beautiful books

part two in my birthday wish blog series. i love reading, but mostly i go for the cheapest available possibility. paperback, second hand, library. however, i really like books with beautiful covers, so why not make a wish for some more precious editions?





penguin launched a wonderful edition of clothbound classics. coralie bickford-smith designed the most beautiful covers i have ever seen, and i wouldn't mind having all the jane austen novels, or the dickens novels, or the whole series, standing in my bookshelves.



yes, this poster is a whole book to put on your wall and read it there. it also is a piece of art to admire every day, and i think it would fit perfectly over our sofa in the living room.

ulovlig norsk

two days ago, my friend maria amelie published her first book. and it's not just any book, but her autobiography. the story of her life. the story of how she and her parents ended up in norway as refugees, got refused and then went underground. the story of how she, against all odds, took a bachelor's and a master's degree at trondheim university. how she lived a full student life and at the same time didn't even exist on paper.

it is not a book about the general situation of refugees, or about norwegian politics, or about a system that obviously does not care about individuals. however, it is about the consequences of these things for her as an individual. it is a personal story, and it was written because she didn't want to lie anymore. maria also wrote it with the wish to give the reader a new perspective on their own lives.

























these last days, from when i first heard about her background until reading through the book, i have been amazed. i feel deeply honoured that i may call this extraordinary person my friend. she is more norwegian than some norwegians i know. she is always full of energy and so positive, looking for new challenges and making her friends happy. she is one of the most generous people i know, and has - even before i knew the truth about her - been a great source of inspiration for me and how i want to live my life.

i wish her all the best for the future. i wouldn't know anybody else who deserves good fortune and luck and a fantastic life more than she and her parents.

today's words of wisdom

"We se(ns)e what we need to se(ns)e in a given context. We are not all confused, even if we are wrong."

"Our sensate bodies [...] do not operate in the transcendent realm of truth, but in the immanent kingdom of the real."

Peter Corrigan in "The Dressed Society"

in other words: i do not need to question every single word i wrote in my thesis, but must trust that my senses did not betray me.

where books come to life

enchanting. amazing. beautiful.

emma

guess how excited i got when i discovered that there is a brand new version of jane austen's emma out there! or well, at least the first two parts of a miniseries of four parts, by the bbc.



the cast is something of a who is who of the best of british costume drama, both mr. knightley and mr. elton have played edmond in mansfield park (though in different adaptations) and finally michael gambon is playing a part in an austen adaptation (i have been waiting for this to happen..). the adaptations feels very fresh and modern, and still seems to capture parts of the book which earlier adaptations have failed to capture..



anyways. the first two parts have been aired, the third is supposed to air tomorrow. but. only the first part is available on youtube.. my question now to my british readers (though i don't know if there are many of you) - does any of you have the possibility to digitally record the miniseries for me? it is even available for streaming on the bbc-website, but they have disabled it for people outside the uk, and i would need it for my master's thesis. i know i could probably write to the bbc and ask if they'd be so kind and so on, but that's quite a hassle, so i thought i'd try it this way first...

millennium

i took a little break from the blog. went to oslo. did something i haven't done for years: read three books in a row. in one week.

stieg larsson's millenium trilogy had been lying around for a few months and i decided i wanted to read them now. when i was a teenager i had a period when i read a lot of classic crime novels. agatha christie. g.k. chesterton. arthur conan doyle. i also had a period when i read a lot of political thrillers. grisham and company, you know. then i thought i'd try out swedish crime, wallander, and that was it. i just stopped. didn't like it. wallander wasn't my thing. instead i started reading romances.

so, i started reading the first book, män som hatar kvinnor, and got hooked. the man was a genius. he starts his stories at different points and with different protagonists and different plotlines. then slowly but steadily he gives you information. a bit here, a bit there, pushing the plotlines towards each other. he gives you just enough info at a time to stay interested. and he always leaves you begging for more. i just didn't want the book to end.

it did end but there were two more novels. plus the movie.



