Monthly reads: August 2022

 

 I only really started reading and finishing books around August 20, so...this pile of books is pretty impressing, I think,

Riskante Begierden (Taeko Kono)

Well...judging from the blurb on the back the german publisher thought that this book was mostly about 'risque erotic'. And while the sadomasochistic relationship between the main characters is admittedly very important for the story...I don't think that's all or even most there is to the book. I liked how Taeko Kono portrayed life in war-time Japan with all its dangers and problems for everyday life. The contrast between that difficult public life and the private life of a unusual husband and wife was what made the book so good. Anyway, I loved it a lot. Will re-read at some point.

Knabenjagd (Taeko Kono)

This short-story collection was pretty good, too! Some of the stories have morally questionable protagonists, but I also really liked that. It's not always necessary to have a relatable character tell their story to the readers, I'd say. I know that many people nowadays might disagree, but...that's how fiction works, isn't it? Do we always want to read about people who are just like us, live lifes like ours and react to things in the same way we do? I don't think so. So, that's why this collection was also pretty interesting. I don't think there's much translated stuff by Taeko Kono save for these two books, but I would like to read more of her stories.

Das Jagdgewehr (Yasushi Inoue)

I do enjoy the works of many Japanese authors, but well...Inoue isn't one of my favourites, I guess. It's not that his books are bad, but I just can't find an emotional connection to his themes and protagonists. Of course the plot of this short little book was pretty interesting and I nevertheless liked reading about the connections between the protagonists lives. But the book failed to make me actually feel for them. Well, it just wasn't a book for me. I will try another Inoue book, but there's a lot of stuff with a higher priority on my reading list!

Zerbrochene Sterne (various authors)

As usual, some stories from an anthology are good, some are bad, but...overall I really liked this one. My favourite was the story about how the first emperor of China became a gamer. I would love to read an entire book about this idea because even just the premise sounds just great and the story was also very fun!

Quantenträume (various authors)

Same as above, but this one had more stories I didn't like as much. I'm very interested in the issue of artificial intelligence, but some stories just weren't my cup of tea. However, some of them were quite good, I have to admit that much. I liked the one about a woman falling in love with an AI, for example.

Komm, ich erzähl dir eine Geschichte (Jorge Bucay)

I got this book from someone, that's why I read through it pretty quickly. Some of the stories were nice, but I don't think the morale of most stories was surprising or very helpful. Most people say that this book opened their eyes for certain issues about their own life and psyche, but...I'm painfully aware of the things I need to change about myself, I don't need to be reminded of them by a book! Actually implementing those changes is the really hard part, but that's not something anything like a book could help me with.

Unter Beschuss (Michael Wolff)

I enjoyed reading Fire and Fury, Wolff's first book about Donald Trump. This one was...not as good, I think. Of course there was still a lot of interesting stuff, but this time the focus was less on Trump and more on all the weirdos he brought with him to the White House. And, well, I'm mainly here to read funny stories about the stupid orange man, haha. Mostly because there's always doubt about whether the author's sources really always told him the truth anyway, so I'd rather read his books for their entertainment value. And this one was just less entertaining than the first one. Maybe I will one day read an actual comprehensive account of Trump's presidency, but I'm not that much into US politics after all.

Monthly reads: July 2022

 

Well...I thought last month was bad, but this one is clearly worse. I can't even remember the last time I finished just one puny book in a month...

Romanze östlich des Sumidagawa (Nagai Kafu)

At least that one book was really good, though. I liked especially how it made me feel like I was actually there, seeing old Japan through the protagonist's eyes or exploring 1930s Tokyo together with him. I guess this won't be my last book by Nagai Kafu, although I need to check out whether there are more translations of his works. I don't think there's all that much available in German, so I might need to go for English, if possible.

Monthly reads: June 2022

 

I don't feel like I've actually read a single book this month, but at least I managed to finish these three. Not very impressive though.

U2532: Bis zum bitteren Ende (Erik Maasch)

I kind of enjoy reading this kind of German WWII submarine stories, even though I'm not especially into marine warfare. (I am interested in WWII though, but I know a lot more about tanks and planes than ships and subs.) This one was also pretty entertaining, as it showed the final days and hours of the war and how everything ended for them when it had in fact ended long ago. It's not especially deep or anything (no pun intended, although it would be a good one!), but it's a decent read. I'll read more of it if I'll occasionally get some of the books for cheap.

