This was a book which Babel lent me, and it took me an incredibly long time to read. I’m not sure why, because I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was bad. Perhaps after how good he had told me it was, I just found it somewhat of an anti-climax. The premise of the book, which is that Hitler won the Second World War and is still in power in the 1960s, is an amazing, mind-blowing idea; the amount of thought which has got into recreating this version of the 1960s which never existed is deeply impressive; but somehow, the actual characters and plot failed to grab me and by the time I got to the end I was left with the feeling that I’d just read a rather mediocre thriller. (more…)

Yet again I was bored on a train, and because I seemingly never learn from my mistakes, I decided to embark on another Esperanto ebook. There were plenty of translations of English-language works I already knew well which I could have chosen, but I decided to be brave and opt for something which I’d never heard of. That something turned out to be “Nuntempaj Rakontoj”, a collection of short stories by a Bulgarian author called GP Stamatov. Happily, the collection starts with an explanatory note, informing readers is a famous Bulgarian author who specialises in stories with a satirical twist, and that these tales have been translated from the Bulgarian by Ivan Krestanoff. So, this time there is no room for confusion as to nationality (more…)

I hardly dare to review another Esperanto language book on my website, but this evening I finally got to the end of a novel I have unsuccessfully been trying to read for three months: “La dua invado de marsanoj” by Arkadij and Boris Strugackij. When I was going on holiday to Geneva in April, I asked my boyfriend if he had anything in Esperanto he could pack for me to read on the plane, and this was what he produced from his limited collection. I had high hopes for it at the beginning, because in my younger days I used to be rather a fan of sci-fi, but over the course of five days I managed to struggle through at best forty pages of it before giving it up as unreadable It languished on the desk in my bedroom for several months before this Sunday I felt bored and decided to pick it up once again. I don’t like a book to beat me, and this time I was determined to get to the end of it (more…)

Bored in Stuttgart airport a couple of weeks ago, I decided to have a mooch around one of the duty-free shops, and was pleased to discover it had a small selection of books. My pleasure was actually short lived, as I soon discovered that virtually the entire stand consisted of trashy American novels in translation Just when I was about to give up and find myself a copy of Der Spiegel to read on the flight home instead, I came across a paperback novel by Bernhard Schlink. Having seen it, I had no choice but to buy it (more…)

My boyfriend recently read a book called “Battle Royal” by Kirstie MacLeod, and recommended it to me as something well worth reading. Nice as my boyfriend is, we don’t necessarily share the same taste in books, and so as a rule I might be rather apprehensive of his choices Nevertheless, he reviewed it so positively that it really did sound rather interesting, and I decided to give it a go. I started reading it for half an hour a night when I was in Bolton last week, to help me wind down from writing my article for La Brita Esperantisto. It did indeed have the desired result of sending me to sleep. (more…)

Working my way through the free Esperanto ebooks at my disposal, on the train to Leicester this weekend I started a story called “El la vivoj de Esperantistoj” by someone called V. Stankievic. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I’d forgotten to pack one of the more traditional books that I’m currently reading, and it seemed like a good way to pass an hour. I finished it off last night, more out of obstinance than anything else, and a slight curiosity to see whether it was actually for real, or just very heavy irony. If I wanted to be mean, I could make the point that it appears to have been published in Germany in 1896 and thus expecting heavy irony was a bit unrealistic of me. (On a wild tangent, I once had a German friend who, as the closing line to a bitter argument, exclaimed at me in a very reproachful manner, “I have been many things, but at least I have never been ironic!”) Sure enough, it turned out to be a story utterly devoid of irony. Reading it was kind of like watching a train wreck and thinking, “Please make this actually not be for real..!” (more…)

One of the books which my boyfriend bought for me with my vouchers on Thursday was ‘Engleby’ by Sebastian Faulks. I knew nothing about the novel at all and bought it purely on the strength of the author’s name. When I did A Level English at school, our specialist subject which we had to study for three hours a week over two years was the literature of World War One, and the school library had a permanent waiting list of people who had requested the sole copy of ‘Birdsong’. That novel was too long for us all to read together in class but pretty much all of us read it in our own time, primarily I suspect because the teacher had mentioned that there was sex in it. (more…)

This evening I was a little bored. There was nothing on tv, no one of interest online, and couldn’t muster the energy to embark on the German version of Gunther Grass’s epic Tin Drum, which was what I planned to read next. So, on a random impulse I decided to download Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ as a free Esperanto ebook (more…)

Written several years ago when the suggestion that he might one day be crowned Mayor of London was something which would have made a good joke on Have I Got News For You, ‘Seventy Two Virgins’ is Boris Johnson’s first attempt at writing fiction. My sister and I are both huge Boris fans and so my mother bought us the book when it was still in hardback a few Christmases ago as a present to share. My sister read it fairly promptly, but for reasons I can’t explain I never quite seemed to get round to it. I devoted months of my life to struggling through weighty German classics like Buddenbrooks and der Zauberberg and somehow I forgot about poor old Boris until last weekend when I finished Rob Roy and was suddenly at a bit of a loose end for exciting reading matter. I went eagerly to the study and began scanning the shelves in an attempt to find where my sister might have put it when she finished with it, but our bookshelves at home are rather overloaded and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t locate it at all In the end I had to call her (thanks be to Skype!) and between us we figured out that it was hiding behind a Russian dictionary and a copy of Doctor Zhivago. (more…)

Today I finally finished a novel which I have been spasmodically reading for the best part of three weeks – Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. Having somehow missed Walter Scott out of my childhood literary education, it would never have occurred to me to pick this book up at all had it not been a sort of gift, but I am very glad that I did and will hopefully get around to reading some of his other works in the future. I probably didn’t do it justice at all by reading it in such a disjointed fashion and over such a prolonged period of time, but nevertheless I enjoyed it immensely (more…)