The Classics Club: The Classics Spin #36

        

"Words and Peace" is a blog I've been following for a couple of years and I have always found some interesting new (or olde) 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 21^st January 2024, 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 3^rd of March 2024 to read it.

This time, I read only the one book from my old list (Classics Spin #35). But there are always some new books that I can add to my challenge. The books are all in chronological order.

1.    Aristophanes "Lysistrata and Other Plays" (Lysistrata) - 411 BC
2.    Dickens, Charles "Nicholas Nickleby. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" - 1838/39
3.    Dumas, Alexandre fils "Camille: The Lady of the Camellias" (La Dame aux Camélias" - 1848
4.    Brontë, Charlotte "The Professor" - 1857
5.    Turgenev, Ivan "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.   Meigs, Cornelia "Invincible Louisa" - 1933
12.   Orwell, George "The Road to Wigan Pier" - 1937
13.   Du Maurier, Daphne "Rebecca" - 1938
14.   Krleža, Miroslav "On the Edge of Reason" (Na rubu pameti) - 1938
15.   Némirovsky, Irène "Les biens de ce monde" (All Our Wordly Goods) - 1941
16.   Cela, Camilo José "The Family of Pascal Duarte" (La Familia Duarte) - 1942
17.   Zweig, Stefan "Schachnovelle" (The Royal Game/Chess) - 1942
18.   Wilde, Oscar "Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast" - 1946
19.   Huxley, Aldous "Ape and Essence" - 1948
20.   Yates, Richard "Revolutionary Road" - 1961

For the Classics Spin #36, we received #20 and this is my novel:
Yates, Richard "Revolutionary Road" - 1961

This is a great idea for all of us who want to read more classics. Go ahead, get your own list.

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.

My Year in Books 2023

I am still doing my usual statistics but this is what Goodreads tells me. You can find links to all my books on Goodreads here or on my page under My Reading List. 

Six Degrees of Separation ~ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Zevin, Gabrielle "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" - 2022

#6Degrees of Separation:
from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow to Books That Changed the World

#6Degrees is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. I love the idea. Thank you, Kate. See more about this challenge, its history, further books and how I found this here.

This month's prompt starts with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Goodreads). Again, I have not read the starter book. But maybe, someone would like to read it, so here is the description:

"In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before."

I don't think, I would like to read this book, even though it seems to be very much appreciated, but it's not the type of literature I enjoy.

But, I can use a word in the title and I always enjoy that. The starter word is, of course,
Tomorrow.

Harari, Yuval Noah "Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow" - 2016

Hawking, Stephen "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes" - 1988

Haddon, Mark "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" - 2003

Calvino, Italo "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" (I: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore) - 1979

Follett, Ken "Winter of the World" (Century Trilogy #2) - 2012

Taylor, Andrew James "Books That Changed the World" - 2008

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Unfortunately, there is no link between the first and the last book. One is a novel, the other one a non-fiction about books. But about a lot of books. Who knows whether "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" isn't going to change the world?

Spell the Month in Books ~ January

           
Reviews from the Stacks

I found this on one of the blogs I follow, Books are the New Black who found it at One Book More. It was originally created by Reviews from the Stacks, and the idea is to spell the month using the first letter of book titles.

January: New (interpret as you wish: new releases, recent acquisitions, “new” in the title, etc.)

January - a new year. So not a bad idea to start with something new. I chose books on my TBR pile that I hope to read during the next year.

JANUARY

J
Worsley, Lucy "Jane Austen at Home" - 2017
This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a 'life without incident', but with new research and insights, historian Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy.

A
Barnes, Julian "Arthur & George" - 2005 (Goodreads)
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later - one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife - their fates become inextricably connected.

N
Walker, Alice "Now is the Time to Open your Heart" - 2004 (Goodreads)
In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart , Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.

U
Dallek, Robert "An Unfinished Life - John F. Kennedy 1917-1963" - 2003 (Goodreads)
Drawing on previously unavailable material and never-before-opened archives, An Unfinished Life is packed with revelations large and small - about JFK's health, his love affairs, RFK's appointment as Attorney General, what Joseph Kennedy did to help his son win the White House, and the path JFK would have taken in the Vietnam entanglement had he survived.
Robert Dallek succeeds as no other biographer has done in striking a critical balance - never shying away from JFK's weaknesses, brilliantly exploring his strengths - as he offers up a vivid portrait of a bold, brave, complex, heroic, human Kennedy.

