Helle's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 12:54:11 -0700 60 Helle's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg House of Names 29344653
Three years later, he returns home and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence, as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers. As his wife seeks his death, his daughter, Electra, is the silent observer to the family's game of innocence while his son, Orestes, is sent into bewildering, frightening exile where survival is far from certain. Out of their desolating loss, Electra and Orestes must find a way to right these wrongs of the past even if it means committing themselves to a terrible, barbarous act.

House of Names is a story of intense longing and shocking betrayal. It is a work of great beauty, and daring, from one of our finest living writers.]]> 272 Colm Tóibín 0241264936 Helle 0 3.54 2017 House of Names
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Helle
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading, historical-fiction, irish
review:

]]> Elizabeth Finch 58788790 We invite you to take her course in Culture and Civilisation.
Her ideas are not to everyone's taste.
But she will change the way you see the world.

'The task of the present is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more urgent when the past cannot be corrected.'

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration - always rigorous, always thoughtful. With careful empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness.

As a former student unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. And underpinning them all is the story of J - Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always threatened to divide us.

This is more than a novel. It's a loving tribute to philosophy, a careful evaluation of history, an invitation to think for ourselves. It's a moment to reflect and to gently explore our own theories and assumptions. It is truly a balm for our times.]]> 179 Julian Barnes Helle 2 3.14 2022 Elizabeth Finch
author: Julian Barnes
name: Helle
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Charles Dickens 13646454 101 George Orwell 3257213980 Helle 0 to-read 4.06 Charles Dickens
author: George Orwell
name: Helle
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Plot (The Book Series, #1)]]> 55315487 Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]> 320 Jean Hanff Korelitz 125079076X Helle 2 book-club-library, american 3.75 2021 The Plot (The Book Series, #1)
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Helle
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: book-club-library, american
review:

]]> Vegetaren 35568034


Vegetaren er Han Kangs første roman på dansk.]]> Han Kang 870221816X Helle 4 3.66 2007 Vegetaren
author: Han Kang
name: Helle
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Kindred 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Helle 4 book-club-library, american 4.30 1979 Kindred
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Helle
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: book-club-library, american
review:

]]> The House on the Strand 50246
Alternate cover is available here.]]> 329 Daphne du Maurier Helle 4 historical-fiction, english 3.85 1969 The House on the Strand
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Helle
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: historical-fiction, english
review:

]]> Rejsende 30639913
Romanens mange små historier griber på uforudsigelig vis ind i hinanden og lader hele tiden læseren møde nye, fascinerende sammenhænge � og en mangfoldighed af mennesker.

Der er en gammel ortodoks kristen sekt, som mente, at mennesket burde være i konstant bevægelse for ikke at blive offer for synd og ondskab. Der er den berømte hollandske anatom, der lavede hele landskaber af de kropsdele, han skar ud og præparerede. Og der er hans datter, der nøje tegner dem af.

Der er en kvinde, der flyver den lange vej tilbage til sit fædrene Polen for at yde en døende ekskæreste en sidste tjeneste. Og der er hende, som for at undslippe sin syge mand og sin dominerende svigermor frivilligt bliver hjemløs i Moskvas undergrundsbaner. Og så er der familien, der under en ferie bliver væk fra hinanden på en lille ø i Kroatien, hvorefter den virkelige rejse begynder.

Olga Tokarczuk, f. 1962, er en af Polens betydeligste forfattere i dag. På dansk udkom i 2012 romanen Kør din plov over de dødes knogler og i 2014 Dagens hus, nattens hus.]]> 400 Olga Tokarczuk 8779737803 Helle 4 polish 3.48 2007 Rejsende
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Helle
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: polish
review:

]]> Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4) 17305367 ‘Seek and ye shall find.�

With these words echoing in his head, eminent Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of where he is or how he got there. Nor can he explain the origin of the macabre object that is found hidden in his belongings.

A threat to his life will propel him and a young doctor, Sienna Brooks, into a breakneck chase across the city of Florence. Only Langdon’s knowledge of hidden passageways and ancient secrets that lie behind its historic facade can save them from the clutches of their unknown pursuers.

With only a few lines from Dante’s dark and epic masterpiece, The Inferno, to guide them, they must decipher a sequence of codes buried deep within some of the most celebrated artefacts of the Renaissance � sculptures, paintings, buildings � to find the answers to a puzzle which may, or may not, help them save the world from a terrifying threat�

Set against an extraordinary landscape inspired by one of history’s most ominous literary classics, Inferno is Dan Brown’s most compelling and thought-provoking novel yet, a breathless race-against-time thriller that will grab you from page one and not let you go until you close the book.]]> 465 Dan Brown 0593072499 Helle 3 crime-mystery, american So the next sentence begins here.
And the next here.
Even when they’re topically connected.

However, I suspect that one reason for this is that I haven’t been reading a lot of thrillers recently, and I strongly feel that we as readers need to read any work of fiction on the premise on which it’s been created. Thus, ten more pages into the book, the part of me that likes James Bond movies took over from the part of me that loves so-called good literature, and that made a difference in my reading experience.

Admittedly, Inferno is full to the brim of symbols, fast-paced action, beautiful accomplices, threats to humanity, etc. that readers have come to expect from a Dan Brown novel (at least the Robert Langdon series), but while it thrills and entertains it also informs. One of the things that I appreciate about Dan Brown’s novels (especially this ‘series�) is what irritates some people, namely the references to all sorts of things to do with art, history, literature, biology and science, which he � to me � adeptly weaves into the plot. So in Inferno, I was not only entertained; I also learned more about Dante, the Medicis, Florence, Venice, overpopulation (now there’s something that’ll keep me awake at night from now on!) and lots more, which I for one found intriguing.

Also, I like the cliff hangers that Dan Brown makes such liberal use of, which are also not popular among the literary ‘snobs� (there, it’s out: I think people who refuse to get something out of a Dan Brown novel are snobs!). To me, as a reader, the cliff hangers don’t detract from the literary merits of the/a novel but rather propel the plot forward and certainly provide me with a narrative drive that certain other ‘better� literary works sometimes lack in their insistence on being portraits or literary experiments rather than interesting stories.

Having said that, I somehow didn’t invest in this story as wholeheartedly as I did in The Da Vinci Code. I also got a bit fed up with some of the repetitive references to what other reviewers have pointed out: the rather one dimensional characterization of Robert Langdon, Dan Brown apparently finding it sufficient to give him a Mickey Mouse watch, a phobia of small spaces and a few other characteristics that haven’t changed since we first met him three books ago.

Likewise, in the formulaic, stereotype vein, one of the baddies in this book, Vayentha, seemed vaguely modeled on one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, Lisbeth Salander (with a black mohawk, an all-black leather outfit, and sporting a gun), and another baddie (at least for a while) � a gunman, also in black � is called Christoph Brüder, which is partly stereotypical (a German name for a bad guy) and partly reminiscent of the name Hans Grüber, one of the terrorists in Die Hard (eminently played by Alan Rickman). Still, most works of literature reference each other to some extent, and despite what may seem a superficial genre, there is depth in how this novel pays homage to one of the most iconic works of literary history, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I think Dan Brown pulls it off. Towards the end, there’s even a bit of a twist, which introduces some ethical questions on the whole overpopulation issue which will no doubt have a ripple effect in some circles (hopefully in the circles of the people who run our planet!)

All in all, a 3,5 star read for me.
]]> 3.71 2013 Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4)
author: Dan Brown
name: Helle
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2013/07/01
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: crime-mystery, american
review:
A brainy thriller, Inferno does what it sets out to do: it thrills. Yet, as I began reading it, I felt only mildly curious, suspecting that perhaps I’ve filled my quota of Dan Brown brooks (having read them all), and thus being all too familiar with his tried and tested formula. 40 pages into the book, I also felt slightly annoyed at the form and its blatant attempts at creating drama simply by pressing the ‘Enter� key.
So the next sentence begins here.
And the next here.
Even when they’re topically connected.

However, I suspect that one reason for this is that I haven’t been reading a lot of thrillers recently, and I strongly feel that we as readers need to read any work of fiction on the premise on which it’s been created. Thus, ten more pages into the book, the part of me that likes James Bond movies took over from the part of me that loves so-called good literature, and that made a difference in my reading experience.

Admittedly, Inferno is full to the brim of symbols, fast-paced action, beautiful accomplices, threats to humanity, etc. that readers have come to expect from a Dan Brown novel (at least the Robert Langdon series), but while it thrills and entertains it also informs. One of the things that I appreciate about Dan Brown’s novels (especially this ‘series�) is what irritates some people, namely the references to all sorts of things to do with art, history, literature, biology and science, which he � to me � adeptly weaves into the plot. So in Inferno, I was not only entertained; I also learned more about Dante, the Medicis, Florence, Venice, overpopulation (now there’s something that’ll keep me awake at night from now on!) and lots more, which I for one found intriguing.

Also, I like the cliff hangers that Dan Brown makes such liberal use of, which are also not popular among the literary ‘snobs� (there, it’s out: I think people who refuse to get something out of a Dan Brown novel are snobs!). To me, as a reader, the cliff hangers don’t detract from the literary merits of the/a novel but rather propel the plot forward and certainly provide me with a narrative drive that certain other ‘better� literary works sometimes lack in their insistence on being portraits or literary experiments rather than interesting stories.

Having said that, I somehow didn’t invest in this story as wholeheartedly as I did in The Da Vinci Code. I also got a bit fed up with some of the repetitive references to what other reviewers have pointed out: the rather one dimensional characterization of Robert Langdon, Dan Brown apparently finding it sufficient to give him a Mickey Mouse watch, a phobia of small spaces and a few other characteristics that haven’t changed since we first met him three books ago.

Likewise, in the formulaic, stereotype vein, one of the baddies in this book, Vayentha, seemed vaguely modeled on one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, Lisbeth Salander (with a black mohawk, an all-black leather outfit, and sporting a gun), and another baddie (at least for a while) � a gunman, also in black � is called Christoph Brüder, which is partly stereotypical (a German name for a bad guy) and partly reminiscent of the name Hans Grüber, one of the terrorists in Die Hard (eminently played by Alan Rickman). Still, most works of literature reference each other to some extent, and despite what may seem a superficial genre, there is depth in how this novel pays homage to one of the most iconic works of literary history, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I think Dan Brown pulls it off. Towards the end, there’s even a bit of a twist, which introduces some ethical questions on the whole overpopulation issue which will no doubt have a ripple effect in some circles (hopefully in the circles of the people who run our planet!)

All in all, a 3,5 star read for me.

