Arrivederci, Signor Camilleri. The world‘s a stage and your exit turns the world into a duller place.
I‘ve only read his historical fiction and whilst not a literary author, his writing showed a warmth, wit and love of his home that was a pleasure to read. Despite his age, he was a breath fresh of air in a genre obsessed with big events and people, and one can only hope that others will step forward and fill this void.
Today‘s a sad day.

My June #bookhaul: On the upper left, ”The Lives of the Gallant Ladies”, a collection of juicy 17th century gossip about figures from world history written by the abbé de Brantôme. Next to it is an anthology with fiction about WWI from various authors. On the lower left is a collection of old children‘s games, rhymes & songs in the Rhineland. The brown leather volume is a complete edition of Caesar‘s works. Been eyeing it for half a year. :D

*blows dust off* I'm back! 🤗 I hope the last year has been good to you all! I hope I'll be able to post more, I need to, my english has turned rusty.

More German historians are adapting a UK/US style of writing that is supposed to be less scholarly & dry (whil maintaining academic standards) and more accessible to the reader. Good, but Hilmes stepping into that direction seems like a set-back? Other works by him are longer & stuffed with sources but a breeze through to read. Still, a great retelling of the 1936 Olympics and what people experienced during them with special focus on Thomas Wolfe

I'm on a WWII-history binge read right now and randomly picked this up in my local library two weeks ago. It's about Hitlers first day in power and how he "breaks the structures of Democracy and constitutional state, disempowers, persecutes and kills his enemies". I'm so glad everybody learned their lesson after this and made sure nothing like this could ever happen again.

Some sleepy puppies for all of you who are feeling down today. 🙃 I've seen some people offering puppy live-streams on Twitter to cheer others up and wish I could do the same but I lack the know-how. 😩

The text on the hearts say: "Let me go IS", "Don't shoot, please" & "I don't want to die yet". The title says: "New safety-concepts for Christmas-markets". This is a cartoon in a best of of German political cartoons of 2016 and must have been drawn before October 2016. I don't want to be too depressing, but I'll be damned if this isn't one of the eeriest things I've ever seen. ?

#readjanuary #thismonthstbr After nearly half a year on the waiting-list I finally got a copy of "My brilliant friend"! ☺️ Decided to read the German translation since reviews said it's better than the English one? Anyway, I decided to jump into #mounttbr and this will be a good start.

The bleakness & horrors in Holocaust-memoirs can be daunting but anybody with even a tiny bit of interest in this era should try this one. It condenses not only Marcelines memories of her time in Birkenau into 100 pages but also its consequences: Trauma, grief, survivors guilt, the death of her family, the birth of a new will to live & build a better world & worries about the present. It's a lot, but made a surprisingly elegant and light read.

#readJanuary #bookishresolutions Not sure about joining #LitsyAtoZ as long as my e-reader is still broken. I already had a list and I want to still use the books on it. 364 days left to make up my mind. 😉

#topreadsof2016 #seasonsreadings2016 Low on the left is "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson and the portrait of Giacomo Casanova stands for Vol. 2 of his collected works.

#myyearinbooks #2016 #goodreads I have no idea what happened, in a normal year, I tend to finish 100-120 books? I can't imagine ever beating this score. 🤔🙃

#seasonsreadings2016 #bestofdecember The book about Goethe was a fun, philosophical look at stations of his life, I posted about "Mätressen" and my absolute favourite was Will Eisners stories about NY. I can't think of a single work by him I haven't loved so far. Great, emotional stories about "small" people without sentimentality or pathos. ??

#seasonsreadings2016 #2017mostanticipatedreads I'm not really aware of new releases until they're actually available and googling lists brought up nothing that excited me...so have some titles I really, really finally want to get around reading 2017.

