Some quick reviews of books I recently read. Consider this a book club where only I get to speak. After the first issue of Reading Matter(s), I have decided to write my reviews in the language I read the book in – my reviews are heavily based on language and style and words or sentences…
Category: Reviews & Rezensionen
Mostly books, sometimes movies or series, seldom opera and concert.
Reading Matter(s)
Some quick reviews of books I recently read. Consider this a book club where only I get to speak. Ali Hazelwood: The Love Hypothesis. “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man!” Okay, so I read this because we have this thing at work where we read books that are related to our…
Folie à deux
From Wikipedia: Folie à deux (French for ‘madness of two’), also called shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are “transmitted” from one individual to another. Folie à deux is also the subtitle of one of the most anticipated movies in 2024: The Joker…
Super, and naturally abnosome.
I have a stupid cold and so I am in the bath tub with poison ivy green menthol and eucalyptus essence or chained to the bed (or rather couch, since I prefer to sit out my illnesses and diseases there) and furthermore so, I am incredibly bored. I tried being productive and read some of…
The rottenest heart in all creation
Mikhail Bulgakov, THE HEART OF A DOG, Harvill Press, 1999 I stumbled upon this beautiful edition outside an antique book store right across the street from the theatre and simply had to buy it. Look at the cover and the author-protagonist-correlation! To all the Nepper, Schlepper and Bauernfänger out there: I can easily be fooled…
Making cents
A movie night with Leo and the Joker or: how a pun got lost in translation and has been bothering me ever since. It’s the hot topic of late 2019, the second fashionable clown after Pennywise and despite the title serious business no laughing matter: Todd Philipp’s [btw, if you read Todd, don’t you automatically…
My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality!
Could be me, to be honest, but comes from non other than one of the greatest German composers: J O H A N N E S B R A H M S 1833-1897 Johannes Brahms. The all-time bachelor with a beard and belly so mighty even Santa Clause envies it. More than 200 songs, concert…
“The hog-squeal of the universe”: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Last semester at FernUni Hagen was all about Großstadtliteratur (urban literature? Metropolitan literature? Eh, books about big city life. You get it.) and provided me with a huge collection of extracts and excerpts from the finest authors from the turn of the 19th/20th century. I’ve read some Rilke and some Raabe, the whole fivehundredsomething pages…
Genetics, Gender, and the Greeks. On Jeffrey Eugenide’s Middlesex.
Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. Middlesex is Jeffrey Eugenide’s second novel. After the much promising The Virgin Suicides, it was not surprising that his…
Facing your fears: The Snail-Watcher
Confession: I suffer from slugophobia. Not sure that word exists (yet), but I use it anyway to describe my very unnatural abhorrence of those slimy little bastards. Shell or no shell, slug or snail – doesn’t matter. I see one, I freeze, I panic. Molluscophobia is the proper name for it. I was scared of…