Book-a-Day Challenge

Book-a-Day-Challenge Day 5

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„I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.“

This book certainly gets the reactions going. In our bookclub it was pretty much love or hate. I really enjoyed this novel even though it was not at all what I expected. After I had managed to overcome that tiny bit of annoyance that the protagonist doesn’t use her year of rest and relaxation to read tons of book I was all in.

I found the book smart, ironic, funny and very dark. The protagonist does what I would like to do: Put my life on pause for a while, until the Trumps, Erdogans, Putings and other assholes have disappeared and I come back to life and all these last years of bullshit were just a bad dream. Wouldn’t that be wonderful.

Well our nameless protagonist goes into hibernation for an entire year. But when you think sandy beaches, or comfy pyjamas, hot beverages and good books you are very wrong. She is off to a completely different kind of hibernation.

She is most of the time of this year completely strung out on a concoction of different super strong drugs, whilst also juggling her partly unwanted friendship with her best friend, her shitty ex-boyfriend and her feelings about her dead parents.

The story is set in the year 2000 and she hibernates hoping to come out of it a completely new human being. She manages to find the worlds worst and funniest psychiatrist who gets her every perscription drug mankind has ever heard of and by this helps her to sleep away a year of her life.

 “This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

The book feels like a strange endless fever dream with its repetitions and its haziness. The protagonist blacks in and out of her life, walks to a nearby Bodega to buy old VHS tapes only to head back to the sofa to fall back asleep. Sometimes she is awake without noticing, goes on telesales shopping binges, finds her phone in the oddest places, phones her ex boyfriend etc. Her black outs can last for days sometimes but she is more astonished by them then horrified and thinks of ways to hide her phone from herself to stop making orders or appointments.

Even though she mainly sleeps, her observation skills of the outside world are spot on. I don’t wanna get into describing the narrators relationship with her distant father and her cold abusive mother. It is definitely the main reason for her escapism and her avoidance of everything.

Oh and then there is her best friend from university, try-hard Reva, who is so desperate to fit in, to stay slim and to be liked. She is always reading the latest hyped self-help book, is having an affair with her boss and if only to have some drama in her life that she can continously chew over with her her friend. She is in every way the absolute opposite of our apethic heroine.

I thoroughly enjoyed this bittersweet story but I’m aware Ottessa Moshfegh is not a writer for everyone. One has to have a bit of a thing for unlikeable protagonists and should ideally not be squeamish about body fluids, descriptions of odors etc.

Check out Ottessa Moshefegh’s previous novel „Eileen“ which I liked even better and makes for really good winter reading.

„My Year of Rest and Relaxation“ is available in German as „Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung“ in Liebeskind Verlag.

Book-a-Day-Challenge Day 4

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Richard Feynman is a physicist who taught at Cornell and Princeton, worked on the Manhattan Project and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965.

Feynman was not a big fan of formalities and this dislike is a big theme throughout the book. His father was a sales man who dealt with a variety of people and he saw that underneath people were all the same. He passed these ideas on to his children and Feynman disliked formalities so much, ne nearly did not accept his Nobel prize.  I really liked the idea that the son of a sales man and a homemaker would win this prestigious price.

No question, Feynman was a brilliant physicist with a varity of interests and the stories told in this book are based on these interests mainly were the were linked with his work in physics. From his childhood interest in radios, his observations on human behavior, his laboratory at home, all the tricks and gimmicks he developed make fun stories to hear.

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.” 

But unfortunately there is a big but. I am happy to oversee his huge ego because well he was indeed an exceptional clever person so ok but being brilliant and sometimes ahead of his time did not stop him from being a pretty sleezy womaniser and I am sadly missing my blessed ignorance about this side of him before I read the book.

Saw this picture somewhere and it is spot on.

But beside that I enjoyed reading about his time at Los Alamos where he worked on the Manhattan Project and the stories about the time he spent in Brazil and Japan as well as the chapters on education.

Most of the stories he tells are about him having a hidden talent, using it often for some prank on others and then being applauded for it by others (or himself). He is not only a great physicist, mathematican, musician, safecracker, code breaker, drawer of naked girls etc. He is unfortunately showing off quite a bit and that can come across as him being a bit of a jerk.

