In Case of Loss is a collection of essays by Lutz Seiler, a German writer best known as a poet. It contains the kind of writing that grabs me completely from the off and makes me wonder how some writers can do that while others take a while to warm up to, or show the mechanics of the writing process too clearly. Seiler, it feels to me, just writes. He won’t, of course. He will hone and craft and weigh each word, but the reader never knows it.
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Johanna Hedva’s Your Love is Not Good is one of my Year of Reading Independently books from this year’s attempt on Mount To Read. It was part of my And Other Stories subscription in 2023. I picked it up because February is LGBT+ History Month in the UK and I hadn’t read any LGBTQ+ literature since last August. I went into it knowing only what is on the publisher’s website and what is written in the blurbs. On the basis of the arty gushing, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did.
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I picked up Yoko Tawada’s novel on a whim. I liked the cover. The blurb on the fly intrigued me. The first two paragraphs captivated me. Scattered All Over the Earth explores the nature and meaning of language, the origins of identity, and the myriad ways in which the world can and does change.
The story takes place in a future where the climate crisis has reached the point where entire land masses disappear and the number of people seeking refuge on the remaining continents is increasing. It follows the fortunes of a disparate bunch of people who travel around Europe seeking some kind of meaning to their lives.
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The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald is a novel disguised as a travel book, recording a walk along the Suffolk coast and inland to Norfolk but also documenting local culture, the interplay between people and landscape, and how transient life is. I read Sebald’s Vertigo a few years ago and loved it, and have wanted to read more by Sebald since.
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October has begun with a Saturday, which means yesterday was Six Degrees of Separation in the literary blogosphere. The Six Degrees meme is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite And Best and you can find the rules here.
This month, the starting book is Notes On A Scandal. I haven’t read it, but I’ve seen the film.
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Back at the start of the year, Mayri at Bookforager set up a Book Bingo challenge complete with bingo card. I decided that I would give it a go.
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Summer is on its way out, because here comes August, and I’m a day late for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
August is holiday month for many, so no surprise that Kate’s book choice to start this month’s chain conjures holidays with its title.
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Read 23/11/2020-06/12/2020
Rating 5 stars
Ghosts on the Shore is a travel book partly inspired by family history. Paul Scraton is a British writer who has lived in Berlin since the early 2000s. His wife grew up in the GDR and spent her early years on the Baltic Coast. Scraton became fascinated by this part of Germany, in part thanks to his wife Katrin’s family photographs and her childhood memories, but also because of the Baltic Coast’s place in the wider history and mythology of Germany. And so he decided to take a trip. Continue reading
Read 15/11/2020-23/11/2020
Rating 5 stars
Stasiland has the subtitle Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. In it, Anna Funder shares the experiences of a number of East Germans to build a picture of life under an oppressive regime. Her interviewees range from people who tried to escape, people separated arbitrarily from family overnight, and people who worked for the Stasi. There are amazing people between these pages who survived unimaginable horrors, and there are also the people who supported the use of those horrors. I found it a very moving book. Continue reading
Read 28/10/2020-09/11/2020
Rating 4 stars
Summer is the final book in Ali Smith’s ambitious Seasonal Quartet. It’s about change; the necessity of it so that things can be made new; the opportunity it offers for us to redefine ourselves in response to it; the choices we make and the consequences they hold. It’s also a drawing together of threads that travel through the other books, with returning characters and crossing themes. Continue reading
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 