#Lastbookyoustacked #seasonsreadings2016 Watership Down has been on my #tbr forever, I actually own a copy but I somehow never got to it and now I feel a bit guilty. 🙈

#seasonsreadings2016 #bookishgifts I got some great books. 😍 The paperback (Anthology of works by Yasunari Kawabata) is from a friend, the best of 2016 cartoons is from my father, and the bundle of books is from my bf including: A French novella, Norwegian fairytales, the correspondence between Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and my first novel by Halldor Laxness. He first wanted me to choose a book for him to gift me but I slightly pulled out a

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Littens. I got a lot of lovely books and I hope you did too! 🎄🎉🎁

Through the dumbest set of circumstances known to mankind, I managed to break my e-reader after 2 1/2 years of good service. 🙈 Containing most of my english-language reads. Oh, 2016...😔😫😡💩

"Mätressen" by Walter Fellmann old, out of print, not available in English - but I still want to mention it here, since it deserves more readers. It presents the lives of 12 royal mistresses (17-20th cent.) that are not the usual french, but ladies from Germany, Sweden, Austria & Romania. What made it great is Fellmann showing empathy for his subjects without romanticising them or padding his text with endless raunchy hearsay - something I keep

"Time waits for nobody. Virtue is not enough. Fortuna is fickle and malevolence cannot be soothed by presents."
(I know optimism, idealism and many other -isms are important for kids/teenagers and a positive outlook on life supposedly helps with resilience...but sometimes I wish I had gotten advice more like this. Or maybe sentences like these only ring true with life-experience? ?)

I'm currently lurking, but not posting on Litsy since I'm having a bad phase in terms of health & mood, also a bit of a book-slump. 😐 Still, I hope all of you are having fun with your reads and the holidays approaching!

This features people from all over the eastern bloc so it fits #setineasterneurope . It's a fascinating read, although it can really get to you- reading about the lady working in advertising talking endlessly about not needing anybody, how only the fit survive and money being the most important thing, immediately after a chapter about a girl whose mother committed suicide due to homelessness makes me want to punch something. #photoadaynov16

My #libraryhaul of this week as a small #bookpyramid including: Books about the history of Christmas, the lives of several European courtesans, the French Revolution a comic on Machiavelli and his thinking and again only one work of fiction "The Terranauts" by T. C. Boyle. #photoadaynov16 #germany #deutsch

#photoadaynov16 #onewordtitles

Only this and "The Virgin Suicides" qualified for #headlesscovers #photoadaynov16

One of my favourite books as a child and Momo belongs to the small group of #child protagonists that stayed with me. #photoadaynov16 .

The books from Reclams bilingual line all have #orangecovers . I used to love buying these, well edited and cheap, but they've switched from the traditional illustrations to a more modern design that is just a white block around the title. Still love the company but never bought anything after the switch, I think they're ugly. 😕 #photoadaynov16 #german #deutsch #reclam

Finally starting to read this after nearly a decade on my #tbr and pushing it back for "a special time" though it's hard to define what "special" exactly means... ? ? #photoadaynov16 #booknerdproblems

I like it when authors keep a bit of mystery, but I hope that Martin will also finish not only book 6 & 7, but also the planned novella about the Dance of the Dragons. I would love to see how the Tagaryens interacted with their dragons before they died out. #photoadaynov16 #herebedragons

I got "Regenbogenkind" ("Rainbowchild") as a kid & this is how I first learned about down-syndrome. It's about a boy who'll soon have a new sibling & how he and his parents are dealing during the pregnancy with that. Parts also follow the babies "soul" & how she waits for the day of her birth. All of this may sound kitschy/esoteric, but it's done well & made the book a good primer for families in the same situation. #photoadaynov16 #disabilities

Some books #publishedinthe1990s . "The Virgin Suicides" & "Clash of Kings" are well known, I guess. The other books are: A beloved book from my childhood, a biography of Friedrich II of Prussia and his brother and a title on brothels and prostitution around the time of the fin de siècle. #photoadaynov16

RIP Ilse Aichinger. Born 1921 in Austria, survived the Holocaust, became one of the most important female authors in post-war German literature and was a member of the group 47. I have the impression she is mostly unknown in the English-speaking world, but I still wanted to post this. #deutsch #german

Cute and moving. My first and favourite Gaiman. I've read the first five Sandman volumes and the comic-version of Neverwhere and they're good but I can't really get into the hype. Though Gaiman himself seems like a nice guy from what I've seen on his tumblr? I also enjoy reading that one. #photoadaynov16 #favouriteneilgaiman

Tomorrow will potentially be horrible and I'm trying to keep anxiety down by taking valerian drops but as the day ends, I find it hard to do anything, even read. #photoadaynov16 #booksandbrew

