Last night I finally finished reading ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’ by Hermann Hesse. This enormous 600 page book, which English readers may know in translation as either ‘The Glass Bead Game’ or ‘Magister Ludi’, has taken me a little over two months to get to finish. That said, I have chiefly been reading it only at weekends, and I have deliberately been reading slowly in order to get as much as possible out of the German. (more…)

I have read two incredibly good books within the last week or so. I read them simultaneously, but the first one I got to the end of was ‘The Odessa File’ by Frederick Forsyth. My boyfriend lent it to me, having himself read it from cover to cover in a very short period of time, and so I was intrigued to see what it was like given that he was singing its praises despite not normally being fiction’s biggest fan. (more…)

 Last night I watched the DVD of a film called ‘Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot” (He who dies earlier is dead longer).  My sister had brought it back for me from Tübingen, knowing that I like to watch German films but find it difficult to get hold of any.  This was actually one I had heard of and wanted to see; released in 2007, it has won numerous German film prizes, and I had seen it reviewed on the German news sender Deutsche Welle. (more…)

 Today I reached an important milestone in my life.  I finally got to the last page of Thomas Mann’s ‘Der Zauberberg’.  I purchased this book at least eighteen months ago, and have been reading it on and off for what I genuinely believe to be the best part of the last nine months.  It is without doubt, at just over a thousand pages in my edition, the longest book I have ever tackled in my life.  Reading it has truly been an ordeal and there were times over the summer, when I was too caught up with other things to get through more than a handful of pages a week, when I despaired of ever finishing it.  I have, I hasten to add, read a multitude of other books simultaneously, otherwise I might have gone stir crazy.  There were some days when the temptation to just admit defeat and fling the accursed volume, if not into a burning fire then, at least, into my paper recycling box was overwhelming.  However, I am proud to announce that I succeeded in overcoming such weak and sinful urges and the Lord gave me the strength to see the novel through right to the bitter end. (more…)

Since I was accompanied by my parents, this second weekend in Tuebingen was always going to be rather more sedate and rather less fun. We were all travelling out there together to celebrate my sister’s 21st birthday, and this time my mother had booked the flights, which were via Stuttgart and thus far less stressful. Stuttgart seems to be a small and quiet little airport, at least before 10am on a Friday morning. Quite why my mother had booked the flights for so early in the morning was something of a mystery. The weather in Britain had been so stormy during the preceding couple of days that a strong tail wind allowed our flight to arrive thirty minutes ahead of schedule and so it was that we found ourselves disembarking from the train in Tuebingen shortly after 11am. (more…)

 Apart from my website obviously, my best birthday present this year was a novel by the Swiss author Martin Suter. An old lady in a Davos bookshop recommended his books to my sister and I about four years ago, and ever since we’ve been avid fans. I enjoy reading Swiss literature in general; it’s subtly different to German literature, and Martin Suter writes in a conversational way which is easy to follow and doesn’t make you wish you were sitting next to a dictionary. (more…)

Getting a flight at 7am on a Saturday morning for a quick weekend away in Germany always seems like such a good idea, until the alarm goes off at four. Having not had more than five hours sleep all week, it was somewhat of a struggle to drag myself out of a nice warm bed into the freezing cold and darkness of the house, with the result that I was hardly ready when my taxi banged on the door. The taxi driver seemed friendly enough, apologising profusely for the fact that the temperature in his taxi was sub-zero, but he then proceeded to drive me to the airport via a route which, in my long experience of taking taxis to the airport, no other taxi driver had ever taken me before. I felt a trifle disconcerted. I have a strange phobia that taxi drivers will either wilfully abduct me or misunderstand me and take me somewhere entirely different to where I wanted to go. The former has happily not yet occurred. The latter unfortunately has on at least one occasion. (more…)