Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

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A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...
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25 May in literature

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On this day in 1911 Thomas Mann visits the Lido in Venice. The visit inspired him to write Death in Venice.

 Mann was born in Germany in 1875 and worked as a clerk and studied to become a journalist. In 1898 he published his first collection of stories, followed by his first novel, and one of his most famous ones, Buddenbrooks. He married in 1905 and had six children. He published many essays about great thinkers like Freud, Goethe and Nietsche and continued to write novels, for example The Magic Mountain. In 1929 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mann moved to Switzerland and then on to the U.S. in 1938. There his published Joseph and His Brothers and Doktor Faustus. Thomas Mann died in Switzerland in 1955.

Buddenbrooks is on my TBR shelves, so let's see if I can overcome the thick book with small text and read it some time soon!

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