]]> Intermezzo 215366091 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 448 Sally Rooney 0571365477 Helle 5 irish 4.04 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Helle
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: irish
review:

]]> At Bertram's Hotel 921047 245 Agatha Christie 0061003638 Helle 4 crime-mystery 3.59 1965 At Bertram's Hotel
author: Agatha Christie
name: Helle
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: crime-mystery
review:

]]> Bytte 62320702
Årets Bog i Sverige går lige i maven og hjertet.

En morgen går niårige Elsa for første gang alene ud til familiens rensdyrfold. Men da hun kommer frem til gærdet, venter der hende et frygteligt syn. Hendes egen rensdyrkalv, Nástegallu, ligger død på jorden. En mand fra en nærliggende by står bøjet over kalven, han har dens øre i munden og en blodig kniv i hånden. Da manden opdager Elsa, skræmmer han hende til tavshed. Det ville heller ikke nytte noget at anmelde det til politiet. De er ligeglade. De har hundredvis af anmeldelser om mishandlede rener, der rubriceres som ’ulovlig jagt�, ikke ’hadforbrydelser. Men når man angriber og mishandler de forsvarsløse, tavse rensdyr, angriber man selve livsnerven i den samiske kultur.

Truslerne forandrer Elsas liv, og som en konstant påmindelse om overgrebet bærer hun det afskårne øre på sig. Mens familien og slægten kæmper for retfærdighed, fortsætter forbrydelserne i Grænselandet år efter år, og desperationen breder sig.]]> 462 Ann-Helén Laestadius 8772390697 Helle 4 swedish 4.08 2021 Bytte
author: Ann-Helén Laestadius
name: Helle
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: swedish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3, Part 1 of 2)]]> 11734301 An alternate cover edition of this ISBN can be found here.

HBO's hit series A GAME OF THRONES is based on George R R Martin's internationally bestselling series A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, the greatest fantasy epic of the modern age. A STORM OF SWORDS: STEEL AND SNOW is the FIRST part of the third volume in the series. Winter approaches Westeros like an angry beast. The Seven Kingdoms are divided by revolt and blood feud. In the northern wastes, a horde of hungry, savage people steeped in the dark magic of the wilderness is poised to invade the Kingdom of the North where Robb Stark wears his new-forged crown. And Robb's defences are ranged against the South, the land of the cunning and cruel Lannisters, who have his younger sisters in their power. Throughout Westeros, the war for the Iron Throne rages more fiercely than ever, but if the Wall is breached, no king will live to claim it.]]> 623 George R.R. Martin Helle 4 4.41 2000 A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3, Part 1 of 2)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Helle
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: fantasy, historical-fiction, american, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Øvelser i mørke 205368634 258 Naja Marie Aidt 8702409100 Helle 4 danish 4.41 2024 Øvelser i mørke
author: Naja Marie Aidt
name: Helle
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: danish
review:

]]> Flappers and Philosophers 9458329 672 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0141194103 Helle 3 short-stories, american 4.00 2010 Flappers and Philosophers
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Helle
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2018/01/12
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: short-stories, american
review:

]]> Quartet in Autumn 227002 186 Barbara Pym 0330326481 Helle 0 to-read 3.90 1978 Quartet in Autumn
author: Barbara Pym
name: Helle
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Helle 5 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Helle
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bell Jar 599649 Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel. Renowned for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing boudaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath an enduring feminist icon.
It was published under a pseudonym a few weeks before the author's suicide.]]> 257 Sylvia Plath 0571200338 Helle 4 4.10 1963 The Bell Jar
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Helle
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read, telegraph-top-100-books, american, book-club-library
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Around the World in Eighty Days]]> 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Helle 4 3.95 1872 Around the World in Eighty Days
author: Jules Verne
name: Helle
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 4
read at: 2014/10/14
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: young-adult, guardian-1000-must-read, 1001-books
review:

]]> Jerusalem 17314985 "Jag visste ingenting om dem. Jag visste inte, om de voro få eller många. Jag hade ingen aning om, att de hade anslutit sig till en amerikansk sekt. Jag visste ingenting om att de hade avhänt sig sina fäders jord och lämnat all sin egendom till sina trosförvanter. Men jag förstod att här mötte mig ett nytt stordåd av de svenske och jag lovade mig själv att jag skulle skriva om det."

Så skriver Selma Lagerlöf själv om hur hon inspirerades till att skriva om bönderna från Nås i Dalarna som 1896 emigrerade till Jerusalem för att vandra i Kristi efterföljelse, och invänta hans återkomst. Jerusalem är en levande och stark berättelse om den väckelsevåg som delade en socken i Dalarna itu - de familjer som följer kallelsen och beger sig till det heliga landet, och de andra som väljer att bli kvar på gårdarna de brukat i generationer. Med färg och dramatik gestaltar Selma Lagerlöf de teman som går djupast i hennes författarskap: trons makt och kärlekens förunderliga vägar.]]> 491 Selma Lagerlöf 9100563854 Helle 3 swedish, historical-fiction 4.25 Jerusalem
author: Selma Lagerlöf
name: Helle
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2017/01/10
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: swedish, historical-fiction
review:

]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Helle 4 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Helle
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: classics, 1001-books, english, jane-austen, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Knight Templar (The Crusades Trilogy, #2)]]> 1130964 467 Jan Guillou 0752846485 Helle 4 historical-fiction, swedish 4.17 The Knight Templar (The Crusades Trilogy, #2)
author: Jan Guillou
name: Helle
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: historical-fiction, swedish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Kingdom at the End of the Road (The Crusades Trilogy, #3)]]> 664773
Ovo je izuzetan završetak trilogije o stvaranju jedne nacije i ratniku koji je svojom ljubavlju uspeo da se izbori za kraljevstvo.]]> Jan Guillou Helle 5 historical-fiction, swedish 4.12 The Kingdom at the End of the Road (The Crusades Trilogy, #3)
author: Jan Guillou
name: Helle
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves: historical-fiction, swedish
review:

]]> Excellent Women 3968796 288 Barbara Pym 1844085260 Helle 3 english, 1001-books 44 Scotland Street series.

The book is the literary equivalent of an English (pre-war) village with its small conflicts, potential marriages, people moving in, people moving out. It could be St. Mary Mead but is actually a London suburb back when those were practically still separate villages. It reminded me of Elizabeth Goudge’s The Scent of Water, though with slightly less religious fervour. Some of Pym’s characterizations and scenes convinced me that J.K. Rowling has read Barbara Pym (one of Elizabeth Goudge’s books was Rowling’s favourite as a child so I see a link). And consider these book titles and tell me they don’t remind you of some of the ones Harry et. al. read: Wild Beasts and Their Ways and Five Years with the Congo Cannibals.

A lot of the time the irony is so gentle that it nearly slipped by without my noticing:

He suddenly smiled and I remembered my Lenten resolution to try to like him. It was getting a little easier but I felt that at any moment I might have a setback.

…and there was less irony that I had expected considering that Barbara Pym is sometimes compared to Jane Austen, which I could only see in one or two places, such as in the following:

In the train we read the school magazine, taking a secret pleasure in belittling those of the Old Girls who had done well and rejoicing over those who had failed to fulfil their early promise.

A quietly enjoyable novel, if perhaps at times a bit too quiet for me, but a novel which, as I recently realized, has nonetheless managed to be put on the 1001 books-to-read-before-you-die list.
]]> 3.97 1952 Excellent Women
author: Barbara Pym
name: Helle
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1952
rating: 3
read at: 2016/03/23
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: english, 1001-books
review:
Stick on the kettle, put up your feet and settle into your favourite armchair with this cosy, post-WW II English novel. Barbara Pym’s world is one of brown-clad spinsters, nuns on bicycles and vicars who live with their sisters. The foreword in my beautiful Virago Modern Classics edition was written by Alexander McCall Smith, and I now see where he got much of his inspiration for his 44 Scotland Street series.

The book is the literary equivalent of an English (pre-war) village with its small conflicts, potential marriages, people moving in, people moving out. It could be St. Mary Mead but is actually a London suburb back when those were practically still separate villages. It reminded me of Elizabeth Goudge’s The Scent of Water, though with slightly less religious fervour. Some of Pym’s characterizations and scenes convinced me that J.K. Rowling has read Barbara Pym (one of Elizabeth Goudge’s books was Rowling’s favourite as a child so I see a link). And consider these book titles and tell me they don’t remind you of some of the ones Harry et. al. read: Wild Beasts and Their Ways and Five Years with the Congo Cannibals.

A lot of the time the irony is so gentle that it nearly slipped by without my noticing:

He suddenly smiled and I remembered my Lenten resolution to try to like him. It was getting a little easier but I felt that at any moment I might have a setback.

…and there was less irony that I had expected considering that Barbara Pym is sometimes compared to Jane Austen, which I could only see in one or two places, such as in the following:

In the train we read the school magazine, taking a secret pleasure in belittling those of the Old Girls who had done well and rejoicing over those who had failed to fulfil their early promise.

A quietly enjoyable novel, if perhaps at times a bit too quiet for me, but a novel which, as I recently realized, has nonetheless managed to be put on the 1001 books-to-read-before-you-die list.

]]> The Shards 168683460
“A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” � Town & Country

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision. 

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre- Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.]]> 608 Bret Easton Ellis 059346916X Helle 3 american 4.10 2023 The Shards
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Helle
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: american
review:

]]> My Heavenly Favourite 179849973 I heard you laughing from time to time and you stayed lying there on the flattened hay, and after you left, your body's imprint was left behind, and I rested my hand on the dry blades of grass that were still slightly warm and I wanted to carry on feeling you forever, really I did, but everything changed when you began to speak to me, on 7 July to be precise.

In the tempestuous summer of 2005, on a day that is as hot as the inside of a bovine, a 14-year-old farmer's daughter makes friends with the local veterinarian who looks after her father's cows. He has reached 'the biblical age of seven times seven' and is trying to escape trauma, while she is trying to escape into a world of fantasy. Their obsessive reliance on each other's stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small Dutch community apart.

Indelible, audacious and impossible-to-put-down, this novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose. With its literary sleight and magnifying glass on human instinct, My Heavenly Favourite establishes Rijneveld as one of the bravest and brilliant writers on the world stage.

Praise for The Discomfort of Evening: 'Exceptional.' Financial Times / 'Exhilarating.' Independent / 'Luminous.' Observer / 'Beautifully wild.' Guardian]]> 336 Lucas Rijneveld 0571375499 Helle 0 to-read 3.53 2020 My Heavenly Favourite
author: Lucas Rijneveld
name: Helle
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Secret Life of Bees 37435 The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.]]> 302 Sue Monk Kidd 0142001740 Helle 4 book-club-library 4.10 2001 The Secret Life of Bees
author: Sue Monk Kidd
name: Helle
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: book-club-library
review:

]]> Lessons 60092581
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.

Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?

Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.]]> 448 Ian McEwan 0593535200 Helle 4 3.89 2022 Lessons
author: Ian McEwan
name: Helle
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Hafni fortæller 123161695
Hun ringer fra en rasteplads til romanens egentlige fortæller. Men det er kun Hafni, der taler. Hun har planlagt at fejre sin skilsmisse med en såkaldt smørrebrødsrejse fra Roskilde over Ringsted, Korsør, Nyborg, Svendborg, Faaborg, og via Bøjden-Fynshav slutteligt til Gråsten for at indtage det store sønderjyske kaffebord.

Det var hensigten, at turen skulle tage 8 dage.

Den ender med at vare cirka en måned.

Nu ringer Hafni så for at fortælle, hvad der er gået galt undervejs.

Hun siger:

Jeg vil ikke være mig.

Jeg vil lave mig selv om.

Jeg ved ikke, hvordan jeg skal lave mig selv om.]]> 168 Helle Helle 8743406033 Helle 4 danish 3.66 2023 Hafni fortæller
author: Helle Helle
name: Helle
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: danish
review:

]]> Beatlesmanifestet 1881203 222 Einar Már Guðmundsson 9170014825 Helle 2 icelandic 3.06 2004 Beatlesmanifestet
author: Einar Már Guðmundsson
name: Helle
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/05/10
shelves: icelandic
review:

]]> Unsheltered 37959904
Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it’s so unnerving that she’s arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. The magazine where she worked has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has closed. The dilapidated house is also home to her ailing and cantankerous Greek father-in-law and her two grown children: her stubborn, free-spirited daughter, Tig, and her dutiful debt-ridden, ivy educated son, Zeke, who has arrived with his unplanned baby in the wake of a life-shattering development.

In an act of desperation, Willa begins to investigate the history of her home, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest and provide funding for its direly needed repairs. Through her research into Vineland’s past and its creation as a Utopian community, she discovers a kindred spirit from the 1880s, Thatcher Greenwood.

A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting new theory recently published by Charles Darwin. Thatcher’s friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him into a vendetta with the town’s most powerful men. At home, his new wife and status-conscious mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his financial worries and the news that their elegant house is structurally unsound.

Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred—whether family or friends—and in the strength of the human spirit.]]> Barbara Kingsolver 0062865501 Helle 4 book-club-library 3.58 2018 Unsheltered
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Helle
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: book-club-library
review:

]]> <![CDATA[10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World]]> 43706466 An intensely powerful new novel from the best-selling author of The Bastard of Istanbul and Honour

'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...'

For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . .]]> 312 Elif Shafak 0241293863 Helle 3 book-club-library, turkish 4.09 2019 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
author: Elif Shafak
name: Helle
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves: book-club-library, turkish
review:

]]> Essays 1697398 Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, the Frenchman's literary importance largely results from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and subsequent.

Montaigne's Essays are, in effect, an extended autobiography, the only one ever to be written in this way. Montaigne does not proceed along the line of time; he does not tell us what event succeeded what other. His aim is to present a portrait of himself in a frame of timelessness; to build up from a number of partial sketches the essential man; not as an unchanging being, but as one who retained a core of identity more important as a subject than the events that befell him.

Against a brilliant range of subjects--from cannibals to physiognomy--the man is displayed as objectively detached, tireless in his search for truth, and at all times restrained. His essential modesty is revealed nowhere more clearly than in his famous medal with its inscription, Que sçais-je? [What do I know?].

Cohen's selection of twenty-six essays comprises approximately one-third of the total essays to be found in an un-abridged version.]]> 406 Michel de Montaigne 0140440836 Helle 0 to-read 4.09 1580 Essays
author: Michel de Montaigne
name: Helle
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1580
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Malma station 62091098 De reser alla mot Malma station och varken de eller läsaren vet hur deras öden hänger samman, eller anar att det som händer på slutdestinationen kommer att omdefiniera deras liv.

Malma station är en drabbande berättelse om familjehemligheter och oförrätter som gått i arv genom generationer � och om jakten på sanningen som kan förändra allt.]]> 248 Alex Schulman 9100191434 Helle 4 swedish 3.57 2022 Malma station
author: Alex Schulman
name: Helle
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: swedish
review:

]]> Any Human Heart 77866
Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk]]> 480 William Boyd 1400031001 Helle 5 book-club-library, english 4.28 2002 Any Human Heart
author: William Boyd
name: Helle
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves: book-club-library, english
review:

]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Helle 4 3.5* 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Helle
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/06
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: 1001-books, american, book-club-library, guardian-1000-must-read, pulitzer-prize
review:
3.5*
]]> Girl with a Pearl Earring 2865
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant—and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model.]]> 233 Tracy Chevalier 0452287022 Helle 4 3.93 1999 Girl with a Pearl Earring
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Helle
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/04
date added: 2023/10/04
shelves: book-club-library, historical-fiction
review:

]]> Morgenstjernen 53416861
Handlingen utspiller seg noen dager sent i august. Litteraturprofessoren Arne og kunstneren Tove er sammen med sine barn på feriestedet på Sørlandet. Deres venn, rikmannssønnen Egil, befinner seg på en hytte i nær-heten. Presten Kathrine er på vei hjem fra et seminar, barnehageassistenten Emil er på øving med bandet sitt, journalisten Jostein er ute på byen, kona hans Turid som er hjelpepleier har nattevakt. Over dem og alle andre dukker det plutselig opp en enorm stjerne på himmelen. Ingen, selv ikke astronomene, vet sikkert hva slags fenomen det er. Er det en stjerne som brenner ut? Hvorfor har da ingen sett den før? Eller er det en helt ny stjerne? Langsomt legger nyhetens interesse seg, og livet går videre, men ikke helt som før, for uvanlige fenomener begynner å inntreffe i utkanten av menneskenes tilværelse.

"Morgenstjernen" er en roman om det vi ikke forstår, om det store dramaet sett gjennom det lille livets begrensede linse. Men først og fremst er det en roman om hva som skjer når de mørke kreftene i verden settes fri.]]> 663 Karl Ove Knausgård 8249521536 Helle 4 norwegian 4.16 2020 Morgenstjernen
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Helle
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/21
date added: 2023/09/21
shelves: norwegian
review:

]]> A Severed Head 907688 224 Iris Murdoch 0099285363 Helle 4 english, 1001-books 3.48 1961 A Severed Head
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Helle
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2016/11/26
date added: 2023/08/21
shelves: english, 1001-books
review:

]]> Between the Acts 46105 224 Virginia Woolf 015611870X Helle 0 to-read 3.65 1941 Between the Acts
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Helle
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mothering Sunday 28511477
It is Mothering Sunday.

How will Jane Fairchild, orphan and housemaid, occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold?

Beginning with an intimate assignation and opening to embrace decades, Mothering Sunday has at its heart both the story of a life and the life that stories can magically contain. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual and deeply moving, it is Graham Swift at his thrilling best.]]> 132 Graham Swift 1471155234 Helle 0 to-read 3.77 2016 Mothering Sunday
author: Graham Swift
name: Helle
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The London Scene 18744457 'The fascination of the London street is that no two people are ever alike, each seems bound on some private affair of his own.' � A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf relished any opportunity for a stroll around London. She found great pleasure in observing the city and its people � noticing the subtle details that others often miss. In this collection of stunning essays, Woolf gives us an intimate tour of her beloved hometown. We venture through unfamiliar pockets of London and revisit its most famous landmarks; we smell the salty air of the East End docks and hear the echoing sounds inside the Houses of Parliament; Woolf transports us to the bustle of Oxford Street and the more peaceful moments on Hampstead Heath.

Originally published bi-monthly in 1931 by Good Housekeeping, the essays in The London Scene exhibit Virginia Woolf at the height of her literary powers and present an unparalleled and meditative portrait of an extraordinary metropolis � capturing the London of the 1930s and also the eternal city we recognise today.]]> 74 Virginia Woolf 1907970428 Helle 3 3.93 2004 The London Scene
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Helle
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2014/09/17
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: english, non-fiction, virginia-woolf
review:
Six small vignettes about London in the first decades of the 20th century, quietly interesting and perceptive in a Virginia Woolf kind of way.
]]> The Voyage Out 834554
Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.

Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights , though by a different path."

This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of The Hours . Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging short essay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly."]]> 448 Virginia Woolf 0375757279 Helle 3 The Voyage Out, it crept under my skin, and yet it’s difficult to say what it’s about, linear or not.

A group of English travellers are brought together on a sea voyage to South America where they meet a number of other English expatriates � and that’s basically it. We hear about their small troubles and foibles, listen in on their conversations and witness the formation of new attachments, with a young woman called Rachel more or less at the centre. There were times when the set-up and the texture reminded me of a Room with a View, though the characters at heart did not.

I felt myself sliding out of the novel as it progressed and neared its end. It partly has to do with the characters. I didn’t much care about them. I felt them to be a bit faceless, as if composed of ideas only, and I could hardly distinguish Mrs. Thornbury from Mrs. Elliot etc. I was delighted to meet some ‘old� acquaintances, who take centre stage in a later novel, namely Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway. That bit added some interesting background about those two characters. For instance, Mrs. Dalloway tells someone that her favourite Shakespeare play is Henry V, and Mr. Dalloway � bless him � says that Jane Austen is the �best author we’ve got�. Rachel, to my annoyance, doesn’t think much of Austen and calls her a ‘tight plait�. Mrs. Dalloway later offers her her copy of Persuasion, to bring her round, presumably, but Mrs. Dalloway’s literary tastes are ultimately better than Rachel’s, and the couple fade out of the story again.

I have complex feelings about this novel, as about most of Woolf’s fiction. I rather enjoy the biting tongue she sometimes employs (a bit of Austen?), and I love her insistence on characters� interior lives. But just when something in a conversation strikes me as profound or meaningful, the next line is often either completely obscure of the non sequitur kind (�Doesn’t everyone have an imaginary uncle?�) or slightly banal or obvious (�Women can have their own opinions�), but of course they were not banal at the time. A mix of the mundane and the meaningful came to be one of her trademarks.

Her poetic style is quite wonderful of course (‘It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool�- for someone who suddenly looked sad), and if I vacillate between frustration and admiration of her writing, I never seem to land on indifference, which in itself makes it a rewarding reading experience.
]]> 3.78 1915 The Voyage Out
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Helle
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at: 2015/03/10
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: 1001-books, english, virginia-woolf
review:
(3.5 stars) This was Virginia Woolf’s first novel and, apparently, the most linear and easy to follow of her novels. I haven’t read them all yet, but during the first half of The Voyage Out, it crept under my skin, and yet it’s difficult to say what it’s about, linear or not.

