The Content Reader

  Week 3: (November 16-20) – Rennie@What's Nonfiction is asking you to Be The Expert/Ask the Expert/Become the Expert: Three ways to join in this week! You can either share 3 or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).  I have decided that I want to become an expert on 17th and 18th-century history. Mostly European, but the world opens up so much during these centuries that I will definitely read up on other areas. If you have any books to recommend, I am interested.  I can't really say I am an expert on a specific subject. Possibly, the Brontës of which I have read a lot. I was also a member of the Brussels Brontë Group which was very interesting and educating. So many experts there. A big advantage being in Brussels wa...

Friday coming up! I am just wondering where the time goes? Tomorrow the sun is promised, so I hope we can go out for a walk. Very windy here in Sweden now. On the other hand, bad autumn weather is a good excuse to stay at home and read a good book. Therefore I have chosen one of my favourite authors for this week's beginning and page 56, Sebastian Barry's Days Without End. "Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on for ever, all rested and stopped in that moment. hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now ..." Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader "The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather tha...

The Classic Club  has announced another Classic spin. This will take us over Christmas and New Year for the deadline of 30 January 2021. The spin will take place on Sunday 22nd November 2020 , so make sure you update your list. You should read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period. There is a problem with Pages in Blogger so all my pages disappeared. It is said they are working on it, but so far no solution it seems. Therefore I put my updated list in this post. Hope to see you on Sunday and am looking forward to seeing what is awaiting us.  My spin list (updated 19 November 2020, for spin #25 1. The Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov 2. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Carter 3. Daisy Miller by Henry James 4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj  6. The Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov 7. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence 8. Child Harold by Lord Byron 9. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 10. The Grapes of Wrath ...

  I bought two books when I visited Delft earlier this year. All about Delft and painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer mostly painted interiors from his(?) house. Young ladies in different occupations around the house, working, maybe being visited by a suitor, or just having a good time. He painted three outside views of which only two are known to exist today. One is  View of Delft and one is The Little Street.  Both wonderful, as everything that he painted. "After 1696 we lose sight of The Little Street and the View of Delft for a very long time, and we have heard nothing whatsoever about the third town-scape since then. It is possible that it is lurking unrecognized as an anonymous work in a collection somewhere, or has been lost. The Little Street did not surface for more than a century, when it appeared in the estate of Gerrit Willem van Oosten de Bruyn, who died in Haarlem in 1797." Since Vermeer became popular again at the end of the 19th century, art historians inte...

We have reached week 2 of Nonfiction November, hosted by Julie@Julz Read . I  have actually been following my list of reading, which I posted in my initial post about Nonfiction November .  Patrik Svensson won the August prize (in Sweden) in 2019 for best nonfiction book with his  The Gospel of the Eels . The Eel, Anguilla Anguilla,  it seems, is one of of the most enigmatic creatures nature has created. Within the world of natural science, it is referred to as 'the eel question'. People from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud have tried to understand the eel without succeeding. Now it is threatened with extinction and scientists don't know enough of how the eel is living, reproducing and dying.   Patrik Svensson mixes his own childhood memories of eel fishing with his father, with scientific research on the life of eels. A little touch of philosophy and psychology and he has us hooked. Although scientific research has been going on for centuries, the answer to the...

  We have reached week 2 of Nonfiction November, hosted by Julie@Julz Read . Week 2: (November 9-13) – is all about Book Pairing: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. It can be an “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.  I read a lot of historical fiction, and find that I often want to read a nonfiction book just to see how well the author has followed history. I recently read The Girl Who Tempted Fortune  by Jane Ann McLachlan. It is set in the Kingdom of Naples at the beginning of the 14th century. I have read quite a lot about the time as regards the region of Tuscany and Milan, but not so much about Naples. So far I have not found a nonfiction book to read about this time. Could you recommend one?   After having visited Florence in February this year (just before the pandem...

It has been a while since I posted here. Maybe because, since I now live in Sweden, I read more books in Swedish. We have excellent libraries here and that means I don't have to put more books on my already over-full TBR shelves. My local library has a shelf with new books, or new translations or just themes they want to promote. There I usually find good books. They also have a shelf with themed books related to events, time of the year etc. Now they have a shelf with horror books or at least spooky books. It is not my favourite genre, but I was attracted by this particular book; Thin Air by Michelle Paver. " The higher you go the darker it gets."  "The Himalayas, 1935 Kangchuenjunga. Third-highest peak on earth. Greatest killer of them all. Five Englishmen set off from Darjeeling, determined to conquer the sacred summit. But courage can only take them so far - and the mountain is not their only foe. As mountain sickness and the horrors of extreme altitude set in, ...

  Nonfiction November has started. Leann@Shelf Aware  is guiding us through the first week. The aim is to look at what you have already have read this year, choose your favourite and recommend to others.  What was your favourite nonfiction read of the year?  I have read 23 nonfiction books so far. I think that is more than I usually read. Most of them are about history, some biographies and some reflection books. I will not mention all of them here, just a few of my favourites. The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood by Jan Marsh about the women who surrounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Very interesting to see the relationships from the women's point of view, and how it affected their lives.  The Tigress of Forli (Renaissance Italy's most courageous and notorious countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de' Medici) by Elizabeth Lev. An interesting story of an extraordinary woman surviving politics, intrigues, relationships, plagues, war and much more during the end of the ...