I know I’m not doing a great job here advertising the book, but there were also parts I really liked and I really recommend this method he came up with and that is named in his honor:

The Feynman Learning Technique:

  1. Choose a concept you want to learn about
  2. Pretend you are teaching it to a child
  3. Identify gaps in your explanation;  Go back to the source material, to better understand it.
  4. Review and simplify

He might not be the world’s most interesting and funny storyteller (as he believes to be) but there is still enough good stuff in the book for me to recommend it to you and follow up with one of his great lectures, for example this one on Gravitation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRE0GxT6Zbw

Are you good at distinguing between the artist/scientist and the book?

Check out Sabine Hossenfelder’s book „Lost in Math. How Beauty leads physics astray/Das häßliche Universum“, this biography on physicist Lise Meitner and  theoretical physicst Lisa Randells book „Knocking on heavens door“

Book-a-Day x-mas Challenge

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It’s this time of the year again and I’m introducing a book a day that caught my interest. You will find old and new, obscure and mainstream titles next to each other so hopefully an interesting mix.

I would like to start today with a book I had picked from the shelves for the wonderful #autorinnenschuber and got sucked into it before I could place it back on the shelf.

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Mind you, this is no comfy feelgood literature. This book is hard, it hurts and it is one of the most painful description of the horrors of WW2 that I ever read.

Agota Kristof (1935-2011) was a Hungarian author who lived Switzerland, and the wrote in french. Das große Heft (The Notebook in english) is the first volume of a trilogy. It quite difficult to describe the ambiance of this weird and chilling story. I have read a lot of books on WW2, but can’t think of many that that made such a strong emotional impression on me.  It paints the impact of war on the people enduring its horrors in cold and dark pictures.

The story is told in the first person plural by twins named Claus and Lucas, who were taken by their mother from the city to the countryside where they should stay with their grandmother until the war is over. This granny is not a warm and welcoming spirit, she is quite mean and unwelcoming and in response to their harsh environment at home and with the war outside, the both numb themselves. They practice surpressing their emotions and harden themselves in physical excercises.

They response to life and its uncertainties in a pragmatic and often amoral way, taken advantage of any situation that promises them a benefit. But there are also moments of altruism that come about very unexpectedly when they help others even less fortunately in life than themselves.

 The book ends in a very unexpected way and left me pretty speechless.

I rarely encountered a book as terrifying, numbing and painful as this one. It has immense emotional power which is only increased by the minimalistic language and will haunt you for a long time. I highly recommend this slender book even though it is a tough read.

Combine Agota Kristof’s „The Notebook“ with Ilse Aichinger’s „Die größere Hoffnung“ and Anna Funder’s „All that I am/Alles was ich bin„.

I’m looking forward to seeing you back here tomorrow where I promise it will be a little more light-hearted.

Do you know the book? What was your impression and did you read the rest of the trilogy?

„Das große Heft“ was published in Piper Verlag.

Book-a-Day Challenge – Day 9

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I had never heart of Will Durant before somebody recommended this really excellent „The Story of Philosophy“ to me. When I looked him up I was astonished to see that this guy has basically written the entire History of the World in 11 volumes in collaboration with his wife Ariel. They had planned it into the 20th century, but due to their old the 11th volume The Age of Napoleon ended in 1975. They left behind notes for a 12th volume, The Age of Darwin, and an outline for a 13th, The Age of Einstein, which would have taken The Story of Civilization to 1945.

Their idea was to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had become fragmented into esoteric specialties and too complex, and to vitalize it for contemporary application.

The couple shared a very intense love for each another. After Will entered the hospital, Ariel stopped eating, and died on October 25, 1981. Though their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep Ariel’s death from Will, he learned of it on the evening news, and died two weeks later, at the age of 96, on November 7, 1981.

Back to „The Story of Philosophy“ in which Durant profiles several important Western philosophers and their ideas from Socrates and Plato to Nietzsche. Durant was aiming to show the interconnectedness of their ideas and how each philosopher build on the ideas of the ones before him.

There are nine chapters each focused on one philosopher, and two more chapters each containing briefer profiles of three early 20th century philosophers namely Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce (of whom I had never heart before) and Bertrand Russell who published his „History of Western Philosophy“ in 1945 and is an equally astonishing read

In a later edition Durant accepted the criticism for not including philosophers from Asia.

The book was published in 1926 but also due to its subject the book has aged well. Will Durant is a good writer and the book is very accessible. I think it makes a really good Christmas present for anybody who’s interested in testing the waters of Philosophy.

Are you interested in Philosophy and which philosopher interests you the most?