A group of English travellers are brought together on a sea voyage to South America where they meet a number of other English expatriates � and that’s basically it. We hear about their small troubles and foibles, listen in on their conversations and witness the formation of new attachments, with a young woman called Rachel more or less at the centre. There were times when the set-up and the texture reminded me of a Room with a View, though the characters at heart did not.

I felt myself sliding out of the novel as it progressed and neared its end. It partly has to do with the characters. I didn’t much care about them. I felt them to be a bit faceless, as if composed of ideas only, and I could hardly distinguish Mrs. Thornbury from Mrs. Elliot etc. I was delighted to meet some ‘old� acquaintances, who take centre stage in a later novel, namely Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway. That bit added some interesting background about those two characters. For instance, Mrs. Dalloway tells someone that her favourite Shakespeare play is Henry V, and Mr. Dalloway � bless him � says that Jane Austen is the �best author we’ve got�. Rachel, to my annoyance, doesn’t think much of Austen and calls her a ‘tight plait�. Mrs. Dalloway later offers her her copy of Persuasion, to bring her round, presumably, but Mrs. Dalloway’s literary tastes are ultimately better than Rachel’s, and the couple fade out of the story again.

I have complex feelings about this novel, as about most of Woolf’s fiction. I rather enjoy the biting tongue she sometimes employs (a bit of Austen?), and I love her insistence on characters� interior lives. But just when something in a conversation strikes me as profound or meaningful, the next line is often either completely obscure of the non sequitur kind (�Doesn’t everyone have an imaginary uncle?�) or slightly banal or obvious (�Women can have their own opinions�), but of course they were not banal at the time. A mix of the mundane and the meaningful came to be one of her trademarks.

Her poetic style is quite wonderful of course (‘It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool�- for someone who suddenly looked sad), and if I vacillate between frustration and admiration of her writing, I never seem to land on indifference, which in itself makes it a rewarding reading experience.

]]> A Society 6566531 136 Virginia Woolf 9600212414 Helle 2
Their admirable object in life, they agree, is to create good people and good books. The story also revolves around the roles of men and women, but again in a kind of fuzzily polemical way. I liked the premise of the story, including the silly idea that one girl is trying to read her way through the London Library in order to get her inheritance, but I felt I was left on the outside more or less throughout the story.]]> 3.86 1921 A Society
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Helle
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1921
rating: 2
read at: 2015/03/28
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: virginia-woolf, short-stories, english
review:
A peculiar short story which is, sort of, about a group of girls who create a little society with the purpose of asking questions about things in life in stead of taking the traditional route of getting married and having children, at least until they have some answers. When I write 'sort of' it's because that sounds as if there might be some logical story line, which there really isn't, or at least it's wrapped in various observations and comments of an almost non sequitur kind, which makes the 'story' seem more symbolic than real.

Their admirable object in life, they agree, is to create good people and good books. The story also revolves around the roles of men and women, but again in a kind of fuzzily polemical way. I liked the premise of the story, including the silly idea that one girl is trying to read her way through the London Library in order to get her inheritance, but I felt I was left on the outside more or less throughout the story.
]]> Long Story Short 3521591 214 Elyse Friedman 0887848036 Helle 0 to-read 3.76 2007 Long Story Short
author: Elyse Friedman
name: Helle
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Den endeløse sommer 23247939
Temaet i "Den endeløse sommer" er tiden. Tiden som byder på kærlighed, forelskelse, livet, ungdommen, det uskyldige, det skyldige og det syndige.]]> 184 Madame Nielsen 8702158019 Helle 0 to-read 3.81 2014 Den endeløse sommer
author: Madame Nielsen
name: Helle
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Victoria- en dronning for sin tid]]> 17913811 446 Richard Herrmann 8252525539 Helle 3 biography-memoir 4.08 1987 Victoria- en dronning for sin tid
author: Richard Herrmann
name: Helle
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/07/16
shelves: biography-memoir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ward Number Six and Other Stories]]> 81886 Ward Number Six, the lunatic ward of a provincial Russian hospital, Doctor Ragin discovers the only intelligent man in town, to whom he can air his theory that 'Man finds peace and contentment within him, not in the world outside.'

Writing towards the close of the nineteenth century, Chekhov recorded the symptoms of a society in crisis. Tolstoy's moral certainties, Dostoevsky passion, Turgenev's civilized idealism--all these have left their mark on the world that Chekhov depicts, yet there seems little to show for it. Relations between the sexes are characterized by cynical exploitation; an elderly professor, after a lifetime of service to medicine, can find no remedy for his own atrophied sensibilities, and even an aspirant revolutionary assassin finds that he cannot deliver the fatal stroke. In these seven stories Chekhov demonstrates a compassionate but wryly unsentimental view of a society whose ills the Chekhovian protagonist can neither kill nor cure.

The text of this edition is taken from The Oxford Chekhov.

Table of Contents
The butterfly
Ward number six
Ariadne
A dreary story
Neighbours
An anonymous story
Doctor Startsev.]]> 249 Anton Chekhov 0192837338 Helle 0 to-read 4.18 1892 Ward Number Six and Other Stories
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Helle
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1892
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Man in the Brown Suit 639795 228 Agatha Christie 0425067866 Helle 2 crime-mystery, english 3.69 1924 The Man in the Brown Suit
author: Agatha Christie
name: Helle
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1924
rating: 2
read at: 2012/07/29
date added: 2023/04/21
shelves: crime-mystery, english
review:

]]> Mrs. March 55298324 Who is Mrs. March?

A twenty-first-century Highsmith, Virginia Feito conjures the unforgettable Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife whose life is shattered by her husband’s latest novel.

In this astonishing debut, the venerable but gossipy New York literary scene is twisted into a claustrophobic fun house of paranoia, horror, and wickedly dark humor. George March’s latest novel is a smash. No one is prouder than Mrs. March, his doting wife. But one morning, the shopkeeper of her favorite patisserie suggests that his protagonist is based on Mrs. March herself: “But . . . ―isn't she . . .� Mrs. March leaned in and in almost a whisper said, ‘a whore?� Clutching her ostrich-leather pocketbook, she flees, that one casual remark destroying her belief that she knew everything about her husband―as well as herself. Suddenly, Mrs. March is hurled into a harrowing journey that builds to near psychosis, one that begins merely within the pages of a book but may uncover both a killer and the long-buried secrets of her past.]]> 304 Virginia Feito 1631498614 Helle 2 3.23 2021 Mrs. March
author: Virginia Feito
name: Helle
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/04/01
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Little Fires Everywhere 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned � from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren � an enigmatic artist and single mother � who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town � and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 Helle 3 american, book-club-library 4.05 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
author: Celeste Ng
name: Helle
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/26
date added: 2023/03/26
shelves: american, book-club-library
review:

]]> Americanah 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Helle 4 4.32 2013 Americanah
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Helle
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2023/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Strangers 6063521 208 Anita Brookner 1905490429 Helle 3 book-club-library, english 3.42 2009 Strangers
author: Anita Brookner
name: Helle
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/30
date added: 2023/01/30
shelves: book-club-library, english
review:

]]> The Fortnight in September 2728102
He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’]]> 326 R.C. Sherriff 1903155576 Helle 0 to-read 4.21 1931 The Fortnight in September
author: R.C. Sherriff
name: Helle
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 84, Charing Cross Road 10679500 This is an alternate cover edition for 9780751503845

In 1949 Helene Hanff, a “poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books�, wrote to Marks & Co Booksellers of 84 Charing Cross Rd, in search of the rare editions she was unable to find in New York.

Her books were dispatched with polite but brisk efficiency. But, seeking further treasures, Helene soon found herself in regular correspondence with bookseller Frank Doel, laying siege to his English reserve with her warmth and wit. And as letters, books and quips crossed the ocean, a friendship flourished that would endure for twenty years]]> 230 Helene Hanff Helle 5 american, favourites
These two sections � this book � had it all from my perspective: humour, sensitivity, books, London, human connections. I alternately found myself smiling and laughing, and simply drank in all of it. Helene Hanff’s crazy, dry, New York sense of humour was fresh and delightful, perhaps especially so because of its juxtaposition to some of the kind, polite Englishmen she writes to and ultimately meets. The book is certainly not new; it was published in 1971, and the author passed away in 1997. I suspect, however, that it will continue to be in print for many years to come.

If you suffer just the least bit from anglomania and consider yourself to have a pretty good sense of humour and a sensitive heart, you must read this book.
]]> 4.11 1970 84, Charing Cross Road
author: Helene Hanff
name: Helle
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2013/11/06
date added: 2022/09/21
shelves: american, favourites
review:
‘An unmitigated delight from cover to cover� it says on the cover of my book, and that is exactly what it is. This little volume is divided into two parts: The first part is the epistolary story (it’s not a novel; it’s too short plus it’s not fiction) - a letter exchange between Helene Hanff, book collector living in New York, and the manager of a second-hand book shop in London (and some of the people in his vicinity) lasting over twenty years. The second part, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, is the aftermath of the letters being published in a book and Helene Hanff’s reception in London, which was every bit as good as the first part, to me.

These two sections � this book � had it all from my perspective: humour, sensitivity, books, London, human connections. I alternately found myself smiling and laughing, and simply drank in all of it. Helene Hanff’s crazy, dry, New York sense of humour was fresh and delightful, perhaps especially so because of its juxtaposition to some of the kind, polite Englishmen she writes to and ultimately meets. The book is certainly not new; it was published in 1971, and the author passed away in 1997. I suspect, however, that it will continue to be in print for many years to come.

If you suffer just the least bit from anglomania and consider yourself to have a pretty good sense of humour and a sensitive heart, you must read this book.

]]> Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 194 Ray Bradbury Helle 4 3.97 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Helle
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/04
date added: 2022/08/29
shelves: book-club-library, dystopian, american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories]]> 9889 here.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'.]]> 157 Truman Capote Helle 4 3.76 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories
author: Truman Capote
name: Helle
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/09
date added: 2022/06/15
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read, 1001-books, american
review:

]]> Lady Windermere’s Fan 11398359 56 Oscar Wilde Helle 4 irish
"I can resist everything except temptation"

"We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"

"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it"

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"

I was reminded of what I appreciated so much about Wilde when I first read him years ago: that combination of humour and intelligence which comes across in skillful repartees, otherwise known as 'wit'. And Oscar Wilde's wit is in a league of its own.
]]> 4.10 1892 Lady Windermere’s Fan
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Helle
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1892
rating: 4
read at: 2013/01/19
date added: 2022/06/09
shelves: irish
review:
This was a quick 'read' (four and a half hours on audiobooks), and though it wasn't among the best works I've read by Wilde, it was a pleasant surprise to suddenly come upon some of his best (and my favourite) quotes; I knew them well but not that they came from this particular play. In chronological order:

"I can resist everything except temptation"

"We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"

"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it"

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"

I was reminded of what I appreciated so much about Wilde when I first read him years ago: that combination of humour and intelligence which comes across in skillful repartees, otherwise known as 'wit'. And Oscar Wilde's wit is in a league of its own.

