Day 10: Book that changed your life

Once I started to read the first Harry Potter book, my view of the world shifted by a light year. The moment Hagrid entered the little hut on the island, I started to see the world with different eyes. Having believed in a boring, bog standard world without a spark of magic, I was flabbergasted to find out that it actually was a place buzzing with wizardry.  Ever since, I’ve seen the world with different eyes, looking out for wizards on broomsticks and boggarts popping round the corner, watching out not to be hit by a malicious spell, expecting to bump into a house-elf with a bag of groceries any second…
No, just kidding. The truth is, I can’t think of a book which altered my life in a significant way. I haven’t studied the bible nor have I got round to Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” nor have I read any enlightening psychological “Know yourself/Key to yourself/Help yourself”-guides by some world-famous lifestyle guru. But while I don’t think that one book influenced me in particular, I suppose that books in general changed my life.
Books shape the readers’ views; they teach them about other cultures and customs and makes them see new perspective. I suppose they also played a considerable part in sparking for my love of languages in general, but especially helped me learn and improve my language skills, in foreign languages as well as my mother tongue. Through books, I can live lives and make experiences I would have never gotten to live and make in real life. Without books, my life would look different, I guess, so my choice for today is

all books I read so far by various authors

Day 9: Book that makes you sick

*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*spoilers*

I wouldn’t have thought that a book can make you feel like you’re going to throw up any second, but there are books which do. Perfume by Patrick Süskind was one of them, but since it is originally German, I instead chose

http://www.scholastic.co.uk/department/home/blogs/11404

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (part 3 of the Hunger Games series)

which also is quite sickening. Seriously. Especially on the last fifty pages, when everything is extremely and exclusively negative, you feel like you need a bin to puke.
The book itself is set in an alternative universe, where a war is being led between the lower social classes and the ruling social class, which tyrannized the others over decades, amongst others with the so-called “hunger games” – an event where 24 children are put in an arena to kill each other and the whole world is forced to watch this via TV. In the end, the war is won by the poor majority – but for what price: death, devastation and desperation all over the country. The heroine of the book, a young girl of sixteen loses everything – and when I say everything I mean everything. After everything the war did to her, she is depressed and just sits around as if she were dead, not washing, not participating in anything around her, just not living her life. All other characters you grew to love die in the course of the book. It doesn’t make it better that the books takes a relatively positive turn on the last two pages – it will make you sick anyway. And lose your faith in humanity.

Day 8: Book that scares you

With this book, it’s kind of hard to find a balance between not telling you too much and thereby spoiling the book in case you decide to read it and telling enough to make you understand it and want to read it, too, because, it is really recommendable after all. The author and the title might sound familiar to you if you’ve read my Day 6: Favourite Series post, but today, it is specifically about the third book, that is

Checkmate by Malorie Blackman,

which is the saddest and scariest book of the Noughts and Crosses series, I think. I don’t usually read horror books or thrillers with murderers, they’re much too scary with all the blood and psychopaths and murderers. When I read something really scary, I’m not only frightened while reading, but it stays in my head, making me jump at every little noise for the next few days. Maybe because I imagine the things I read so vividly, I don’t know. With Checkmate, though, I didn’t expect it to be scary from the beginning. I knew that book one and two were sometimes violent and included graphic language, but you wouldn’t get more than occasional goose bumps. But in the third sequel, there was so much hate and brutality and hopelessness that I really gave me the creeps. On the one hand, I was scared for the characters and about the terrifying things that happened to them. On the other hand, it also frightened me that the book sometimes didn’t seem so far from reality as you’d like it. And if a book is realistic, it usually makes it even more worrying.
A brief description of the plot (without giving away too much, I hope): For the most part, Checkmate is told from Callie Rose perspective. The sixteen-year-old girl has a complicated relationship with her mother, thinks her dead father was a murderer and rapist and as if this is not enough enough, she has also got boy trouble. The only one who she feels she can talk to is her uncle, a wanted criminal who tries to convince her to join a terrorist organisation and additionally infiltrates her with lies about and hate against those she actually loves. The author creates a teenage character who doesn’t know the first thing about being loved and accepted the way she is. Her only way out of it is resorting to violence.
As you might guess, the book is not one where you scream out loud because you’re so shocked, but it is causes a fear that makes your chest grow cold. It makes you wish very very hard that what happens in the book will never ever happen to your own children and family. Not even to your worst enemy, I’d say.

The one that sounds correct is correct

I found this in the “Merriam- Webster’s dictionary of English usage” (page 967) and immediately had to post it. I wouldn’t have imagined that I would ever find such a sentence in a dictionary….Don’t you just love the sound of the highlighted part? I do, but sometimes I wish there were more dictionary entries like this one!

