Blue Night by Simone Buchholz
I had so much fun reading parts of this that I almost feel bad giving it 3-stars. What I liked about it wasn’t necessarily what I was going for when I picked it up. Germany isn’t one of the countries most well known in the States for European crime fiction. Italy, France, the UK are all heavyweights and even Spain and parts of Eastern Europe have made the rounds in recent years. But the Germans are not especially renowned here in this regard. When I […]
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
This book is on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List so I read it when it became available. I’ve read a lot of WWII both in my life and in over the last few years. As this is professional reading, I suppose the kind way to phrase it is that I am over-saturated with WWII at the moment. I was a history major in college, I’m in the military, and my father was described by John Mulaney this week on SNL – he is […]
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)
Time does something to a person, because a human being isn’t a machine that can be switched on and off. The time during which a person doesn’t know how his life can become a life fills a person condemned to idleness from his head down to his toes. Go, Went, Gone is a carefully crafted, meticulously researched novel that feels as natural as walking down the street. Protagonist Richard is a newly retired professor of Classics and a childless widower. As a former East Berliner […]
This is the Award Winner. The Dorothy Canfield Fisher award is a Vermont state award that the books are picked by adults (though I am not always sure why they were the pickers as one was a professor at my college who had no English or child background that I knew of) and then voted on by the kids. Of course, the year I did this award the “cool kids” pick won. But that is the perfect lead in to this book. It is 1943. […]
In May 2016, a friend I met through Ravelry brought my attention to a Kickstarter for a book her friend Karie Westermann was writing called This Thing of Paper, with knitting designs inspired by Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Even with a planned publication date of April 2017, I knew I wanted this book. It’s a good thing I was patient because I didn’t receive it until December. Westermann divided the book into three sections, as she had layed out in her Kickstarter proposal. […]