]]> The Tortoise and the Hare 11158247
Imogen, the beautiful and much younger wife of distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham, is facing the greatest challenge of her married life. Their neighbour Blanche Silcox, competent, middle-aged and ungainly - the very opposite of Imogen - seems to be vying for Evelyn's attention. And to Imogen's increasing disbelief, she may be succeeding.

'A subtle and beautiful book ... Very few authors combine her acute psychological insight with her grace and style. There is plenty of life in the modern novel, plenty of authors who will shock and amaze you - but who will put on the page a beautiful sentence, a sentence you will want to read twice?' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times]]> 272 Elizabeth Jenkins 1844087476 Helle 3 3.83 1954 The Tortoise and the Hare
author: Elizabeth Jenkins
name: Helle
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1954
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/05/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Hothouse Flower 10151892 For fans of The House at Riverton and 𳦳�a debut spanning from the 1930s to the present day, from a magnificent estate in war-torn England to Thailand, this sweeping novel tells the tale of a concert pianist, Julia, and the prominent Crawford family whose shocking secrets are revealed, leading to devastating consequences for generations to come.

As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park, the great house where her grandfather tended exotic orchids. Years later, while struggling with overwhelming grief over the death of her husband and young child, she returns to the tranquility of the estate. There she reunites with Kit Crawford, heir to the estate and her possible salvation.

When they discover an old diary, Julia seeks out her grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed Wharton Park. Their search takes them back to the 1930s when a former heir to Wharton Park married his young society bride on the eve of World War II. When the two lovers are cruelly separated, the impact will be felt on generations to come.

Lucinda Riley skillfully sweeps her readers between the magical world of Wharton Park and Thailand during World War II with irresistible and atmospheric storytelling. Filled with twists and turns, passions and lies, and ultimately redemption, Hothouse Flower is a romantic, poignant novel that became an instant bestseller in the UK and Germany.

]]> 577 Lucinda Riley 0141049375 Helle 3 english, historical-fiction
Needless to say, I didn't suggest it, but I didn't hate it either, which - judging from some of the reviews here, some readers apparently did. The author clearly knows how to spin a story, with multiple threads, even if the outcome was sometimes pretty unlikely, but it was damn entertaining. I read the last 250 pages in one sitting.

Some books we learn something from, some we escape into when there's enough going on in the rest of our lives and we don't want to make too much of an effort. This book clearly belongs to the latter, and that's OK.]]> 3.87 2010 Hothouse Flower
author: Lucinda Riley
name: Helle
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2013/10/03
date added: 2022/05/19
shelves: english, historical-fiction
review:
This was a page-turner with some terrific settings on an English estate and in Thailand, but also now and then some appalling romance-y cliches, which I decided to (try to) look past after the first 50 or so pages if I was going to enjoy the book. And since I read it for one of my reading groups, I kind of had to finish it, but that really wasn't a problem.

Needless to say, I didn't suggest it, but I didn't hate it either, which - judging from some of the reviews here, some readers apparently did. The author clearly knows how to spin a story, with multiple threads, even if the outcome was sometimes pretty unlikely, but it was damn entertaining. I read the last 250 pages in one sitting.

Some books we learn something from, some we escape into when there's enough going on in the rest of our lives and we don't want to make too much of an effort. This book clearly belongs to the latter, and that's OK.
]]> <![CDATA[Metamorphosis and Other Stories]]> 1677233
This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes "Metamorphosis", his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; "Meditation", a collection of his earlier studies; "The Judgement", written in a single night of frenzied creativity; "The Stoker", the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and "The Aeroplanes at Brescia", Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.]]> 299 Franz Kafka 0143105248 Helle 4 4.03 1915 Metamorphosis and Other Stories
author: Franz Kafka
name: Helle
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/23
date added: 2022/04/24
shelves: german, short-stories, novella, czech
review:

]]> Birdcage Walk 31288031
Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism.

But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat.

Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants.

In a tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror, Diner’s passion for Lizzie darkens until she finds herself dangerously alone.]]> 416 Helen Dunmore 0091959411 Helle 3 book-club-library, english 3.52 2017 Birdcage Walk
author: Helen Dunmore
name: Helle
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/29
date added: 2022/02/01
shelves: book-club-library, english
review:

]]> Ansigterne 13575668 160 Tove Ditlevsen 8700089826 Helle 4 danish 4.04 1968 Ansigterne
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Helle
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/04
date added: 2022/01/25
shelves: danish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Det tidlige forår: Barndom og ungdom]]> 38188650


Det tidlige forår er den samlede udgave af Tove Ditlevsens to første erindringsbøger Barndom og Ungdom. Sammen med denne bogs efterfølger Gift står Tove Ditlevsens erindringsbøger som et hovedværk i dansk litteratur.]]> Tove Ditlevsen 8702260905 Helle 4 biography-memoir, danish 4.45 1969 Det tidlige forår: Barndom og ungdom
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Helle
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/16
date added: 2022/01/24
shelves: biography-memoir, danish
review:

]]> Brave New World 415342
Kim Llewellyn - Designer
Carin Goldberg - Cover Design]]> 267 Aldous Huxley 0060809833 Helle 3 3.90 1932 Brave New World
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Helle
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/31
date added: 2021/10/31
shelves: dystopian, english, 1001-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Helle 4 irish 3.53 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Helle
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/19
date added: 2021/10/19
shelves: irish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swanns verden 1 (På sporet af den tabte tid, #1)]]> 8285225 Hovedpersonen, en 50-årig franskmand, ligger søvnløs i sin seng og oplever grænserne flyder ud, mens han farer afsted i tid og rum, og forgæves forsøger at få kontakt til fortiden. En tilfældighed udløser en sensorisk åbenbaring, bedre kendt som madeleinekageerindringen, der bringer ham i kontakt med bardommens rum i Combray, da han var ca. 7, hvor han rituelt indtog kagen og teen. Siden følger en fremadskridende beretning om hændelser fra hans liv, Swanns indskudte kærlighedshistorie (romanen i romanen) og tanker om steder og navne. Til slut i bd. 2 er vi tilbage i den 50-åriges nuværende situation.]]> 261 Marcel Proust 8703039153 Helle 0 to-read, french, 1001-books 4.16 1913 Swanns verden 1 (På sporet af den tabte tid, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Helle
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/12
shelves: to-read, french, 1001-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 Helle 5 american, non-fiction 4.55 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
author: George Saunders
name: Helle
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/09
date added: 2021/10/09
shelves: american, non-fiction
review:
I didn't love the Russian short stories quite as much as George Saunders did, but I absolutely loved George Saunders! Could he please tackle other stories now (by e.g. Hemingway, Carver, Mansfield, Maupassant, whomever, just so we can read more of Saunders reading other writers)?!
]]> Frygtelig lykkelig 5930233
Den lokale skønhed får hurtigt et godt øje til den nye betjent, men hendes mand kan andet og mere end at tæve sin kone, og snart er Robert viklet ind i et drama, hvor han slet ikke kan bunde.

FRYGTELIG LYKKELIG er en sædeskildrende politiroman fra marsklandet, hvor man har tyve i skabet og skeletter i mosen. Med humor og kulsort alvor fortælles en historie om at finde sin plads i verden.]]> 231 Erling Jepsen 8721026335 Helle 3 danish 3.22 2006 Frygtelig lykkelig
author: Erling Jepsen
name: Helle
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/26
date added: 2021/08/26
shelves: danish
review:

]]> Eat, Pray, Love 19501
Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.

To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.

An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.]]> 368 Elizabeth Gilbert 0143038419 Helle 3 3.5<br /> 3.64 2006 Eat, Pray, Love
author: Elizabeth Gilbert
name: Helle
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/20
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: american, biography-memoir, non-fiction
review:
3.5

]]> The Lemon Table 37585
The characters in The Lemon Table are facing the ends of their lives–some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage. Their circumstances are just as varied as their responses. In 19th-century Sweden, three brief conversations provide the basis for a lifetime of longing. In today’s England, a retired army major heads into the city for his regimental dinner–and his annual appointment with a professional lady named Babs. Somewhere nearby, a devoted wife calms (or perhaps torments) her ailing husband by reading him recipes.
In stories brimming with life and our desire to hang on to it one way or another, Barnes proves himself by turns wise, funny, clever, and profound–a writer of astonishing powers of empathy and invention.]]> 241 Julian Barnes 1400076501 Helle 5 english, short-stories 3.68 2004 The Lemon Table
author: Julian Barnes
name: Helle
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/30
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: english, short-stories
review:
‘Cheer up! Death is round the corner.�
]]> <![CDATA[Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives]]> 46114266 --Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive

SUCCESSFUL AGING delivers powerful insights:
- Debunking the myth that memory always declines with age
- Confirming that health span--not life span--is what matters
- Proving that sixty-plus years is a unique and newly recognized developmental stage
- Recommending that people look forward to joy, as reminiscing doesn't promote health

Levitin looks at the science behind what we all can learn from those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people's wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, using research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.

Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise.
]]> 528 Daniel J. Levitin 1524744182 Helle 4 american, non-fiction 3.89 2020 Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives
author: Daniel J. Levitin
name: Helle
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/23
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: american, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose]]> 76334 With his bestselling spiritual guide "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle inspired millions of readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived ?in the now.? In "A New Earth," Tolle expands on these powerful ideas to show how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world. Tolle describes how our attachment to the ego creates the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness, and shows readers how to awaken to a new state of consciousness and follow the path to a truly fulfilling existence. "The Power of Now" was a question-and-answer handbook. "A New Earth" has been written as a traditional narrative, offering anecdotes and philosophies in a way that is accessible to all. Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, "A New Earth" is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life?and for building a better world.]]> 316 Eckhart Tolle 0452287588 Helle 5 mind-body-spirit, non-fiction 4.15 2005 A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
author: Eckhart Tolle
name: Helle
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: mind-body-spirit, non-fiction
review:

]]> The Dud Avocado 15770463 The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).� –Groucho Marx

"[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian]]> 321 Elaine Dundy Helle 3 american Not for the impatient, overly serious reader but for someone who might need a break from more challenging books and/or would savour a literary and slightly more daring version of ‘Emily in Paris.’]]> 3.35 1958 The Dud Avocado
author: Elaine Dundy
name: Helle
average rating: 3.35
book published: 1958
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/08/22
shelves: american
review:
Really one of the silliest, flimsiest stories I’ve ever read but with a stylistic inventiveness that bizarrely seems to mix P.G. Wodehouse and J.D. Salinger, with a dash of Raymond Chandler in a kind of Bridget Jones interpretation, a touch of Groucho Marx and a tiny nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald. A highly unlikely yet original mix, especially considering it was written in 1958. What made me finish the ridiculous story, apart from the language, was the sense of a self-deprecating intelligence underneath all the slapstick humour.
Not for the impatient, overly serious reader but for someone who might need a break from more challenging books and/or would savour a literary and slightly more daring version of ‘Emily in Paris.�
]]> Open Secrets 58489985
"Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life."--New York Times Book Review]]> 294 Alice Munro 7800994597 Helle 4 canadian, short-stories 3.93 1994 Open Secrets
author: Alice Munro
name: Helle
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/18
date added: 2021/08/18
shelves: canadian, short-stories
review:

]]> Scenes from Provincial Life 12596230 Boyhood, Youth and Summertime.

Scenes from Provincial Life opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother's unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils, especially the rough Afrikaners.

As a student of mathematics in Cape Town he readies himself to escape his homeland, travel to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting: he toils as a computer programmer, inhabits a series of damp, dreary flats and is haunted by loneliness and boredom. He is a constitutional outsider. He fails to write.

Decades later, an English biographer researches a book about the late John Coetzee, particularly the period following his return to South Africa from America. Interviewees describe an awkward man still living with his father, a man who insists on performing dull manual labour. His family regard him with suspicion and he is dogged by rumours: that he crossed the authorities in America, that he writes poetry.

Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.]]> 484 J.M. Coetzee 1846554853 Helle 4 south-africa 4.16 2011 Scenes from Provincial Life
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Helle
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/24
date added: 2021/07/24
shelves: south-africa
review:

]]> Oscar's Books 5357575 of the books he read.

In an entirely new kind of biography, Oscar’s Books explores the personality of Oscar Wilde through his reading. For Wilde, as for many people, reading could be as powerful and transformative an experience as falling in love. He referred to the volumes that radically altered his vision of the world as his “golden books.� He gave books as gifts, often as part of his seduction campaigns of young men, and sometimes he literally ate books, tearing off corners of paper and chewing them as he read. Wilde’s beloved book collection was sold at the time of his trials to pay creditors and legal costs.

Thomas Wright, in the course of his intensive research, has hunted down many of the missing volumes, which contain revealing markings and personal annotations never previously examined.]]> 192 Thomas Wright 0701180617 Helle 5
The research behind this book is astounding, as is the love which Wright clearly has for his subject. Throughout the book he manages to strike a balance between devotion and truth, and he makes a convincing case of how Wilde’s life, to a large extent, imitated the books he read and those he wrote, more than the other way round.

A book lover myself, I wallowed in all the bookish details and greatly sympathized with both Wright and with Wilde’s need to live on a diet of great literature. Wright remains in the background throughout, allowing the reader to meet the Oscar Wilde he so convincingly conjures up, and perhaps therefore I was greatly moved by the last chapter in which Wright himself unfolds his lifelong literary love affair with the works of Oscar Wilde.

Although I’ve read several of Wilde’s books, seen the performance of The Importance of Being Earnest and read various other snippets about his life, trial etc., I have increased that knowledge hundredfold, at least, reading this book. It is, as Peter Ackroyd says on the back cover of my book, �animated by real intellectual passion�. Highly recommended for book nerds and/or Wilde enthusiasts.
]]> 4.25 2008 Oscar's Books
author: Thomas Wright
name: Helle
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2015/02/26
date added: 2021/07/01
shelves: biography-memoir, english, non-fiction
review:
This literary biography about Oscar Wilde is a brilliant, touching and original portrait of Wilde, exploring in great depth his staggering reading habits and his outlandish personality and lifestyle.

The research behind this book is astounding, as is the love which Wright clearly has for his subject. Throughout the book he manages to strike a balance between devotion and truth, and he makes a convincing case of how Wilde’s life, to a large extent, imitated the books he read and those he wrote, more than the other way round.

A book lover myself, I wallowed in all the bookish details and greatly sympathized with both Wright and with Wilde’s need to live on a diet of great literature. Wright remains in the background throughout, allowing the reader to meet the Oscar Wilde he so convincingly conjures up, and perhaps therefore I was greatly moved by the last chapter in which Wright himself unfolds his lifelong literary love affair with the works of Oscar Wilde.

Although I’ve read several of Wilde’s books, seen the performance of The Importance of Being Earnest and read various other snippets about his life, trial etc., I have increased that knowledge hundredfold, at least, reading this book. It is, as Peter Ackroyd says on the back cover of my book, �animated by real intellectual passion�. Highly recommended for book nerds and/or Wilde enthusiasts.

]]> <![CDATA[Verden af i går (Rosinantes klassikerserie)]]> 52259643
I "Verden af i går" tegner Stefan et generationsportræt med udgangspunkt i sig selv og sit liv. Hans erindringer er inddelt i tre perioder, hvor vi i den første periode følger barndommen og ungdommen i Østrig-Ungarn. Den anden periode indtræffer ved første verdenskrig og den sidste periode finder sted, da Adolf Hitler kommer til magten.]]> 398 Stefan Zweig 876382793X Helle 5 The World of Yesterday. The book informed my trip and made me imagine the Vienna of 1910 before the world went over the edge, or at least before Europe did. This is very much a European memoir, and to my mind it ought to be required reading for all Europeans, in fact for everyone who considers themselves citizens of the world and who do not define themselves, as Zweig did not, by means of the narrow and excluding confines of nationality alone.

This rather bloodless introduction does not even begin to describe my experience of reading this sweeping, touching memoir of a life lived in what was probably the most tumultuous period in European history. Stefan Zweig has the true soul and sensibility of an artist, and it is with keen observation, nostalgia and regret that he paints, first, the bygone days of one of Europe’s most overlooked culture capitals, Vienna, and, then, how geopolitical excuses and the human quest for power over others marked the end of peace in Europe and the beginning of a new era.

Alongside a very insightful and personal account of the two world wars, their causes and their repercussions, Zweig tells the story of how he became an author: how at school he was part of a group of youngsters who all adored poetry and the arts, how he began writing poetry and was published at a young age and how he humbly decided to dedicate himself to travel and to the translation of other authors� works of literature in order to add more substance to his own literary endeavours. Zweig would become one of the most read and translated authors of his age, but like much else in the wake of Hitler’s slaughter of Europe, that, too, came to a (temporary) end.

Throughout the book Zweig demonstrates a touching reverence for other masters of literature, e.g. Goethe and Rilke, but also for composers, e.g. Beethoven, and, towards the end, Freud, whom he visited in both Vienna and London and considered a good friend. (I, too, visited Freud’s apartment in Vienna over Easter and saw a portrait of Zweig there in one of the rooms). He took great pleasure in many of the friendships he developed throughout his life with clever, thinking people all across Europe, but in the end he had to flee Austria and his beloved Europe because he was a Jew.

He never discloses the most private aspects of his life, e.g. details surrounding his two marriages, because that is not his errand here. It is a story about Europe and a about a world long gone, as seen through the eyes of one of its biggest fans. At one point he describes himself as a man with ‘a near pathological lack of self-confidence�, which I found both remarkable and likeable in a renowned and gifted writer when only last week I heard a not-so-gifted but young (and thus perhaps forgivable) wanna-be poet admit to being a narcissist, a word that these days gives me the creeps (and I told him as much). I wonder what Stefan Zweig would have made of the world of today.

I not only admired this book but grew increasingly fond of Stefan Zweig as I neared the end, which had me in tears, I must admit. The book goes straight to my ‘favourites� shelf. I cannot recommend it highly enough.


(This was a timely read for me, as I discovered upon returning from Vienna that a new movie is out about Stefan Zweig called ‘Farewell to Europe�. A tragic aside: Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide only days after the manuscript for this book was sent to his publishers).]]> 4.75 1942 Verden af i går (Rosinantes klassikerserie)
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Helle
average rating: 4.75
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2017/04/26
date added: 2021/07/01
shelves: biography-memoir, favourites, austrian
review:
Before I went to Vienna over Easter, I began reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. The book informed my trip and made me imagine the Vienna of 1910 before the world went over the edge, or at least before Europe did. This is very much a European memoir, and to my mind it ought to be required reading for all Europeans, in fact for everyone who considers themselves citizens of the world and who do not define themselves, as Zweig did not, by means of the narrow and excluding confines of nationality alone.

This rather bloodless introduction does not even begin to describe my experience of reading this sweeping, touching memoir of a life lived in what was probably the most tumultuous period in European history. Stefan Zweig has the true soul and sensibility of an artist, and it is with keen observation, nostalgia and regret that he paints, first, the bygone days of one of Europe’s most overlooked culture capitals, Vienna, and, then, how geopolitical excuses and the human quest for power over others marked the end of peace in Europe and the beginning of a new era.

Alongside a very insightful and personal account of the two world wars, their causes and their repercussions, Zweig tells the story of how he became an author: how at school he was part of a group of youngsters who all adored poetry and the arts, how he began writing poetry and was published at a young age and how he humbly decided to dedicate himself to travel and to the translation of other authors� works of literature in order to add more substance to his own literary endeavours. Zweig would become one of the most read and translated authors of his age, but like much else in the wake of Hitler’s slaughter of Europe, that, too, came to a (temporary) end.

Throughout the book Zweig demonstrates a touching reverence for other masters of literature, e.g. Goethe and Rilke, but also for composers, e.g. Beethoven, and, towards the end, Freud, whom he visited in both Vienna and London and considered a good friend. (I, too, visited Freud’s apartment in Vienna over Easter and saw a portrait of Zweig there in one of the rooms). He took great pleasure in many of the friendships he developed throughout his life with clever, thinking people all across Europe, but in the end he had to flee Austria and his beloved Europe because he was a Jew.

He never discloses the most private aspects of his life, e.g. details surrounding his two marriages, because that is not his errand here. It is a story about Europe and a about a world long gone, as seen through the eyes of one of its biggest fans. At one point he describes himself as a man with ‘a near pathological lack of self-confidence�, which I found both remarkable and likeable in a renowned and gifted writer when only last week I heard a not-so-gifted but young (and thus perhaps forgivable) wanna-be poet admit to being a narcissist, a word that these days gives me the creeps (and I told him as much). I wonder what Stefan Zweig would have made of the world of today.

