The Content Reader

Another month and another chain. I am joining Books Are My Favourite And Best for another six degrees. This month the chain starts with Wild Swans by Jung Chang. I read it many years ago, and loved it. It is a family saga that spans three female generations in China. I love family sagas so I go from here to The Empress of South America by Nigel Cawthorne. It is the story of a middle class Irish girl who went to Paris and ended up the wife of the emperor of Paraguay. It is a true story of how two, evil people made a whole country their private family business. Quite intriguing and chocking. From royalty to royalty I go to Mrs Jordan's Profession , by Claire Tomalin. It is a biography about the Anglo-Irish actress, courtesan and mistress of the future King William IV of UK. They had ten illegitimate children together. Fascinating story about a fascinating woman far ahead of her time.

I bought this book several years ago and it has been standing on my TBR shelves ever since. I bought it because it is a classic and I want to read a classic from time to time. Furthermore, since I mostly read English classics, it felt refreshing to read a classic from another country. However, every time I felt like reading it, its pure size stopped me from actually picking it up. What a lucky day when I did! 
 Sometimes you start a book with not very high hopes. A classic is always a gamble. Will it still be as fresh as it was at the time of writing, or will it seem hopelessly old fashioned? Buddenbrooks feels as fresh as when it was written. You are stuck from page number 1! 
 The novel tells the story of four generations of a bourgeoisie family in Lübeck during the years 1835-1877. Mann's own family comes from this milieu so he was well aquatinted with it. We meet them at the peak of their success and follow the decline over the years.  Major political and military developme...

It has been rather quiet here lately. This is partly due to a travel I did to London and Menorca. While in London I also visited Oxford and Stratford and hope to do a couple of posts on these wonderful places later. Otherwise life has been very heavy from the beginning of the year. I am trying to cope with lack of energy and hope that I am now on the right way. Something that helps is to read your blogs which always inspire me. It feels good to see what you are all up to, what you are reading and how you cope with life. I have a couple of book reviews waiting to be written. I read Buddenbrooks  by Thomas Mann. A huge book, but what a treat it was to read it. In Stratford I bought a book, Blood and Guts, A Short History of Medicin  by Roy Porter. Very interesting story on the development of medicin. To help out my present state I finally read Self Power by Deepak Chopra, which has been on my shelves for some time. It contains a lot of useful tips on how to approach life ...

New month and time for another chain of books. This month, host Books Are My Favourite And Best starts with Fates and Furies by Laureen Groff. I must admit I have never heard of it, although I see that it was one of the most popular books in 2015. Just shows how stuck I am with my TBR shelves! Never to late to change. Seems like a fascinating book. Reading the synopsis on Wikipedia, my attention was drawn to the line "is essentially about how the different people in a relationship can have disparate views on the relationship ". That is certainly true, and it immediately made me think of The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, where Rachel has a totally different view on the relationship with her ex-husband, and we could say people she sees from her train window. From there my connecting word would be train and I am thinking of a book I have had on my shelves for many years; Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux. It is a travel book about his travels thro...

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!