Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

-
Image
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...
5 comments

6 Degrees of Separation

-


March is upon us and there is another book chain to consider.  Host, Books Are My Favourite And Best, starts with Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. I am not familiar with the book, but it is about football in general and the author's relationship with Arsenal Football Club in particular. It is Hornby's first book, published in 1992, and is said to be an autobiographical essay.




The first word coming into mind is of course 'sport'. I don't really like reading about sports, and don't know about any books about sports either. However, I did read I am Zlatan by David Lagercrantz, which is a biography about one of our greatest football players ever, Zlatan Ibrahimovic.


That takes me to 'David Lagercrantz' who wrote the sequel to the Millenium book by Stieg Larsson. It is called The Girl in the Spider's Web. I have not read it, and am not sure I will, although I read the first three ones.


The word girl, or girls, takes me to Lee Smith's The Last Girls, which I finished recently. A group of girls went on a raft down the Mississippi, in the foot steps of Huckleberry Finn, during their college years. Thirty five years later, four of them meet up again, to take a boat down the river, in honouring their friend who died. A really good story, where nothing is as it seems to be. Review will follow.



The word to go from here will be 'voyage', and I settle for Fatal Voyage by Kathy Reichs. Our favourite forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan  is in action again. Don't we just love her?


'Forensic' takes us to any murder mystery, and I settle for one book on my shelves, not yet read. That is Playing With Fire by Peter Robinson. I have read one book by him and liked it.


'Fire' takes me to Sweden and the second part of a fantasy trilogy by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark, Eld or Fire. I have read the first one, The Circle which is very good. Looking forward to his one.



There I went very quickly from football, to girls, to fire and a few travels in between.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8 March 2017 at 22:12

    I like the way you've picked out a key word and used that as a prompt for the next link - I shall have a go at that with the next chain I think . I spend ages trying to find a connection so this might help me speed up! Here's what I ended up with - like you I'm not keen on sport https://bookertalk.com/2017/03/04/football/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lisbeth 9 March 2017 at 12:07

    Hi Karen, thank you. It was more tricky this time, maybe because I did not know about the book. I do like sports, I just don't like to read about them. A little bit like music, love it, but do not have to read about it.
    I like your chain as well and think it is really good.
    Thank you for posting and now I will enter you into my feedly feed!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Magical Room, Saloons in 1920s Paris by Ingrid Svensson

-
Image
Better late than never as they say. This post was supposed to go up last year. At a museum in Sweden I found a book about 1920s saloons in Paris. Very interesting and it generated the post:  Paris in July - French Saloons.    As promised then, here is the first of two posts about four of the main hostesses.  Still picking from the "Magical Rom" and events from Paris in the 1920s. There were four main characters who put their mark on the literary scene of the time; Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney, Adrienne Monnier, and Sylvia Beach. For most of you, they are already well known. These ladies had one thing in common, as well as many of the women holding salons, in that they were all lesbians. This was maybe one reason why they ended up in Paris, being more liberal (although you had to be discreet) than many other countries, and the US specifically. They were very creative and talented and did a lot for the cultural scene in Paris, introducing new talents and hel...
Read more

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson

-
Image
This is one of those popular help yourself books that seems to overflow these days. However, it defies all the good advices we have been given during the last years, that is; stay positive. Manson says: "Let's be honest; sometimes things are fucked up and we have to live with it."  Right! That is life after all. "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." Sigmund Freud  With this quote in mind Manson argues that values such as "pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive", are poor guidelines for a persons life. After all, some of the greatest moments in our lives are " not  pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive". Which leads him to the belief, and I am bound to agree with him, that it is the individual who is responsible for everything in his/her life. We just have to act due to external circumstances. We are not always in control of all aspects of our...
Read more

How To Read Novels Like A Professor by Thomas C. Foster

-
Image
I am not a professor in literature, but I would like to be. Unfortunately, this will never happen, so, I have to go along trying to read novels and literature like a professor. Thomas C. Foster's book is therefor a very useful tool. He has also written How To Read Literature Like A Professor , which sounds like another useful read. It is not only a book for readers. I would say it is also useful for aspring writers. How do you make a novel interesting? What does it have to contain? Who should be the narrator and what should he/she do? The content gives a hint on what makes up a good book.  Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages - are we not fascinated by how certain writers manage to hook you on the first sentence? This seems to be one of the most important sentences in a book and Foster mentions a few excellent openings. I love good openings and cannot help but quote them here, although I am sure you are already familiar with them (I only knew 2,4 a...
Read more