#Women in SciFi (47) meets Book-a-Day Challenge Day 8: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

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Luckily Mary Shelley continued to write after her first novel „Frankenstein“ was such a huge success. Today I would like to introduce to you one of her less known works „The Last Man“. The novel starts at the end of the 21st century and ends in the year 2100.

This futuristic story talks about the gradual extermination of the human race by a mysterious plague and a tragic love story. Mary Shelley is not just the Grandmother of Science Fiction, I’m sure she also was the first person to write a post apocalyptic novel. She basically invented the dystopian genre. Compared to this book, Frankenstein is a happy comedy.

“What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?” 

This novel is a slow burn. Like many Victorian authors, Shelly took her time, she did not rush her plot along and she backed it up with ideas and feelings. The book is intriguing, especially for people with an interest in the ideals and philosophies of Victorian times.

“It is a strange fact, but incontestable, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men’s minds than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause.”

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The book is partly a „roman a clef“ with the main protagonists modelled after her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. I’m sure Mary Shelley felt pretty lonely after the deaths of so many people that played such a big role in her own life. She created a story about the deconstruction of the Romanticism movement, showing how the world view and optimism of an aesthete never really survives contact with the real world.

“I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.” 

This is a pretty sad story and it clearly reflected Mary Shelley’s own life. She also outlived all of her friends and her husband, four of her five children had died and was actually „The Last Relict“.

If you are a little brave and can tolerate the hopelessness and dispair of this novel, you will rewarded with beautiful language, interesting ideas and vivid melancholy pictures of a world that gets lonelier and emptier every day.

Mary Shelley is not just the Ur-Mother of Science Fiction with her novel „Frankenstein“ she is also the Ur-Mother of the apocalyptic novel. I bow my head in respect to Mary Shelley…

Here is a really interesting short BBC documentary on Mary Shelley’s „The Last Man“:

Day 5 – Everyone should read

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„As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.“

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In „Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance“Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor argues that the secret to success — whether for parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people — is not talent, but a combination of passion and perseverance she calls “grit.”

The dictionary defines “grit” as “mental toughness or courage.”

The book was such an eye-opener for me and I have used her TED Talk and parts of the book a lot in my Leadership trainings and have given the book as a present a couple of times. It was such a paradigm shift for me.

Having grown-up in an environment that placed so much emphasis on natural intelligence and talents, I was taught in school to always stick to what I’m immediately good at, avoid failure at all costs, because failure is just so bad. The whole spiel of the closed versus a growth mindset.

Based on my experience and of those around me, I realized this kind of thinking was detrimental to our development and luckily I’ve learned that people are so much more adaptable and can achieve so much more when they simply try harder and they believe they can make it, which is the opposite of what I’ve been taught to believe. Ironically, the easiest way to fail is to actually not to try because you are scared of failing.

In Grit, Angela makes clear that talent exists (defining talent as the rate in which a person learns with effort), but argues that „a focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort“. Also, Angela values the cultivation of other character strengths to be happy and successful in live like humility, kindness, social intelligence etc.

“Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” 

I love „Grit“. It’s so informative, clear and very well written. I especially liked the fact that there was a chapter in her book that took note of the fact that a lot of children grow up in very very difficult circumstances which makes it a lot harder for them.

If you are hungry at school, scared of violence at home your priorities are just plainly somewhere else and these kids most probably are not encouraged by their parents to enroll in team sports, or to learn an instrument etc.

The most important thing to overcome poverty in the world is to give children a decent upbringing. This book has touched me in so many ways and helping kids from uneducated and/or poor backgrounds is one goal in life I have not yet reached. I will use all the Grit I have in make it happen.

“…there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine….you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people….Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.” 

Here is Angela’s TED Talk on „Grit“:

Which book do you think everybody should read?

Day 2 Book-a-Day Challenge: Last Read

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We – Yevgeny Zamyatin

As the very happy Reader of the „Happy Reader“ magazine I finally managed to read the book of the upcoming edition beforehand, so I can happily participate in the online and offline book discussion.

The dystopian novel was on my reading list anyway as it counts as sort of a precessor of Aldous Huxely’s „Brave New World“ or George Orwell’s „1984“ and having read the novel now, I can totally relate to that.

„Isn’t it clear that individual consciousness ist just sickness?“

The story takes place in the future within a united totalitarian state. The urban city almost entirely constructed of glass so everything is constantly under surveillance and everybody lives a strongly reglemented life where people are numbers instead of having a name. The state is governed by the „Benefactor“ and the „Guardians“ and surrounded by a huge wall that protects the people in the city from nature outside of the city and the wood people that live there.

