I haven't kept up with blogging, but I still write down everything I read, and I want to post it here. I like looking back over my book lists from time to time, and it's nice to have to short descriptions to remind me what the book was about and why I liked it. So here goes again!

Books since 2014

Tarjei Vesaas: The Birds, 1957. Translated from Norwegian by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barns, 1969. A sweet and sad book about a mentally retarded man who lives with his sister. The sister has always protected her brother until she unexpectedly falls in love. The story is told from the perspective of the brother and captures well the emotional turmoil he lives in.

Vladimir Vertlib: Zwischenstationen, 2005. I think this must be an autobiographical novel, but I don’t know that for sure. In any case, the protagonist is a Russian Jew who left Russia in the early 70s with his parents when he was five years old to try to find a place to live without persecution. The family lived for short periods in Austria, Israel (twice), The Netherlands, Italy, and the US, before finally settling once again in Austria. The father is the driving force for this wandering, and it is interesting to see how the son and the mother come to terms with it. A lively, funny, entertaining and heartbreaking representation of a chaotic migrant story.

Irena Korschunow: Er hieß Jan, 1979. A truly charming book about a love affair between a German girl and a Polish man in Nazi Germany. Written for young people, this was the text we used in a 300-level German course I recently taught. This book has a special place in my heart because of its sweet story and the role it played in my understanding of myself as a teacher.

Elisabeth Gaskell: North and South, 1855. A “social novel”, Gaskell is my new favorite bedtime author. Her books are long and slow, just perfect for reading in bed and getting sleepy. Not a lot happens, but the couple that’s meant to be together gets together in the end. Netflix has a great adaptation of the novel in four installments.

John Williams: Stoner, 1965. A really depressing story about the life of a college professor. Stoner is the name of the English professor who never really quite makes it professionally and certainly not personally but nevertheless has moments of happiness in his sad, dreary life. The sordidness and pettiness of the academic life is a main theme, and boy can I relate to that.

Elizabeth Taylor: A Game of Hide and Seek, 1951. This is the English author, not the American actress Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor is supposed to be a very good novelist, but this novel was terrible. I usually don’t finish things I don’t like, but I kept thinking this would get better since I read what a good writer Taylor is. The problem wasn’t the writing—it was the characters. There was nothing interesting or attractive about them. A young woman and a young man like each other but both are “duds” in their way and never manage to make much of their lives or even to get together.

Robert Seethaler: Der Trafikant, 2012. A young Austrian man from the countryside goes to Vienna in the 1930s when Hitler is in power and is in the process of annexing Austria. The young man works in a newsstand (“Trafikant”) and witnesses and experiences the Nazi violence and terror. Sigmund Freud is one of his customers, and he and the young man become friends. Like the other Seethaler novel I read (Ein ganzes Leben), the power of the book is getting immersed in the main character’s life and milieu, but this one is way better. At least, I enjoyed the story telling here and felt like I understood the character and his struggles.

Charles Marsh: Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 2014. This is a must-read for anyone interested in German history. So much has been written about Bonhoeffer that it’s hard to believe there could have been anything more to write, but there apparently was. Marsh narrates this biography beautifully—it reads like a novel but is a solid academic work. I didn’t want it to end.

Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford. I forgot that I already read this! I blogged about it here.

Sherman Alexie: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, 2006. Written for young people, I read, but this is for anyone. Alexie grew up on a reservation near Spokane and went on to become a well-respected author. His writing is funny but true, very poignant. This is a bitter-sweet tale based on Alexie’s childhood; there’s lots of trauma but also lots of good.

Daniel Kehlmann: Ruhm, 2014. I loved the last book I read by this author and was disappointed with this one. It is a series of short stories in which the characters all end up being connected to one another in various ways. The stories were clever enough, but the connection angle was not clever at all. I didn’t really understand why that needed to be in there, and I would have liked this better had I thought I was just reading a collection of short stories.

