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Showing posts from September, 2020

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...

Book Beginnings on Fridays and The Friday 56

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  This week's book is a non-fiction book I have had on my shelves for quite some time; Darwin's Sacred Cause, Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins  by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. I have not yet read it, but it is an interesting subject in more ways than one. Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader "No 'evil more monstrous has ever existed upon earth'. So said the leading anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson on celebrating the end of the slave trade. Clarkson was supported and part-financed by Charles Darwin's grandfather, the master potter Josiah Wedgwood. But the words could equally have been Darwin's - or those of his other grandfather, the libertine, poet and Enlightenment evolutionist Erasmus Darwin. For all of them slavery was a depravity to make one's 'blood boil', in Charles Darwin's words, a sin requiring expiation: 'to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants ... have been and are so gu...

Bookmark Monday

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 Long time since I posted a bookmark here. Probably due to Corona, since travelling has been scarce. However, now I have made a short trip to Austria and Delft. You will find, in the coming days, two posts about these trips on The Content Reader Goes Outdoors . The meme is hosted by Guiltless Reading   although I think Aloi is mostly posting this meme on her twitter/instragram accounts with the same name.  In Delft, we visited churches and museums and I managed to find a bookmark of Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of the most popular paintings of Delft's famous son Johannes Vermeer. For my magnet collection on the fridge I bought another four motives by him; View of Delft, Little Street, Art of Painting, and Girl With a Pearl Earring.  In the Vermeer centre, I found two books which I am looking forward to reading. They are Vermeer's Little Street by Franz Gruzenhout. Not much is known about the exact location of the painting, so it reads like a mystery. The other...