and poignant moments in recent history: starting every morning with Obama in the Daily Briefing; waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room; reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran; leading secret negotiations with the Cuban government; confronting the resurgence of nationalism that led to the election of Donald Trump.

This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama’s presidency. It is an essential record of the last decade. But it also shows us what it means to hold the pen, and to write the words that change our world."

Barack Obama received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009 "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.".

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

Happy May!

Happy May to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch

"Blütenpracht in der Boddenstraße von Groß Zicker"
"Splendid Blooms in the Bodden Street of Groß Zicker"

April was pretty mild over here but I've heard of other areas that couldn't say so. Well, let's hope that May will be nice everywhere. The beginning is already promising, lovely weather. In German, we call it the blissful or merry month (Wonnemonat). 

It's the most popular month for weddings. Nowadays, one of the reasons is probably because the weather is more consistent and it's less likely to rain or be too hot. I read somewhere that it was also a reason that there were flowers again so the bride could carry a bouquet - in order to mask the smell of body odour since people didn't take baths very often, if at all. 

The flower of the month is lily of the Valley which stands for happiness, humility, and sweetness, Other names for it are May bells (the translation of the official German word for it: Maiglöckchen), Our Lady's tears, and Mary's tears. I also like the French name: Muguet. Sounds so pretty. 

In French folklore, the lily of the valley wedding symbolizes the 13th wedding anniversary On May 1st, the lily of the valley is traditionally offered as a "lucky charm", a very popular tradition, in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. 

In the area of Germany where I come from, boys bring a "May tree" to their girlfriend, a birch decorated with strips of crèpe paper. In other areas, they bring a heart made from paper flowers. In many regions, the whole village puts up a May pole. 

Thus, May is a month of festivities. 

Enjoy it with this beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch.

You can find many more wonderful pictures on their website here.