(i also checked the german trailer. it's bad. watch the original if you can.)

there is lisbeth salander. stieg larsson once said that she is some kind of modern pippi longstocking, and i'd say he's probably right. she is fascinating. misunderstood. independent. strong. there is mikael blomkvist. a modern day detective. journalist. easy going. likeable. there is harriet, the mystery. and there are men who hate women. they all are realistic, even though a little overdrawn. and then, it's a complex story. it really is. this is not a small universe of its own. everything takes place within society. that means, a lot of people, difficult situations. complex. interesting. exciting. critical. perfect.

the first part of the trilogy is a story with a beginning and an end. the second one kind of ends in the middle of everything, and the third part finishes the second. so one could actually say that it's only a duo, but the second book got so long he decided to cut it in half. smart. also, the first one is more of a detective novel, while the second and third are more of a thriller, but both genres are interwoven in a way. fascinating.

it's sad the author had to die so early. apparently he had planned a series of 10 books. only three got finished. i recommend them. i also recommend the film. i've seen the first one and liked it a lot. a great piece of swedish literature and cinema.

carte noire literature

do you like literature? and do you like other people reading it aloud to you?

yesterday i stumbled over a british coffee brand's homepage featuring a brilliant marketing idea. they offer videoclips in the length of your usual coffeebreak with three amazing british actors reading the best love-scenes of classical history. you can chose between alltogether 27 different pieces, and there's more to come.

























how about dan stevens (he played hildegard knef's husband in "hilde" and edward ferrars in the newest "sense and sensibility") read you a moving bit of middlemarch?

























greg wise offers, amongst others, a reading of THE letter in persuasion: "i can listen in silence no more. i must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. you pierce my soul. i am half agony, half hope..."
















or how about dominic west reading mr.darcy's proposal and elizabeth bennet's rejection?

you can find all of the reading's on carte noire's homepage - enjoy!

in my book

i got tagged by a new acquaintance of mine, neniel.
the task is to take a book lying around, open page 123, find sentence nr 5 and post the three following sentences:

To work in his garden was one of his most respectable pleasures; and Elizabeth admired the command of countenance with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and owned she encouraged it as much as possible. Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind. H could number the fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees were in the most distant clump.

of course this is from jane austen's pride and prejudice, which is lying around simply because i am studying it for my thesis..
oh, and i tag lovely dotti in munich where i hope there is as much snow as here in oslo...

the secret lives of dresses

have you ever wondered about what all your dresses and clothes think about you? or how they experienced the latest party you went to? or how they felt about your latest breakup? are you interested? read a wonderful series of shortstories about the secret lives of dresses on erin's blog "a dress a day"!! you'll have to scroll down a bit to find the stories on the right side of the blog.

here is a link to my favourite one, i borrowed the picture from there as well.

Leo and Anna (Tolstoj and Karenina)

in moscow, i went to buy some russian literature and ended up with tolstoj's "anna karenina" and nabokov's "lolita", which i think is only partly russian and partly french/english/american, as the writer did not write it in russia. on my "want-to read-russian-literature"-list i still got some dostojevskij and also "the master and margarita" by mikhail bulgakov, which i have already read a part of.

anyway, i started to read anna karenina and have already read more than halv of it. the book is easy to read, even though in the beginning it is difficult to remember the who is who. and it is thick. it is exciting, not too fast and not too slow, it features different points of view and it is about love. and family. and divorce. and life. and the upper gentry of 19th century russia. thus featuring kind of a russian parallel to jane austen or w.m. thackeray's "vanity fair", at least when it comes to descriptions of society. oh, i need to find out about film-versions.

this grey sunday-afternoon i think i might dedicate to some more reading.

the big read 100 books list

there is this list of literature circling through the different blogs, and even though i usually do not copy and past and type in my own answers to these kinds of lists, this one i think is nice and interesting. it is a list of 100 books, chosen by "the big read" (whoever that is) by no apparant reason other than them being something of classics and widely read, and you are supposed to mark the books which you have read, which who want to read, which you like and which you didn't like. the scary thing is - i don't remember where i found the list. anyway, here is the result:

Here's how it works:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And now..... THE BIG READ TOP 100

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series JK Rowling (ok, last one missing)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (ok, the first part)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (let's say: half of it)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (halfway through)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh .
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen .
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan .
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry .
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (this must be the only stuff by her that i never ever read)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

well. at least now everybody knows i'm a huge jane austen fan. but that's probably no big news.