I not only admired this book but grew increasingly fond of Stefan Zweig as I neared the end, which had me in tears, I must admit. The book goes straight to my ‘favourites� shelf. I cannot recommend it highly enough.


(This was a timely read for me, as I discovered upon returning from Vienna that a new movie is out about Stefan Zweig called ‘Farewell to Europe�. A tragic aside: Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide only days after the manuscript for this book was sent to his publishers).
]]> Our Man in Havana 133394 Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction

First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates to this day. Conceived as one of Graham Greene's 'entertainments,' it tells of MI6's man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

]]> 220 Graham Greene 0140184937 Helle 4 3.94 1958 Our Man in Havana
author: Graham Greene
name: Helle
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/27
date added: 2021/06/27
shelves: english, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Goodbye to Berlin 760702
In linked short stories, he says goodbye to Sally Bowles, to Fraulein Schroeder, to pranksters, perverts, political manipulators; to the very, very guilty and to the dwindling band of innocents. It is goodbye to a Berlin wild, wicked, breathtaking, decadent beyond belief and already -- in the years between the wars -- welcoming death in through the door, though more with a wink than a whimper.

~from the back cover]]> 208 Christopher Isherwood 0586047956 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.95 1939 Goodbye to Berlin
author: Christopher Isherwood
name: Helle
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.96 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Helle
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Something Fresh (Blandings Castle, #1)]]> 18025
Now there are two of them � both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth’s secretary, the efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what is afoot � despite the distractions caused by the Honorable Freddie Threepwood’s hapless affair of the heart.]]> 284 P.G. Wodehouse 1585676586 Helle 4 Blandings Castle series and every bit as silly, witty and delightfully early 20th century (published in 1915) as the other books I’ve read by him (though I think I prefer Jeeves & Wooster).

The characters who people the Blandings series are the dotty Lord Emsworth, his no-good but basically harmless son, Freddie, an officious secretary, Baxter, and Beach the butler. However, the two main characters in this first one � who unfortunately then disappear out of sight after this installment � are Ashe Marson, a writer of detective novels, and Joan Valentine, a woman who lives in Ashe’s building and whom he meets when she laughs at him doing his ‘Larsen exercises�. They are both in need of money and adventure, and after a completely unlikely mix-up of a misplaced scarab, they find themselves at Blandings Castle pretending to be something they are not in order to retrieve said scarab. Misunderstandings ensue, crazy conversations follow and other silly characters enter the scene � in short Wodehouse’s trademark devices abound.

Some of the slapstick is a bit too silly for my taste; it’s the little asides that had me chuckling (‘he looked to the wallpaper for inspiration�), and chuckle I did once the whole cast had finally arrived at Blandings Castle. (Already in the preface, we know what we’re in for; here Wodehouse describes why his American editor wanted him to use his full name, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse: A writer in America at that time who went about without three names was practically going around naked.)

Evelyn Waugh (a devout fan of Wodehouse’s) had this to say about him and Blandings Castle:

'For Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man. The gardens of Blandings Castle are the original gardens of Eden from which we are all exiled.'

His stories may not be profound, but they are quirky, funny, utterly English (from a time gone by, alas), witty and heartwarming.
]]> 4.10 1915 Something Fresh (Blandings Castle, #1)
author: P.G. Wodehouse
name: Helle
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: english, humour, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
(3.5 stars) A light, amusing snack between meatier meals, this is the first installment in Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle series and every bit as silly, witty and delightfully early 20th century (published in 1915) as the other books I’ve read by him (though I think I prefer Jeeves & Wooster).

The characters who people the Blandings series are the dotty Lord Emsworth, his no-good but basically harmless son, Freddie, an officious secretary, Baxter, and Beach the butler. However, the two main characters in this first one � who unfortunately then disappear out of sight after this installment � are Ashe Marson, a writer of detective novels, and Joan Valentine, a woman who lives in Ashe’s building and whom he meets when she laughs at him doing his ‘Larsen exercises�. They are both in need of money and adventure, and after a completely unlikely mix-up of a misplaced scarab, they find themselves at Blandings Castle pretending to be something they are not in order to retrieve said scarab. Misunderstandings ensue, crazy conversations follow and other silly characters enter the scene � in short Wodehouse’s trademark devices abound.

Some of the slapstick is a bit too silly for my taste; it’s the little asides that had me chuckling (‘he looked to the wallpaper for inspiration�), and chuckle I did once the whole cast had finally arrived at Blandings Castle. (Already in the preface, we know what we’re in for; here Wodehouse describes why his American editor wanted him to use his full name, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse: A writer in America at that time who went about without three names was practically going around naked.)

Evelyn Waugh (a devout fan of Wodehouse’s) had this to say about him and Blandings Castle:

'For Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man. The gardens of Blandings Castle are the original gardens of Eden from which we are all exiled.'

His stories may not be profound, but they are quirky, funny, utterly English (from a time gone by, alas), witty and heartwarming.

]]> Oscar and Lucinda 11277511
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.]]> 582 Peter Carey 0307787133 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.45 1988 Oscar and Lucinda
author: Peter Carey
name: Helle
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> I Served the King of England 148634 I Served the King of England is a story of how the unbelievable came true. Its remarkable hero, Ditie, is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from the German invasion to the victory of Communism. Ditie's fantastic journey intertwines the political and the personal in a narrative that both enlightens and entertains.]]> 243 Bohumil Hrabal 0330308769 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 4.02 1983 I Served the King of England
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Helle
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Behind the Scenes at the Museum]]> 28940 332 Kate Atkinson 0312150601 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.96 1995 Behind the Scenes at the Museum
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Helle
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> The Red and the Black 14662 The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical portrayal of French society after Waterloo, riddled with corruption, greed, and ennui, and Julien - the cold exploiter whose Machiavellian campaign is undercut by his own emotions - is one of the most intriguing characters in European literature.

Roger Gard's fine translation remains faithful to the natural, conversational tone of the original, while his introduction elucidates the complexities of Julien's character. This edition also contains a chronology, further reading and an appendix on Stendhal's use of epigraphs.]]> 577 Stendhal 0140447644 Helle 3 3.91 1830 The Red and the Black
author: Stendhal
name: Helle
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1830
rating: 3
read at: 2019/01/11
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: 1001-books, french, classics, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Death in Venice 53061
Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."]]> 142 Thomas Mann 0060576170 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.77 1911 Death in Venice
author: Thomas Mann
name: Helle
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Gilead (Gilead, #1) 68210 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.]]> 247 Marilynne Robinson 031242440X Helle 3 Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience.

Gilead is a meditation on life, faith and fatherhood. It is the goodbye letter from a father to a son � a father who is 77 and whose son is only seven � and the father’s desire to leave some kind of legacy for his young son because he knows he won’t be there to see him grow up.

Looking back on his life, the Reverend John Ames remembers incidents small and big which have constituted his life. He reminisces about regrets and moments of epiphany as well as the role of his own father and grandfather, his wife and son, the wife and child he lost, his neighbours. It is small-town America in the 1950s, but his thoughts span a century and go back to the Civil War which his own grandfather participated in. It is, in this way, very much an American novel. The way it explores faith, too, seems to be both personal and national/American at the same time, which might explain why Barack Obama had a conversation with Marilynne Robinson in November last year.*

It may also explain why I failed to fully connect with it or appreciate it to the extent many others have. As an agnostic (I suppose) I sometimes felt weighed down by the theological ramblings, though at other times I was drawn into John Ames’s musings when they didn’t rely too heavily on Scripture. The narrative voice of the old man was thoroughly convincing, as was the confessional tone, the testimony of a parent’s love for his child. Despite this there was something in the near-epistolary style that made me feel removed from it, as if I was being told John Ames’s story but never saw any of it for myself. Perhaps that was why I was easily distracted during the reading of it.

I very much enjoy philosophical novels, and in this novel, too, I found myself agreeing with many of the thoughts expressed by the old reverend, this for instance:

My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.

But as these thoughts were more often clothed in a strict sense of faith, to my mind at least, I often didn’t feel they could be my thoughts. A quote early on expresses my feelings about this, and John Amos’s own (talking about Feuerbach, a man whose books his brother has read, after which he left the small town of Gilead, considering it a backwater):

Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant.

See, I wish it had been a discussion of faith and not a one-sided conviction in which the sceptics/agnostics are considered ‘in error� as above. John Amos himself talks about the poverty of (our) understanding later on, which is fantastic phrase and which should, surely, leave the door open for those of us who easily back away from what Ames himself calls the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.

Or perhaps I felt a bit removed from this because John Ames’s musings, interesting though many of them are, lead to more musings, which are connected with new thoughts. There is rarely any action to speak of on which to pin some of these musings, and what conflict there is takes place in retrospect.

A writer who was a firm Christian and whose works I enjoy without being able to follow him the whole nine (religious) yards is Søren Kierkegaard who, I think, would have completely agreed with John Ames in the following:

To be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

Yes, whether with or without the help of God, to become ourselves is perhaps ultimately what we/I do with each literary step we/I take. And to be sure, there is real warmth and intelligence in the book, which are what I’ll take away with me:

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

*Link to the conversation in The New York Review of Books:


]]> 3.84 2004 Gilead (Gilead, #1)
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Helle
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2016/01/30
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: pulitzer-prize, american, book-club-library, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience.

Gilead is a meditation on life, faith and fatherhood. It is the goodbye letter from a father to a son � a father who is 77 and whose son is only seven � and the father’s desire to leave some kind of legacy for his young son because he knows he won’t be there to see him grow up.

Looking back on his life, the Reverend John Ames remembers incidents small and big which have constituted his life. He reminisces about regrets and moments of epiphany as well as the role of his own father and grandfather, his wife and son, the wife and child he lost, his neighbours. It is small-town America in the 1950s, but his thoughts span a century and go back to the Civil War which his own grandfather participated in. It is, in this way, very much an American novel. The way it explores faith, too, seems to be both personal and national/American at the same time, which might explain why Barack Obama had a conversation with Marilynne Robinson in November last year.*

It may also explain why I failed to fully connect with it or appreciate it to the extent many others have. As an agnostic (I suppose) I sometimes felt weighed down by the theological ramblings, though at other times I was drawn into John Ames’s musings when they didn’t rely too heavily on Scripture. The narrative voice of the old man was thoroughly convincing, as was the confessional tone, the testimony of a parent’s love for his child. Despite this there was something in the near-epistolary style that made me feel removed from it, as if I was being told John Ames’s story but never saw any of it for myself. Perhaps that was why I was easily distracted during the reading of it.

I very much enjoy philosophical novels, and in this novel, too, I found myself agreeing with many of the thoughts expressed by the old reverend, this for instance:

My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.