Day 7: Book which isn???t published yet but you???re dying to read it

City of Heavenly Fire by Cassandra Clare

…no book cover available yet…

This is the conclusion of a 6-part series called the Mortal Instruments. By reading the first five books, I got really attached to the characters and now absolutely want to know how life turns out for them. It’s weird that one would sympathise with and worry so much about the destiny of fictional characters’, but I just do. The ending of book 5 was an absolute cliff hanger, with one of the character’s life at stake, but the sequel, that is “City of Heavenly Fire”, will only be published on March 19, 2014. Yes, you’ve read correctly. 2014. If it were possible to spell numbers in capital letters, this would definitely be the case here. 1 year, 22 months or 660 days until I know the final ending. Although the suspense is really annoying, I also enjoy it in some kind of way, imagining in what different ways the author might end the book. I still wish it were possible to do something to support the author in writing faster or to make the countdowns go down in twice as fast. I’m not saying that I want Cassandra Clare to write in a hurry and then mess up this great series, but for her to writing a bit faster, for the proof readers to correct a bit quicker, the cover designers to draw a bit faster and for the editors to publish a bit sooner couldn’t be such a big problem, can it? No, I’ll stop moaning now and turn to one of the other great books on my shelf which I haven’t read so far. And think about March 19, 2014 a bit more. I can’t wait 🙂

Day 6: Favourite Series

This was a really hard nut to crack, but finally, “Day 6: Favourite Series” has arrived. (Yeah, remember? The book challenges? Where the last post was about one month ago? It’s been a long break, but now I’m back again. For a few days at least, I guess…) It was a tough call, but I eventually decided for the

“Noughts and Crosses” series by Malorie Blackman

First of all, because the series is very unusual in itself, just extremely different to other series I have read. Above all, the topic is exceptional and has never been dealt with before in such a way, but also the style of writing and the books’ structure are atypical. Secondly, the book is written in such a gripping way that it is impossible to put it down. And thirdly, I chose it because it is not so very well known, but I think that it has such an exceptional and important content that more people should read it. Even though it is young adult literature, it is perfectly suitable for grown-ups, too, tough not for reader below 14 because it contains very violent scenes.

If you do read the book, I don’t want to spoil it for you by giving away the gist, but I can tell you as much as that it deals with racial prejudice in a very special way. In a dystopian Britain, there are the Crosses, a superior race and there are the noughts, inferior to them and discriminated against. The books follow the relationship forms between a Cross girl and a nought boy, rebelling against the line drawn between them by convention, who are confronted with every possible socially inflicted difficulty. Even though the book is set in an alternative universe, references to the real world are made quite often, for instance there is a civil rights activist called Alex Luther. So far, there are 4 book plus two short stories, all set in the same alternative universe, but told by different narrators.

If you want a lovely, superficial, happy ending book, don’t read it. But if you want a gripping, eye-opening, shocking and thought-provoking book, then do.

25 Words You Wish They Existed in English

I found this today (in fact, ORF presenter Armin Wolf posted the link on facebook) and I immediately had to share it with you because these words are simply genius. All credits go to Alex Wain, the article’s author. Enjoy 🙂

Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language, in fact it’s the 3rd most commonly spoken language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish). Interestingly enough it’s the number 1 second language used worldwide – which is why the total number of people who speak English, outnumber those of any other.

But whilst it’s the most widely spoken language, there’s still a few areas it falls down on (strange and bizarre punctuation rules aside). We look at 25 words that simply don’t exist in the English language (and yet after reading this list, you’ll wish they did!)

1 Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

2 Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

3 Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need of a fist

4 Bakku-shan (Japanese): A beautiful girl… as long as she’s being viewed from behind

5 Desenrascanco (Portuguese): “to disentangle” yourself out of a bad situation (To MacGyver it)

6 Duende (Spanish): a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.

7 Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love

8 Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute

9 Guanxi (Mandarin): in traditional Chinese society, you would build up good guanxi by giving gifts to people, taking them to dinner, or doing them a favor, but you can also use up your gianxi by asking for a favor to be repaid

10 Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time

11 L’esprit de l’escalier (French): usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

12 Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery

13 Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire

14 Manja (Malay): “to pamper”, it describes gooey, childlike and coquettish behavior by women designed to elicit sympathy or pampering by men. “His girlfriend is a damn manja. Hearing her speak can cause diabetes.”