Good if you want to know more about the plight of workers around the turn of the century but it can be very emotionally draining? I can't believe that at the time people were apparently more shocked by the lack of food-safety than what was actually happening to the people involved. 😞 #politicalfiction #photoadaynov16

A cook-book portraying cooks working/coming from extreme situations & their recipes: A chinese mail-order bride turned YouTube-star, a former Serbian soldier, cooks who worked for Idi Amin or Honecker, working on a dump in Nairobi, for death-row prisoners, political protests or refugee-camps. Celebrated cooks drunk on fame or completely disillusioned & those who only do it to survive. Excellent read. #cookbooklove #Photoadaynov16 #deutsch #german

So when did we all collectively stumble into another dimension that is a Simpsons-episode?. The first thing I saw on TV this morning was a right-wing Russian nationalist celebrating & presenting oil-portraits of Putin, Trump & Marine Le Pen that are so over the top heroic, blond and blue-eyed that they look like what you would have called in 1930s Germany the "aryan ideal". ? Hugs to all Littens in the US - I seriously hope things won't turn bad.

Spies was the only YA-novel we #readinschool and we never really warmed up to it, since our other books were much better (Colour Purple, Kite Runner, Of Mice and Men, King Lear) and the characters were younger than we were then and that made connecting to them more difficult? I kind of felt sorry about that? 😅 It's still a good read with a nice twist at the end, but it probably would have worked better for GCSEs than A-levels #photoadaynov16

#threwitacrosstheroom - I hate it. Many of my acquaintances/relatives had to deal with infertility, it's painful and life-changing (sometimes haunting one until their last breath).That's why I found the way, all characters just hand-wave the effects of the virus away, incredibly offensive. IIRC, the book also tried really hard to make you feel sorry for Sienna and that was also annoying. 🙄 #photoadaynov16

One of my favourite things about Stephen King novels: When they're #setinasmalltown and include the community. I love how he sets up so many different side-characters, their quirks, interests and relationships with each other...and how it derails once the supernatural hits. #photoadaynov16

Kampusch's story (not only her book but also interviews etc.) is always a good reminder to pull myself together if I'm being whiny or drowning in self-pity.I mean, she doesn't only have to deal with the memories of her captivity but also people wanting her to fit their categories of being a victim and nut job conspiracy-theorists, among other things. 🙈Reading this was a very humbling and inspiring experience. #photoadaynov16 #inspiring #memoirs

I haven't read a lot of books about #planestrainsautomobiles but I really want to get this one - I have a weakness for tie-in merch. 😅 #photoadaynov16

My #libraryhaul seems to be perfect for #NonfictionNovember. Topics include Israel, essays on the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany, a history of the Restaurant, a memoir of a man re-visiting the lost (formerly Habsburg) eastern-european homelands of his ancestors and a global history of European expansion between 1500-1515. "Nutshell" being the only, lone fiction title. ? #novembertbr #photoadaynov16 #german #deutsch

"The haunting of Hill House" was my favourite, really disturbing read. There are a lot of similarities between the thoughts and issues Eleanor has and I had as a teenager. It hit very close to home and I needed two days to recover from it. Nevertheless, it's a really good book that re-defined what "horrifying" means to me. #allhallowsread #scaryread #giveascarybook

"Jede Gesellschaft ist geronnene Ungerechtigkeit." ("Every society is coagulated injustice" - This quote doesn't sound good as good in my translation, though. ?.) #deutsch #german

An incredible book that I read nearly in one sitting. Brown explains with great style the plight of the Donner party without sensationalism & a lot of respect for his subjects. He supplements his narrative with excurses into history, frontier-life & other subjects, making actions of people & events involved much clearer. A model-example of how a good introductory book on history should be: Accessible and well sourced. #booktober #bestofoctober

I was so creeped out by the cover as a kid/young teen, that I would avoid looking at it when opening the book. 😅 #booktober #creepycovers #deutsch

"Interestingly, men who have been castrated have been found to have a life expectancy 13.6 years longer than that of intact males." ? ...the unexpected things you learn about modern life in a book about the American Frontier. Thank you, Mr. Brown. ?