But as these thoughts were more often clothed in a strict sense of faith, to my mind at least, I often didn’t feel they could be my thoughts. A quote early on expresses my feelings about this, and John Amos’s own (talking about Feuerbach, a man whose books his brother has read, after which he left the small town of Gilead, considering it a backwater):

Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant.

See, I wish it had been a discussion of faith and not a one-sided conviction in which the sceptics/agnostics are considered ‘in error� as above. John Amos himself talks about the poverty of (our) understanding later on, which is fantastic phrase and which should, surely, leave the door open for those of us who easily back away from what Ames himself calls the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.

Or perhaps I felt a bit removed from this because John Ames’s musings, interesting though many of them are, lead to more musings, which are connected with new thoughts. There is rarely any action to speak of on which to pin some of these musings, and what conflict there is takes place in retrospect.

A writer who was a firm Christian and whose works I enjoy without being able to follow him the whole nine (religious) yards is Søren Kierkegaard who, I think, would have completely agreed with John Ames in the following:

To be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

Yes, whether with or without the help of God, to become ourselves is perhaps ultimately what we/I do with each literary step we/I take. And to be sure, there is real warmth and intelligence in the book, which are what I’ll take away with me:

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

*Link to the conversation in The New York Review of Books:



]]> On Beauty 3679 On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.]]> 445 Zadie Smith 0143037749 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.79 2005 On Beauty
author: Zadie Smith
name: Helle
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Tender is the Night 35050615 Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.]]> 337 F. Scott Fitzgerald Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.12 1934 Tender is the Night
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Helle
average rating: 3.12
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Pale Fire 7805
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.]]> 246 Vladimir Nabokov Helle 4 What have I just read here? 4.17 1962 Pale Fire
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Helle
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2016/07/14
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: 1001-books, russian, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
What have I just read here?
]]> Cranford 182381
Cranford depicts the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of a small village - their petty snobberies, appetite for gossip, and loyal support for each other in times of need This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister Miss Matty, But domestic peace is constantly threatened in the form of financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents, and the reapparance of long-lost relatives. to Lady Glenmire, who shocks everyone by marrying the doctor. When men do appear, such as 'modern' Captain Brown or Matty's suitor from the past, they bring disruption and excitement to the everyday life of Cranford.

In her introduction, Patricia Ingham places the novel in its literary and historical context, and discusses the theme of female friendship and Gaskell's narrative technique. This edition also contains an account of Gaskell's childhood in Knutsford, on which Cranford is based, appendices on fashion and domestic duties supplemented by illustrations, a chronology of Gaskell's life and works, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory notes.]]> 257 Elizabeth Gaskell 0141439882 Helle 3
Having seen the BBC production first (which I loved), I was surprised to learn that a number of the characters in the television series don’t actually exist in the book. And parts of the plotline have been changed completely. I felt this was taking some unusual liberties with the original text, but I since found out that the series is apparently also based on two other novellas by Gaskell (My Lady Ludlow and Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, neither of which I’ve read). But it’s still called Cranford.

It was enjoyable although at times also a little twee and dull, but some of the characters made up for that (and I kept seeing Judi Dench as Miss Matty, which was great. She’s out of her usual element in that role).
]]> 3.85 1853 Cranford
author: Elizabeth Gaskell
name: Helle
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1853
rating: 3
read at: 2014/06/25
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: english, victorian, 1001-books, telegraph-top-100-books, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
This is basically a collection of vignettes all describing small aspects of life in the village of Cranford in the middle of the 19th century, notably as regards the ladies in the village who are single or widowed. The stories are chronologically ordered, and so the story begins to come together after a while after we’ve met the same people a number of times.

Having seen the BBC production first (which I loved), I was surprised to learn that a number of the characters in the television series don’t actually exist in the book. And parts of the plotline have been changed completely. I felt this was taking some unusual liberties with the original text, but I since found out that the series is apparently also based on two other novellas by Gaskell (My Lady Ludlow and Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, neither of which I’ve read). But it’s still called Cranford.

It was enjoyable although at times also a little twee and dull, but some of the characters made up for that (and I kept seeing Judi Dench as Miss Matty, which was great. She’s out of her usual element in that role).

]]> <![CDATA[Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family]]> 80890
As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks� decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.

First published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles in its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.]]> 731 Thomas Mann 0679417370 Helle 4 (Phew...) 4.17 1901 Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
author: Thomas Mann
name: Helle
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1901
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/04
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: german, 1001-books, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
(Phew...)
]]> Under the Skin 123063 Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory—our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion.]]> 296 Michel Faber 1841954802 Helle 3 3.76 2000 Under the Skin
author: Michel Faber
name: Helle
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/08
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: 1001-books, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Hard Times 5344
Without a moral compass to guide them, the children sink into lives of desperation and despair, played out against the grim background of Coketown, a wretched community shadowed by an industrial behemoth. Louisa falls into a loveless marriage with Josiah Bouderby, a vulgar banker, while the unscrupulous Tom, totally lacking in principle, becomes a thief who frames an innocent man for his crime. Witnessing the degradation and downfall of his children, Gradgrind realizes that his own misguided principles have ruined their lives.

Considered Dickens' harshest indictment of mid-19th-century industrial practices and their dehumanizing effects, this novel offers a fascinating tapestry of Victorian life, filled with the richness of detail, brilliant characterization, and passionate social concern that typify the novelist's finest creations.

Of Dickens' work, the eminent Victorian critic John Ruskin had this to say: "He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions."]]> 384 Charles Dickens 0321107217 Helle 2 3.55 1854 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Helle
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1854
rating: 2
read at: 2018/09/26
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: book-club-library, classics, english, victorian, 1001-books, guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Excellent Women 178565 Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,� the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.]]> 256 Barbara Pym 014310487X Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.92 1952 Excellent Women
author: Barbara Pym
name: Helle
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Far From the Madding Crowd 31463 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439655

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in the fictional county of Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.]]> 433 Thomas Hardy Helle 5
I’ve stubbornly (stupidly) avoided Thomas Hardy’s novels since seeing the film adaptation of Jude the Obscure years ago, after which I wept inconsolably for hours and which I thought about for years afterwards. I will never read that book and felt a kind of anger at Hardy for allowing those children to die so horribly. As I mentioned recently in another review, Hardy even trumps Dostoevsky in his ‘weakness for bleakness�, as The Guardian called it. The newspaper had made a sort of statistical survey of the number of deaths and other tragedies to occur in both author’s novels. Hardy wins hands down, and that’s no mean feat when Dostoevsky is the opponent.

So I ‘went in� expecting only doom and gloom but was absolutely delighted with the story. Yes, there is death and sadness, but there is much more, too. Hardy’s clever humour and gentle irony threw me completely. Take this delightful description of one Maltster Warren:

’The maltster’s lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as mill. He had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line � less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful he would ever reach it at all.� That, to me, is priceless.

The characters were utterly convincing and compelling (I’m wondering, despite the difference in spelling, whether Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games ‘borrowed� her last name from Bathsheba. Wild gumption seems to be a trait they share).

I marvelled at how this pastoral, Victorian story had drama, striking weather and big feelings and yet was interspersed with philosophical musings ( As without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no decorum etc.)

There was too much dull pub/sheep/farmer talk for my taste, and a bit too much melodramatic pathos here and there (at one point, Boldwood’s fury and speech were positively Shakespearean), but the tone and the heart of the novel grabbed me completely (in part, I think, due to an amazing narrator, one Jamie Parker). There comes a certain point in only a few novels where I’m willing to overlook the parts I don’t love because I the love the rest so much. This was that kind of novel to me � the style, the story, the heart of it.

I will most definitely be reading more of Hardy. But I’m apparently not the only one who has tended to avoid him due to the bleakness of most of his stories: I’m already deeply curious to see if the new film will have an impact.


]]> 3.96 1874 Far From the Madding Crowd
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Helle
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1874
rating: 5
read at: 2015/04/18
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: classics, english, victorian, 1001-books, guardian-1000-must-read
review:
This was an unexpected surprise. I expected sadness and bleakness throughout but found a wonderfully written story that simply pushed all my buttons. I came to this classic love story now because of Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s film adaptation of it (starring Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene), which is opening in Danish cinemas this week.

I’ve stubbornly (stupidly) avoided Thomas Hardy’s novels since seeing the film adaptation of Jude the Obscure years ago, after which I wept inconsolably for hours and which I thought about for years afterwards. I will never read that book and felt a kind of anger at Hardy for allowing those children to die so horribly. As I mentioned recently in another review, Hardy even trumps Dostoevsky in his ‘weakness for bleakness�, as The Guardian called it. The newspaper had made a sort of statistical survey of the number of deaths and other tragedies to occur in both author’s novels. Hardy wins hands down, and that’s no mean feat when Dostoevsky is the opponent.

So I ‘went in� expecting only doom and gloom but was absolutely delighted with the story. Yes, there is death and sadness, but there is much more, too. Hardy’s clever humour and gentle irony threw me completely. Take this delightful description of one Maltster Warren:

’The maltster’s lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as mill. He had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line � less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful he would ever reach it at all.� That, to me, is priceless.

The characters were utterly convincing and compelling (I’m wondering, despite the difference in spelling, whether Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games ‘borrowed� her last name from Bathsheba. Wild gumption seems to be a trait they share).

I marvelled at how this pastoral, Victorian story had drama, striking weather and big feelings and yet was interspersed with philosophical musings ( As without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no decorum etc.)

There was too much dull pub/sheep/farmer talk for my taste, and a bit too much melodramatic pathos here and there (at one point, Boldwood’s fury and speech were positively Shakespearean), but the tone and the heart of the novel grabbed me completely (in part, I think, due to an amazing narrator, one Jamie Parker). There comes a certain point in only a few novels where I’m willing to overlook the parts I don’t love because I the love the rest so much. This was that kind of novel to me � the style, the story, the heart of it.

I will most definitely be reading more of Hardy. But I’m apparently not the only one who has tended to avoid him due to the bleakness of most of his stories: I’m already deeply curious to see if the new film will have an impact.



]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the Center of the Earth]]> 32829
The expedition descends into an extinct volcano toward a sunless sea, where they encounter a subterranean world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic marine life � a living past that holds the secrets to the origins of human existence.]]> 240 Jules Verne 0553213970 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.87 1864 Journey to the Center of the Earth
author: Jules Verne
name: Helle
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1864
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Helle
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]> Blindness 2526 No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.

Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet� Independent]]> 326 José Saramago Helle 0 guardian-1000-must-read 4.04 1995 Blindness
author: José Saramago
name: Helle
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves: guardian-1000-must-read
review:

]]>