Die schlafenden Schönen (Yasunari Kawabata)

Haven't read japanese literature in ages (or that's how it feels, would need to look it up) and this one was a good place to start again. I'd say that Kawabata is one of my favourite Japanese authors of the 20^th century as there wasn't a single one I didn't like among the books of his I've read so far. This story about old men and sleeping young women was oddly mesmerising and entertaining, even though it also felt wrong to gaze at the 'sleeping beauties' through the eyes of Eguchi, one of those very men. Nevertheless, it made me feel all sorts of things and it's also thought-provoking and that's what I like most about Kawabata's stories.

Für die Freiheit sterben (James M. McPherson)

I have been reading on this huge book for literal ages and I'm so glad I'm done now. It was an interesting read, but sometimes I got confused by all those names of people and battles. Also, the blatant racism of the olden times was sometimes pretty hard to stomach. So, not an especially pleasant read, but still very good.

 

Monthly reads: May 2022

 

Not many books this month. I'm wondering how I actually managed to finish those four books...

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation vol. 1 (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu)

I watched the donghua. I watched the drama adaption called 'The Untamed'. As of yet I even listened to a few audio drama episodes and I'm planning to finish this version, too. And yet I apparently never quite understood or noticed many smaller aspects of the story. Like the fact that Lan Zhan noticed pretty much immediately that the young man he was dealing with was in fact not some random weak lunatic from the Mo family, but rather no other than Wei Wuxian. (That's not the only thing I never quite got in the adaptions, but probably the biggest one.) Also, it's probably due to Chinese censorship laws, but even just this first volume of the story already advanced their relationship so much more than the complete drama and donghua. So that's why I'm especially happy about us Westerners being able to enjoy the original work now. It's just that good. Well, at least if you ask me and the many other fans of the series and the author's other works! Oh, and I also do like the translation. I heard that there were quite a few complaints about some things not being accurate, but...I couldn't really agree with some of the 'translation errors' others were pointing out. Those scenes made perfect sense to me.

Der begrabene Riese (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I enjoyed this a lot, which surprised me a bit. Then again, it's the book I actually wanted to read first when I started looking out for Ishiguro's works in bookshops and bargain bins etc. So I guess we've come full circle now! Anyway, I liked how the book was partially an entertaining historical fantasy story (with dragons, knights and people going on a journey – whee!), but it was also very obviously an Ishiguro book. It was a bit like 'The Unconsoled', but way less confusing. Well, the ending was a bit confusing, and I'm still not sure about Axl's role in his earlier life. Honestly, at one point I expected him to actually be the aged King Arthur, haha. Anyway, I guess that one's one of my favourite books from the author, too. Although nothing beats his first two Japanese-set books in my opinion!

Waffenschmuggel (Eric Ambler)

This one was a bit of a bore at times (the entire part about the annoying woman and the tourist couple...frankly, I expected the woman to pop up later again and ruin things or something!) and the way some characters are portrayed are pretty outdated. Still, it was a quick read and some parts were actually a lot of fun. Not my favourite from this author though.

Das Santa-Lucia-Rätsel (C.H. Guenter)

Well, I guess this book could be considered something like a penny dreadful. Cheap, but fun entertainment – if you're ready to enjoy stuff like that and switch off your brain for a moment while reading, that is. Some plot elements probably wouldn't make any sense if your thought about them for too long and yet I really enjoyed reading the book. I was also quite surprised that issues like global warming and the lack of food and water for millions of people especially in Africa were brought up here. And not in a derisive way, but shown as actual issues humanity has to deal with at some point. That's another thing I really liked about the book!

Monthly reads: April 2022

 

Not 'digressing' all that much, am I? Well, but here's at least another uninspired monthly book post. Maybe I'll finally find the motivation to write about something else. It's not like there aren't other things I could talk about...

The Complete Mapp & Lucia Vol. 1 (E.F. Benson)

I didn't actually read the entire book, just the 'Lucia in London' part because I already knew the first two volumes of E.F.Benson's six-volume series. I think I've read them last year, so there wasn't no need to read them again. Well, not yet, because I love the series and really might want to re-read it at some point. Anyway, Lucia in London was once again highly enjoyable. Before I started reading I was a little bit afraid that we would see less of the people of Riseholme due to Lucia's temporary move to London. That wasn't the case though and both the London and Riseholme parts were simply delicious. I'll probably take my time with the next three volumes, because the books are just wonderful comfort reading and I need to stock up on books like that for reading slumps!

