Bookish Beck » Germany
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Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
My second contribution to German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzy Siddal, after Last House Before the Mountain by Monika Helfer. I spotted this in a display of new acquisitions at my library earlier in the year and was attracted by the pointillist-modernist style of its cover (Man with a Tulip by Robert Delaunay, 1906) featuring ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
My next four reads for Women in Translation month (after Part I here) were, again, a varied selection: a mixed volume of family history in verse and fragmentary diary entries, a set of nature/travel essays set mostly in Denmark, a memoir of mental illness, and a preview of a forthcoming novel about Mary Shelley’s inspirations ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
Back to the foodie lit. A chef’s memoir of adventurous travel and eating, and a short story collection about Ethiopian American immigrants – for some of whom learning how to cook traditional American food is a sign of integration. A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain (2001) Anthony Bourdain ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
I’m rounding out our nonfiction week of Novellas in November with a review that also counts towards German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzy Siddal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian, was hanged at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 for his role in the Resistance and in planning a failed 1944 assassination attempt on ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
It was a prolific month for poetry. There is so much variety here in form and topic, from the tongue-in-cheek aphorisms of Tara Bergin’s Savage Tales to the maritime and ornithological portrait of Anglesey in Zoë Skoulding’s A Marginal Sea. Something for everyone, I’d like to think, and I hope these capsule reviews and sample ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
I’m sneaking in with five more review books on the final day of Nonfiction November, after a first catch-up earlier on in the month. Today I have a sprightly travel book based on the journeys of female writers and artists, a probing account of repeated chronic illness in the family, an anthology of essays showcasing ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
Today I have a book of poems about Covid lockdown and being autistic, a reprint of a vintage cookbook with a difference, the pinnacle of autofiction that I’ve found thus far, and a prize-winning collection of short stories about immigrants’ everyday challenges. The Oscillations by Kate Fox (2021) The first section, “After,” responds to ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
My summer reading has been picking up and I have a firm plan – I think – for the rest of the foodie books that will make up my final 20. I’m reading two more at the moment: a classic with an incidental food-themed title and a work of American history via foodstuffs. Today I ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
Fittingly, I finished reading this on Sunday, which was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Even after seven decades, we’re still unearthing new Holocaust narratives, such as this one: rediscovered in a flea market in 2010, it was republished in French in 2015 and first became available in English translation in 2017. Born Frymeta Idesa Frenkel in ..read more
Bookish Beck » Germany
3M ago
Possibly never before nor since has a great writer been so intensely and so permanently influenced by one woman as Lawrence was by Frieda von Richtofen. ~biographer Robert Lucas I have a weakness for “famous wives” books, which have become increasingly popular over the past decade. (I have a whole shelf for them on Goodreads ..read more