“The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.”

The narrator is D-503 a mathematican and constructor of the space ship „Integral“ that the state is planning to use to colonize and integrate our planets. When D-503 illicitly falls in love with the mysterious I-330 his well-defined mathematical world descends into chaos. He starts to dream, misses work and the assigned walks and also starts to neglect his other lover 0-90 and his friend R-13 a state poet.

A doctor diagnoses him with having developed a soul and if it not have been that he is vital for building the spaceship, he would have been deemed uncurable and hence terminated. Out of love to I-330 he agrees to sabotage the Integral Project…

The language is quite sparse, with a lot of mathematical-technical words and references to Taylorism.

Many of the names and numbers in „We“ are allusions to personal experiences of Zamyatin or to culture and literature. Auditorium 112 for example refers back to the prison cell 112 where Zamyatin was inprisoned twice.

In light of the increasingly dogmatic Soviet government of the time, Zamyatin seems to make the point that it would seem to be impossible to remove all the rebels against a system. Zamyatin even says this through I-330: „There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite.“

„We“ was the first book that was banned by the Soviet censorship bureau in 1921. Zamyatin’s influence in the literary world declined further throughout the 1920s and he was eventually allowed to emigrate to Paris in 1931 (in contrast to his writer colleague Mikhail Bulgakov who applied for emigration for years and was never allowed to either publish or leave)

The novel was first published in English in 1924, readers in the Soviet Union had to wait for its publication until 1988, when glasnot resulted in the book being available alongside George Orwell’s „1984“.

The ZDF adapted the book for television in 1982 under the title of „Wir“:

There is also a short film called „The Glass Fortress“ by the french director Alain Bourrett:

I can highly recommend „We“ it really is a dystopian classic that still sounds fresh and unfortunately current, even though the Soviet Union has long disappeared.

What was the last book you read and would you recommend it?

Day 23 Penguin Book-a-Day-Challenge (The best present)

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Great to already have presents before Christmas. Got this one a few days ago from a very good friend, and sooo happy about it 🙂 This is the perfect Holiday read before the upcoming festivities. It is pretty „arschkalt“ up here in the North, torrential rain and gale-force winds are the best excuse ever to not leave the bed and cuddle up with this book that is a wonderful little gem for every book lover.

New York, 1919. Roger Mifflin turned his biggest passion reading into his job. Wouldn’t we all want to do that? In his small little second-hand bookshop in Brooklyn, called „The Haunted Bookshop“ you will always find him hunched over a book with his pipe and his cute little dog „Bock“ named after Boccacio. Books are his life, luckily Mrs Mifflin is pretty down-to-earth and takes care of the financial and food side of business.

Spooky things go on in the bookshop. Aubrey Gilbert a young man from an advertising agency hopes to convince Roger to spend some money on ads for the bookshop, failing that he takes a strong interest in Rogers cute assistant Ms Titania. Books appear and disappear in the shop and somehow there might be a German spy conspiracy behind all this. Or not ?

“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”

There even is talk about Bibliotherapy – who would have thought ????

„A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don’t know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!”

This book will warm every book lover’s heart, so I highly recommend you dare to go outside to your own favourite little haunted bookshop and get yourself a copy. Then you are good to cuddle up with it on the sofa or the bed and wait for Santa Claus 🙂

“Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”

“The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.”

Day 22 Penguin Book-a-Day (Favourite Festive Scene)

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I love the festive Christmas fest at Hogwarts on Christmas Day. All the professors and any students that remain at Hogwarts over the Christmas holidays attend the fest. It is prepared by the House elves in the kitchen and the hall looks wonderfully festive. For dessert flaming puddings are served and I always wanted Wizard Crackers on our dinner table, but no luck so far.

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Picture: harrypotter.wika.com 

“One can never have enough socks,“ said Dumbledore. „Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

Day 20 Penguin Book-a-Day Challenge (Set where I live)

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Thomas Manns late work „Doktor Faustus“ is quite a few things combined. A „Künstlerroman“ based on the „Faust“ story, a novel about the role of Music and also a novel about the Munich society. I had a go a few years ago but have to confess that I failed tremendously a few chapters into the novel.  Definitely my fault, not his.

Any „Doktor Faustus“ Fans out there who can advise the wary Thomas Mann beginner ? Other than „Death in Venice“ we haven’t had so much fun and success together. I am totally fine with all the other plentiful Manns – Klaus, Erika, Heinrich even Golo – but Thomas and I, no luck yet.