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I guess basically everyone knows this book (or possibly a film adaption) at least by name. Although...maybe it's just me being an uncultured swine, but I had no idea what it was actually about. (Well, some bloke called Gatsby. Duh.) Well, it's basically about how rich people often fuck up other people's lives and don't even care about the ramifications of their actions. So, while I had a hard time actually liking any of the characters in the book, I quite liked the book itself. A pretty nice, quick and interesting read.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

Bah, I tried so hard to like this one and there were parts of it that were highly enjoyable. But in the end...well, it's not my favourite funny book ever, that much is for sure. I get that the main character Ignatius isn't supposed to be an especially likeable sort of chap, but he got pretty much unbearable after a while. And not in a funny way, honestly. Just thinking of it now...I never want to hear the word 'valve' ever again and people who read the book might know why. But like I said, it wasn't all bad and some of the side plots and characters were genuinely funny. I also sort of liked the open ending. So, well, I don't get the high praise for this book because I thought it to be pretty mediocre in the end, but at least I don't regret reading it or anything. Putting the valve issue aside, that is.

Solaris (Stanislaw Lem)

Well, I definitely didn't like this one. Maybe I shouldn't have read the German translation (I heard that one isn't actually all that good and some sentences definitely felt odd and/or clunky...), but I genuinely wonder if the English translation would've made me like the book more. I very much doubt it though. I know that Solaris is one of the most influential examples of sci-fi literature, and I have to admit that some ideas were pretty interesting. What would happen if humanity were to meet a strange foreign kind of possibly intelligent lifeform, but they had literally no way of communicating with that lifeform? What is is that makes a human human? Sadly the execution of those ideas was less good. I actually had to skip some pages because the narrator was droning on about some scientific theories which had absolutely no relevance to the plot. It was also quite hard to grasp the character's motivations – their actions often seemed entirely random to me. So, to sum it up: it's a book I read because it's a book people interested in sci-fi should've read, but it's not something I would have picked up purely for fun or entertainment.

Daisy Miller & The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)

Even though I'm regularly watching English-language news and TV shows, prefer reading English books over translated ones and write a blog and fanfics in English...this book genuinely made me doubt myself. Henry James seems to use an ungodly amount of words to explain even the simplest thing, and that's just something I don't enjoy in a book. I had a really hard time reading and sometimes even understanding both stories – and maybe that was also the reason why I didn't really enjoy them either. Especially The Turn of the Screw: what's with that ending? What did even happen there? And even without the ending, why is that story considered to be one of the most famous spooky stories in classic literature? I was genuinely more creeped out by the writing style than the actual story, haha...

Maus (Art Spiegelman)

I actually didn't buy this book because I saw the news stories about some overzealous American education board banning it from being read at school because it was on my list anyway due to the Guardian 1000, but...that was the reason why I had to wait quite a while until I could get my hands on a reprint copy. I hesitate to say I enjoyed this one (because how could anyone possibly enjoy any kind of media about the Holocaust...), but still, I genuinely liked it a lot. Banning books is wrong anyway, but banning this books is especially stupid because a comic actually seems to be a great way to explain the horrors of the Nazi era especially to younger and/or more sensitive people. I personally doubt whether I could stand reading an actual book about a survivor's story, but the comic made it quite easy while still bringing the point across very well. Also, the characterisation of all humans as various kinds of animals worked really good, I think. Anyway, I wish we would've read Maus back at my school. There even is a German edition and it would've been so much more interesting and shocking than the dry, emotionless facts we learned at school.

Auf phantastischen Pfaden (anthology, various authors)

I love the stories by Karl May, and I love fantasy books. That's why I was pretty thrilled when I stumbled across this book because it combines both things. And while – as is always the case with anthologies – not all stories were that good, I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. One thing I noticed though: I don't actually need the fantasy part, I just want to delve into the universe of Karl May's famous characters again. It's about time for a re-read...

Das Star Trek Universum (Ralph Sander)

Earlier this year I finally got into Star Trek. So far I watched the original series and the first two series of The Next Generation, and I love both. This book is sort of a compendium about exactly that part of the Trek universe, so it was a pretty interesting read with lots of information for me. I would've preferred for the author to leave his personal opinion aside more often, though. Okay, so you don't like it if females write fanfictions about their favourite pairings from the show and that's fine (more or less), but why would I as the reader care about that? It's even more ironic looking at how he repeatedly complained about how intolerant some Trek fans are in other parts of the book...