A
Huxley, Aldous "Ape and Essence" - 1948 (Goodreads)
In February 2108, the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition reaches California at last. It is over a century since the world was devastated by nuclear war, but the blight of radioactivity and disease still gnaws away at the survivors. The expedition expects to find physical destruction but they are quite unprepared for the moral degradation they meet. Ape and Essence is Huxley's vision of the ruin of humanity, told with all his knowledge and imaginative genius.

R
Orwell, George "The Road to Wigan Pier" - 1937
A searing account of George Orwell’s experiences of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.

Y

Brooks, Geraldine "Year of Wonders"  - 2001

Spring 1666: when the Great Plague reaches the quiet Derbyshire village of Eyam, the villagers make an extraordinary decision. They elect to isolate themselves in a fateful quarantine. So begins the Year of Wonders, seen through eighteen-year-old Anna Frith’s eyes as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. Based on a true story, this novel explores love and learning, fear and fanaticism, and the struggles of seventeenth-century science and religion to interpret the world at the cusp of the modern era.

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I hope I will read them all this year. Wish me luck. And:

Happy Reading!

📚 📚 📚

#ThrowbackThursday. Possession

 

Byatt, A.S. "Possession" - 1990

I am happy to start this year's ThrowbackThursday list with one of my favourite books. I have read this book several times and I had to buy another copy because my paperback was falling to pieces.

There are two stories playing at the same time. Roland Mitchell, an American researcher at a London university, tries to find information about the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. This leads him to Maud Bailey, a professor at Lincoln University who is an expert on another fictitious Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte. While they discover a common past of the two poets and unfold a mystery, their lives begin to take on a turn parallel to that of the two poets.

The different chapters always start with a poem written by one of the two poets. I love classic novels and although this isn't one, it reads like one. Plus there is the time the two poets lived in that gives you the feeling of being in a classic book.

Did I say I love it?

Read my original review here.  

Windmills

  Happy January to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch

"Die Ahrenshooper Mühle im Winter"
"The Mill of Ahrenshoop in Winter"

Frank says to this picture:
Als wir in den vergangenen Wochen im Winter an der Ostsee unterwegs waren, dann hatten die Schneewolken die Landschaften an der Ostsee in einen Wintertraum verwandelt..

When we were traveling along the Baltic Sea in winter in the past few weeks, the snow clouds had transformed the landscape on the Baltic Sea into a winter dream.
(see here)

Another great watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch. Enjoy!

Read more on their website here. *
 

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I have always loved windmills. Therefore, I cannot hide this January picture by Frank Koebsch. Isn't it beautiful?

 

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The German word for January is Januar, so very similar. But there are old German words, as well. They are often based on natural phenomena and seasons. January used to be called Hartung (hardening) or Eismond (ice moon or ice month).

 

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* You can also have a look under my labels Artist: Frank Koebsch and Artist: Hanka Koebsch where you can find all my posts about the two artists. 

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🌬🍃 I wish you all a wonderful January! 🌬🍃

Happy New Year!

  Happy New Year to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch

"Liebeserklärung an …. (Rostock)"
"Declaration of love to …. (Rostock)"

Hanka and Frank say to this picture:
Das Bild ist eine Liebeserklärung an die vielen wunderschönen Augenblicke mit und ohne Sonnenuntergang mit Hanka und eine Liebeserklärung an die Stadt Rostock, in der wir so viele schöne Momente verbrinden konnten.

The picture is a declaration of love to the many wonderful moments with and without sunset with Hanka and a declaration of love to the city of Rostock, where we were able to spend so many beautiful moments.
(see here)

Another great watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch. Enjoy!

Read more on their website here. *
 

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We meant to visit Rostock several times already but didn't manage so far. Yet, I hope. It seems to be a beautiful city, is situated at the Baltic Sea, that's always a plus.

***

November was rainy, December even more so. But that was alright. Most of the activities at the moment take place indoors anyway, concerts, visits with friends. Just a visit to the Christmas market was outdoors and we were pretty lucky with that.

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It was nice having our sons visit us for Christmas, even though their trip here was a catastrophe. The train system in Germany is just awful. It took one of them twelve hours (the second time that happened this year) instead of five. And only because we picked him up halfway.

***

Do you bake cookies for Christmas? It's a definite must in our house. So, here are a few to share. If you want some real ones, you must come to our house.

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* You can also have a look under my labels Artist: Frank Koebsch and Artist: Hanka Koebsch where you can find all my posts about the two artists. 

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🎉 I wish you all a Happy New Year! 🎉