Who is your personal Jane Austen?

i just did this hilarious test about who my own private Austen was:

Who's Your Jane Austen?

the problem was that i already had read "the jane austen book club". and i'm like grigg. in case you read it too.
i recommend it anyway. warmly. more jane austen for all of us!!

reading europe - europa erlesen

when a. and i travelled - amongst other places - to budapest last summer, i had the chance to borrow a somewhat different "guide" to the town. it was small, perfect travel-size so to say, and it was called "europa erlesen - budapest" (reading europe - budapest). the basic idea behind it was to gather pieces of literature, both poetry and prose, that had something to do with the town, that discribed the town and its inhabitants in one way or another, and thus give a very differentiated picture of the place you visit. there were both german and hungarian authors, and some from other countries as well. phantastic!

i never really gave a thought to that this actually must be part of a series of books, until i, when looking through the further- information-pages in my new travelguide for moscow, discovered that there is a "europa erlesen - moskau" guide as well. and when checking the publisher wieser-verlag's homepage, i saw that there were surely around 100 other cities and regions to be explored through literature, especially from eastern europe, but also lappland, iceland, new york and oslo (which is not available anymore, but i found it on ebay - so now it's mine). so, if you can read german and go on a trip, check if there is one of those wonderful literary guides available! they are not too expensive, and they make the journey so much more interesting..

a harvest of tares

on very rare occasions, i buy the one or other of those women's magazines. it may happen once or twice a year. on even rarer occasions, i find something worthwhile to read in them as well, which was the case with the last one that i bought in march.
i read a book review about this small piece of norwegian-rooted literature, hjalmar hjort boyesen's "a harvest of tares" ("selbstbestimmung"). a small german publisher, Lilienfeld, had rediscovered it somewhere, and decided to do a reprint, which was released a bit more than a month ago.

anyway, i had read the review, and it stuck on me like glue. i searched almost all of lüneburg's bookstores (i still prefer buying books in person, it is so much nicer), but none of them had it in store, and i was not quite sure if it really really would be worth spending 19 euro. then, i had the chance to read some pages on a bookstore online, and decided to purchase. today, it arrived. and, what should i say, i only read the first chapter so far, but i love it already.

in the center of everything stands hulda, the eldest daughter of a norwegian reverend in a fjord-parish at the end of the 19th century. she is young, beautiful and headstrong, and she is supposed to marry the new young and extremely inexperienced curate. but then, also, there is this artist, who is everything that the curate is not, whom she falls in love with, and whom she eventually will follow to a new life in the united states.

i don't know how to describe exactly how the book is written, or what makes it so special, but it is extremely appealing, it feels interesting and what i have read touches me deeply. i can relate to this girl in a way that i haven't even related to some of jane austen's characters, whom i love dearly. maybe it's because i know the beauty of the fjords, or maybe it is because i also am an eldest doughter (even though in totally different circumstances).

as i said, i haven't read so very much yet, but i can't wait to continue. so, with all my heart, i already strongly recommend it.

airportnews

i'm sitting at the torp-airport close to oslo right now, with approximately 1,5h to kill time. sure, i got some books with me, and i got some stuff to write down as well, but as this lovely computer station was absolutely abandoned i thought i updated this blog a bit.

this morning, i heard about this thing called "bookcrossing", you take one of your books that you would like otherpeople to read, register it, put a short note about the bookcrossing-thing inside, and hide it somewhere in town. then, you put the place where you hid the book online, and somebody else can go there and take the book. pretty smart, it's something like the worlds largest bookclub..

anyway. i'll check out the tax-free now (don't have any money left, so there is at least no risk of me buying chocolate..).

Out Stealing Horses

i finally took the time to read a book that i got as a christmas present, norwegian author per petterson's "ut og stjæle hester" (pferde stehlen) and i read it through in one day.

an old man has recently bought an old house close to a lake, more or less in the middle of nowhere (apart from the small community the house belongs to) where he wants to spend the last years of his life in quiet and peace. the thing is, things turn out differently. the forest, the nearby lake, and a somewhat familiar neighbour set his memories going, and one part of his past which he had thought he had forgotten, breaks up and into his life again.

dreams recall the summer when he was 15, just after the end of the war, which he spent with his father close to the border of sweden, as well in the middle of nowhere (or at least, the end of norway), and this is the summer that changed his life, made him grow up and deeply disturbed him. or maybe not? the novel feels disturbing, with smaller and larger desasters breaking into life every now and then. and maybe it's not so much the things that happen or the people, but rather the surrounding nature, dry and hot in the summer, cold and harsh in the beginning winter. and the trees. always the trees.

it's a novel about time. family. sons. guilt. physical pain and how to deal with it. it is a genuinely male world that is described here. the beginning of a lone wolf's world, though he had had company most of his life. and it is about norway. and a little bit about sweden, värmland in particular. my second homeland. kind of.

