Haruf, Kent "Plainsong"

Haruf, Kent "Plainsong" - 1999

The story of a father raising his teenager sons alone in a small town. Another farm is run by two unmarried brothers. And then there's a pregnant teenage girl. That's the set-up for this story that has been written in a wonderful way, the author manages to tell it as if it had happened to his own family, in his own community. Quite an emotional story with a lot of details. I really liked it.

There is a sequel, "Eventide", which is on my wishlist.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together - their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from."

Pasternak, Boris "Doctor Zhivago"

Pasternak, Boris "Doctor Zhivago" (Russian: Доктор Живаго = Doktor Živago) - 1957

Who hasn't seen the movie "Doctor Zhivago"? I doubt there are many who haven't. But who has read the novel? I haven't met many who did. But since I really like the story in the movie and the author received a Nobel prize for literature and I love literature by Nobel prize winners ... I just had to read this one day.

I am glad I did. Boris Pasternak has a great way of telling a "very simple story", as he put it himself. Not really that simple, lots of complications in the life of our hero, Jura Zhivago, a doctor and a poet. He writes a lot of poems during his life, some of them are added at the end of the book. As so often when I read a translation, I wish I spoke the original language. I am not much into poetry but translated poetry is even worse than original one, it can never give the true sentiment of what the poet really meant.

However, even in the translated poems, you can detect Pasternak's wish to write a "simple novel", one that shows the true life of people struggling through difficult times but still trying to maintain a human life. The poems are about everyday life, love, and the Bible,

Zhivago himself is depicted as a highly intellectual and very sensitive person, any other character complements him, any individual is complex and still easy to understand.

The only problem non-Russians might have with this novel are the names. But, if you've read other Russian novels, you will know that every person has three names, the first name, the family name and the middle name which is called father's name. If you bear in mind, that a person is often addressed by their first and their father's name and only from time to time by their first and family name, you don't get confused with the different names.

I enjoyed reading this book just as much as I have enjoyed watching the movie again and again. There is a lot more in the book than they can ever bring on the screen, therefore, if you like the story, you should read the novel.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy - the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities - Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times."

Boris Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition". He had to renounce this for fear of being expelled from his country but the award is still valid.

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

Esperanto

Esperanto celebrated its 125th birthday on 26 July 2012.

This is a good reason to have a list with many links to interesting Esperanto pages. I will update this post regularly. So, wait for more.

Lots of information about Esperanto

How to learn Esperanto - in many languages

Dr. Zamenhof created the international language - Esperanto

BBC Radio 4 feature about Esperanto

Esperanto on Wikipedia

The International Language - Esperanto

How is Esperanto easier to learn than other languages

Kontakto - Esperanto magazine
Personal Stories - why people learn and speak Esperanto
Duoblilo - Allows you to type texts with Esperanto signs without having to use ASCII codes all the time.

German article "Das Linux der Sprachen" (The Linux of the Languages)
Esperanto article "Mondlingvo por malmultaj" (World Language for a few)

Songbook from the Esperanto Scouts - Kantlibro de la Skolta Esperanto Ligo

Series about Esperanto

Part 1 - Esperanto is a language you can use for everything

Part 2 - Esperanto is a language with many traits

Part 3 - Esperanto is a language used in many ways

Part 4A - Esperanto is a language everybody can and should learn

Part 4B - Esperanto is a language everybody can and should learn

Part 5 - Esperanto is a language associated with a colourful movement

Part 6 - Esperanto is the language of the future

Zane, Lily "Creating Home"

Zane, Lily "Creating Home. Inspiring Comfort in Every Room" - 1998

A sweet little book with a lot of interesting tips on how to create a home in your house. Certainly not all of these ideas are new but most of them are easy to accomplish. And with a little bit of inspiration, you can change or enhance almost every room in your house.

From the back cover:

"According to author and designer Lily Zane, home is the ultimate reflection of its inhabitants. Using the insights illustrated in Creating Home: Inspiring Comfort in Every Room anyone can capture the inspiration to turn a space into their own warm and intimate oasis. With its hand-drawn full-color illustrations and more than 50 practical and inspirational tips, the book combines the attractiveness of a gift with the usefulness of a how-to. Designed to encourage readers to develop their own personal styles and cultivate their own vision of 'home', the nine se of Creating Home lead to an inspired trip through living spaces with a trusted, creative friend. The decorating tips include easy-to-implement ideas and inspirations on how to create comfort and beauty by focusing on what you love and incorporating those details into daily life.

