Book Blogging
So, I had this resolution, namely to read 60 hardcover and 40 Kindle books before I bought any new ones.
Unfortunately, life threw me a curveball, and I soothed myself in a very predictable way involving Foyles, amazon.de, the amazon Kindle store (shutupIhadavoucher), Hugendubel, and the local bookstore in Mudersbach, Lesestübchen (ahem).
Let’s survey the damage.
My haul at Foyles:
Mafalda inedita, by Quino - Mafalda is just amazing. A little Argentinian girl tells it like it is. Politics, feminism, being a kid, you name it, Mafalda has it covered. Quino, the author, wrote Mafalda from the mid-Sixties until the mid-Seventies. Like Bill Watterson, he ended the comic when he felt he was about to jump the shark. The result is a modern classic.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W Anthony is a scholarly detective story of the origins of Indo-European language and culture. I’m about 20% of the way through, and it is an absorbing read.
Flat Earth by Christine Garwood is a fascinating piece of history of popular science. In this book, Garwood argues that the view that the earth is flat emerged relatively recently and superseded earlier knowledge about a round earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but I am looking forward to seeing Garwood trace the history of ideas, and the contortions that were required to implant the Flat Earth idea in people’s minds.
My Kindle collection grew by four works. First up was the eBook of Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, which I also have as a paperback. Since this was mainly for my own reference in the gym, I decided not to count it. If you are interested in picking heavy shit up and putting it back down again, GET THIS BOOK.
Then, there was Gary Taubes’ The Diet Delusion, also known as Good Calories, Bad Calories in the US. When experimenting with my own nutrition, I found that I fare much better on a high protein, low-ish carb diet (40% protein, 30% fat, 30% carb, fact fans). Since I also have diabetes II in the family, I thought I would have a look at Taubes’ arguments, which favour the kind of diet I’ve been moving towards.
Since I am very impressed by the monolingual dictionaries that come with Kindle, I decided getting a foreign language book might be an ideal way to bolster my Spanish and French. The French offerings were a bit dire, but I found a nice history of Spain, Breve historia de Espana, which seems readable and appears to have been written by a competent historian.
Finally, I am fascinated with a particular type of German writer who worked in the early 20th century, wrote prose and journalism, and used a clear, incisive style. One of this group of writers is Stefan Zweig, and I got his Sternstunden der Menschheit for Kindle.
At Hugendubel, a local chain book store, I got Zweig’s Schachnovelle - we were going to read this for a book club which I will probably be unable to attend now.
At the Lesestübchen, I ordered a copy of the most up-to-date Zweig biography, Stefan Zweig - Drei Leben, eine Biografie by Oliver Matuschek. This book covers Zweig’s tumultuous life which spanned the Austrian Empire, the Great War, the Anschluss, and exile. Zweig killed himself before the end of World War II, sending shock waves through the German and Austrian emigrants.
I continued the Zweig theme by ordering Donald Prater’s biography of Zweig (used) via amazon.de. Six further used book purchases ended my shopping spree.
The first book, “Die Schule der Frauen” by the German critic Iris Radisch, was recommended to me by a female physicist who came up against gender discrimination while working in Switzerland. She is now at home with her three children.
Next up was a biography of the writer Thomas Mann, who covers a similar time span as Zweig. The reviews said it was scholarly and thorough, the price was right, so I put in my order.
The next two books focus on cultural history. Frank Stein’s short book highlights the long cultural history of Jews in Germany, a reminder of what was destroyed in the last century, while “Verschwende Deine Jugend” is a novel about the New Wave / punk movement in Germany in the late Seventies / early Eighties. Although I was born in 1974, and so only caught the tail end of the Neue Deutsche Welle, I didn’t particularly like most of the music that was in the charts in my early teens (soft rock, stadium rock), and went through a long phase of listening to early Eighties music.
The final two books are concerned with the history of places. “Deutschland vor Ort” is a collection of stories that capture some of the spirit of Germany, each linked to a place of historical significance, and “Auf Römerstrassen durch Europa” goes back to the time to the Roman Empire, when a large part of the continent was unified under Roman rule. I’ve always been interested in Roman history; I learnt Latin at school, which has stood me in good stead when confronted with Romance languages, and I grew up East of the Rhine, in the part of Germany that the Romans successfully occupied. Many of my favourite childhood trips were to Roman monuments and sites such as the archaeological park at Xanten.
Total haul: 16 books. No more purchases until I’ve read those 16, plus the 60 paper and 40 eBooks I originally planned.
Hopefully.