E.M. Delafield: Faster! Faster!, 1936. There are many wonderful English women writers and E.M. Delafield is one of them. This story about a strong woman who is a wife and mother and who runs a company in London seems way ahead of its time in so many ways. Or maybe we just think women didn’t do all these things before our times? In any case, the story is seems like it could be a modern tale; the worries of the stressed main character and her fate are told in an engrossing way, and the many questions about life and work and children that come up are ones we struggle with now.

Dezsö Kosztolányi: Skylark, 1920? Translated from Hungarian by Richard Aczel, 2010. Turn of the century novels from Austro-Hungarian writers fascinate me. The culture of the Empire with its many ethnicities is complex and layered, yet the writers do share a way of looking at the world. This novel tells the story of a simple family—a  father, a mother, and a grown daughter—who all must live together with the disappointment of their failed dreams. The writing is detailed, rich, humorous and engaging; the story is sad but not depressing.

Joe Simpson: Touching the Void, 1988. Not at all well written but still a great story, it’s about the true experience of two mountain climbers in Peru. They are tied together when one of them falls from the ledge in an icy storm and the other one has to eventually cut the rope and leave his friend behind, not knowing if he’s dead or alive but assuming the worst. Unbelievably, the friend, gravely injured and with no food or water, climbs out of the crevasse and makes it back to camp over three grueling days, minutes before his partner was about to leave. Greg and I saw the reenacted documentary of this story a while back and when I happened upon the book, I had to read it.

R.K. Narayan: Waiting for the Mahatma, 1955. A young man joins the group around Gandhi because he falls in love with a woman who is close to Gandhi and is an ardent follower. The young man is very immature and spoiled and doesn’t seem to learn very much along the way, but he stays in the group and endures the hardships for this woman. She, on the other hand, lives the teachings of Gandhi and stays true to her values. The book is written with amazing, delightful irony—we are meant, I think, to wonder about the whole Gandhi movement. Yet, in the end, the light shines through, and we, and the protagonist, come to understand something we didn’t know before. Can you tell I loved this book?

Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, 2013. A light, enjoyable read, not as good as the original Bridget Jones, but still laugh-out-loud funny! Bridget finds herself a single mother after her wonderful Mr. Darcy unexpectedly dies and has to go on to find her guy again. The scrapes she gets herself in are hilarious. She shows growth and maturity since her last adventures, but she still remains quite a character.

Barack Obama: Dreams for my Father, 1995. I kept wondering if Obama had help writing this, but it doesn’t appear he did. It’s really well written and gives a lot of insight into his psychological make-up. He is a strong person, due to wonderful support from his mother certainly, but mainly from his grandparents. This is interesting if you like Obama and want to know more about him. I hope he writes some more about his life (probably a work about his presidency is being planned).

Blake Eskin: A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, 2002. I stumbled on this work in the process of translating an article about Binjamin Wilkomirski by Noemi Schneider. Wilkomirski wrote a memoir of the time he spent in concentration camps as a child (called Fragments), but it turns out he made up the whole story. The memoir was a huge sensation when it came out (1995), and the author won several literary prizes and traveled a great deal and gave talks about the work. Naturally, it was a big scandal when the hoax was discovered. Eskin’s book details the story and the man in absorbing prose, weaving in his own family history, since he first met Wilkomirski at a family event, thinking he was a distant cousin (Eskin’s maternal great-grandmother was a Wilkomirski). I really enjoyed this book—it was like reading a mystery.

Daniel Brown: The Boys in the Boat, 2013.  A great American tale about the 1936 Olympic rowing team, a group of students from the University of Washington. Of course, they were the underdogs who came out ahead and won the race! The book is well-researched and very engaging.

Elizabeth Gaskell: Ruth, 1853. This story of a “fallen woman” must have been quite shocking for its time. Unfortunately, the character of Ruth is a passive victim who becomes a Madonna-like figure after her she is abandoned by her lover and sees the error of her ways, which makes this tale not as interesting as other Gaskell novels (North and South is my all time favorite), but it was a good choice for night reading.

If you read any of these and want to tell me what you thought, I'd love to hear from you. Or if you want to tell me what you're reading, you can let me know that too (juliemwinter6@gmail.com).