Solche Geschenke

after a long day of studying and searching for a new room, i usually read a little bit in some book or novel, to relax before sleeping. in december, i met this nice young german writer, franziska gerstenberg, at a reading. she was then just about to end a scholarship she had in lüneburg. we had a really interesting conversation and even went to the cinema together, with the result that i bought her first book, "Wie viel Vögel", and read it within a week or two. for christmas, i got her other book "Solche Geschenke", out of which i am reading some pages every evening now.

those books are short stories, erzählungen (in german). franziska writes about normal people and their lives. sometimes we follow them for a few hours through their lives, sometimes a few days or months, never more. it's never dramatic in a sense of big things happening, but the small things that happen sometimes have a huge impact. for example, there is this girl who doesn't really have anything to do, she just wants to get out of her apartment, take the tram to the station, buy a magazine and maybe a t-shirt and get back home. instead, she finds herself helping an elderly and confused lady with her hamsters that went lose in the tram. or there is this middle-aged man who has been travelling around for two years in his camping bus, all on his own. just one day, he has a teenage girl next to him, asking "we are going to spain, aren't we?", and so they go, even though he never really wanted to take her along, as she obviously is running away from home. and suddenly, there is something like friendship.

i like those stories. they are warm and sometimes a bit funny, but never ever is anyone made ridiculous. never. which is what i like even more. and they are easy to read. calming, in a sense.
and they make me want to translate them to swedish. i really want to try.

Ach, Glück - Monica Maron

tonight i went to a reading with the german author monica maron, who read out of her newest novel "Ach, Glück". it was part of a reading-series called LiteraturNord, the third part to be exact, and of all three readings up to now it was the most solid one, but also the most proper and, i have to admit, the most boring.

the book itself was easy and nice to read (if you don't know what to give your mom for a christmas-present and she likes to read - take this one!) , had some depths in it and just the right amount of comic moments, and it gave me something to think about. questions i consider important popped up in my mind while i read, about what it is that i want to do with my life, how i want to spend the time i have here and if i'm really living my own life - or somebody elses? what is it that makes my life worth living, and what to need to do to spice it up more? where am i stuck in old, quaving traditions and conventions and how did i end up there?

unfortunately, the author wasn't at all interested in answering questions afterwards, but didn't just say so. she showed that she was bored by the questions, but still tried to answer them, as part of the necessary process of the LiteraturNord, which is not only a series of readings but also a tournament where a jury and the audience give a price to the "best" of six authors. the atmosphere changed all the time between really stiff and kind of humorous (mostly when the author once again blocked a question by "well, i really can't answer this, it's just part of the writing process" or "of course she returns to the dog, i wrote that"), which felt kind of funny. i guess i mostly felt sorry for herr kramer who did his best trying to moderate the non-existing discussion..

librarything

i just stumbled over a site on the net which i have to say i really like. i love making lists, and always have wanted to catalogue my books (and dvds and cds).

the site i found is called librarything, and you can get an account (for free) and, very easily, add books to your virtual catalogue. it's perfect! or, at least, almost. if your book is not to be found in any of the 99 online sources you can chose to search, you're just unlucky. or at least, i didn't find out any compensation yet. but probably i just didn't find it yet. and until then - i still got a whole bookshelf to add...

oh, and one other nice thing is that you can write reviews about books, and connect other users you know (or maybe don't..) and i don't know what other functions there are, but there is a whole world of books to explore.
for me, it's like my imdb-account (a catalogue of basically all the movies i ever saw up to now) or my account on that swedish site where you could put all your cds in a virtual catalogue. i have to admit, i didn't use that site very long or often, but imdb is something like a bible of movies, at least in combination with the swedish site filmtipset.
i love it. maybe i should have studied to become a librarian after all??