15 Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. It’s when you put something of yourself into what you’re doing

16 Nunchi (Korean): the subtle art of listening and gauging another’s mood. In Western culture, nunchi could be described as the concept of emotional intelligence. Knowing what to say or do, or what not to say or do, in a given situation. A socially clumsy person can be described as ‘nunchi eoptta’, meaning “absent of nunchi”

17 Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation

18 Pochemuchka (Russian): a person who asks a lot of questions

19 Schadenfreude (German): the pleasure derived from someone else’s pain

20 Sgriob (Gaelic): The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky

21 Taarradhin (Arabic): implies a happy solution for everyone, or “I win. You win.” It’s a way of reconciling without anyone losing face. Arabic has no word for “compromise,” in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement

22 Tatemae and Honne (Japanese): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively

23 Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbor’s house until there is nothing left

24 Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods

25 Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language

Source: http://sobadsogood.com/2012/04/29/25-words-that-simply-dont-exist-in-english/

Are there any other words you can think of? Or do you have a special favourite? Please share 🙂

The Big Read – How Many Books Have You Read?

It’s been quite a long time since my last book challenge book, but there was so much going on I just didn’t get to sit down and blog. And today, I still didn’t have time to choose a book for Day 6: Book series. But I will soon, I promise! And if you’re very impatient, you can always go back to my blog post on book series and guess which of the series mentioned there I will choose!

For today, though, I thought of something else, which doesn’t take as much time and thinking but still is good fun! I found a list by the BBC of 100 books, including 2003’ best-loved novels. In a survey called “The Big Read” which was carried out in the UK they tried to find the nation’s best-loved novel and thereby made this top 100 list. To find out whether your book taste is similar to the British public reading taste, check the list how many of the books you have read and then let us know which ones they are!

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Book list from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

Day 5: Book you wish you could live in

I have no proof, but my guess is that at least fifty percent of all readers would answer this question with a book involving magic. Or at least something futuristic or supernatural that doesn’t exist in our world. I think that lots of people read to get a change from their everyday life in a world which appears so normal and maybe even a bit boring. It’s a way to escape reality to a fantastic place for a few hours. Now, I am no exception to this. I enjoy reading science-fiction, futuristic and fantasy novels a lot and sometimes wish I could slip into the pages of the book and be a part of these fantastic universes. The world I wish that I could live in most is

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by Joanne K. Rowling

Actually, I don’t need to live in one of the books in particular, but simply in the universe Joanne K. Rowling created. I chose the seventh book because it ends so well, so if it were up to me, I would live in the book from the point onwards when Voldemort is defeated, Hogwarts reopened and thins get back to “normal” (page 600 in my edition).

I wonder how J.K. Rowling was ever able to come up with such a mesmerising world. She absolutely describes bewitching places like Hogwarts, magical creatures and the wizarding world in general so vividly that she succeeds in making the reader want to see this world not only in their heads, but with their own eyes. However, not only to seeing this world, but really living appears attractive, too. Imagine you could drink butterbeer, eat pumpkin pasties or use Fred’s and George’s extendable ears.  Imagine riding in a flying car or using floo powder to travel to a place miles away in a split second or, most importantly, simply pull a wand to clean up your room or change your chair into a horse. Anyway, next time I am at King’s Cross, I’ll make sure to look out for platform 9¾, maybe it exists after all!

Day 4: Book that makes you cry

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

“My Sister’s Keeper” is one of the few books where I saw the movie before reading the book. In fact, I watched the movie one evening and liked it so much that I went to the book store the next morning and bought the novel. However, the book turned out to be a big surprise/shock. Having seen the movie, I expected the book to be similar to the film, at least plot-wise. There are not many films where the ending is totally different from the book, but in this case, it was. I think this is one of the reasons why the ending shocked me so much: I simply didn’t expect the ending to be this way, since it was so different in the movie. Obviously, I can’t tell you what the ending is because this would be spoiling the book, but I can tell you that it is extremely shocking and terribly sad, so be prepared!

What I can do, though, is give you a short plot summary. My Sister’s Keeper is a family story. It’s about a family where the oldest daughter was diagnosed leukemia as a toddler and this shakes up and tears apart the family. The story is told from different points of view (the parents, the three children, family friends, a lawyer…), but mainly from Anna’s perspective, the youngest daughter who is a “designer baby”, conceived for the main purpose of being a perfectly matching organ donor for Kate. At the end especially, I went through boxes of tissues. After finishing the book, I stayed curled up on the couch weeping for at least five minutes or so.

It’s gripping, heartbreaking, realistic and terribly sad all at the same time – and well worth a read!