Lily Zane guides readers to:
-- Create an entry that says 'welcome' with color, scents, collections
-- Inspire comfort in the living room with candles, pillows, lighting, photos
-- Add personal flavor to the kitchen with cookbooks, recipes, utensils
-- Gather with elegance in the dining room
-- Luxuriate with plants, art and oils in the bathroom
-- Maintain serenity in the bedroom

Sections on garden, deck, home offices and the details that make any room special for an occasion round out this engaging yet sumptuously useful gift book."

Lily Zane has also a good website and a page about her book.

Shields, Carol "Jane Austen"

Shields, Carol "Jane Austen. A Life" - 2001

I am a huge Jane Austen fan. I love all her novels, love the movies and TV series they created from her material. So, reading one of her newer biographies was definitely on my list.

The first downside is the length of the book, only a little over 200 pages. Of course, so little is known about Jane Austen's life, she lived very secluded, private, didn't even publish her name for quite a while, only wrote six major works.

Despite those facts, Carol Shields managed to write a good account of a life at a time where there were no journalists or paparazzi around to reveal every single step a famous person made. I would have loved it to be longer, to reveal a little more than I knew already but, alas, I can't blame the biographer for not knowing more, there simply isn't. What a pity.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award-winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created."

I read quite a few novels by or about Jane Austen. Find a link to all my reviews here.

I have also read "The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields and liked it a lot.

Westerman, Frank "The Republic of Grain"

Westerman, Frank "The Republic of Grain" (Dutch: De graanrepubliek) - 1999

"The Republic of Grain" describes life in a Dutch region, in the North of the Netherlands during a tough time. The rise and fall of an area due to nature, politics, decisions made. Mainly, this is the story of a guy who lived during the biggest part of the 20th century who was the son of a big farmer, got into politics and ended up the agricultural commissioner at the EU in Brussels. But it is also the story of his country, his village, his home

Frank Westerman is a renowned journalist who has spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe as a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper. I am sure I will read more of his books.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

Book description:

"From time immemorial, the Dutch have owed their survival to pushing back the sea. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the dikes will be pierced and water let in once again. In the grain republic of Groningen where the clay is richest and the best grain harvested, the centuries-old polders will be flooded. The farming community, and with it a thousand-year-old tradition, will have to yield to environmental pressures and recreation.

Central in this amazing turnabout is the European agricultural technocrat Sicco Mansholt who worked his way up from farmer’s son in Groningen to Minister of Agriculture and subsequently Agricultural Commissioner of the EEC and Chairman of the European Commission. His controversial ‘Mansholt Plan’, formulated in the sixties to reform agriculture and manage it in a more industrial way, fundamentally changed European agriculture. By means of stable grain prices and import levies Mansholt was able to push grain production up sharply. But the initial success turned against him. From the seventies, ever larger surpluses of grain, milk, butter, and meat were created which then had to be dumped on the world market. Ultimately, Mansholt’s agriculture policy absorbed more than half of the eec budget and was permanently abandoned in the eighties.

Because of the enormous increase in scale, many farmers in Europe had already given up. Meanwhile Mansholt had also undergone a sea-change in his thinking. Under the influence of the Report of Rome and his remarkable relationship with the German Green politician Petra Kelly, he changed his mind about the idea of food self-sufficiency and became a champion of the idea of preferring the environment to agriculture.

De graanrepubliek ends with this apotheosis. The plan to flood fertile agricultural land will definitely mean the end of gentlemen farmers and farm workers. In a compelling way Frank Westerman shows how the history of the grain republic of Groningen is in fact the story of the destruction of all European farmers and of an old world that has disappeared."

Kemal, Yaşar "The Drumming-Out"

Kemal, Yaşar "The Drumming-Out" (Turkish: Teneke) - 1987

A young administrator in a town in the Anatolian province tries to fight a big landlord who floods large portions of land to grow rice but doesn't care about the effects on the population. Quite a story, well written, exciting.

The author was born in a small village in Southern Anatolia and was the only one in his village who learned to read and write. Quite an accomplishment. He is one of the biggest critics in Turkey and received several prizes for his works.

I later read another book by the author, "The Birds Have Also Gone", he seems quite the expert on Turkish life.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"In Teneke, Kemal depicts the tragic conditions, under which the landowners in the region Çukurova in southern Anatolia of Turkey live and the way in which the rice planters exploit them. A young and idealistic district governor, who is newly appointed there, tries to back the landowners struggling against oppression and injustice by a rice planter."

Yaşar Kemal received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1997.