The Hall of Fire

I read with a pencil in my hands, I fear beyond easy fiction, Kindle will never do it for me. I need paper and our house is slowly becoming too small for all the books. If a book is written in French, German, English or Spanish, I will always read the original. For other languages, I have to read tr...

Actually, I wanted to read "Dawn", but there was no Paperback Copy which I could buy at that time (that was in octobre, I think) and they offered "Debt" at 1$95 on the Kindle app, so I thought, what the heck for that price, I can give it a try - I found it very compelling, but qu...

Give it a slot tomorrow. It’s worth it, promised.

On Monday, I finished "Debt. The first 5000 Years" by David Graeber and I hardly ever felt so much smarter after having read a book. What a read! It's a book which changes your conception of guilt, sin, debt, economy, slavery and many other things. I wanted to yell out to the world to read...

For my part, I found that the blindness of Míriel needed to be underacted. She is the leader of the highest developed human civilisation and she knows that she is contested. She cannot show weakness and emotion like Elendil can do it - his position at this point of time is not particularly important...

Absolutely worth it and the only way of watching it! Nothing but the names must be awful in any other language....

(and, of course, Hesse is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century so quite a few others also disagree). Apparently in the US, where he is also widely read from what I have gathered. Among German literature specialists Hesse is usually considered provincial and kitsch...

Somewhat OT but I'm impressed with V and Nin for getting through Hesse. I gave up on Glasperlenspiel a quarter of the way through. I would have loved to give up on Hesse, however some of my colleagues read him and some students choose his book (mainly Siddharta) as graduation lecture, so I have to ...

But in Hesse's book (as I remember it at least), Siddhartha rejects the Buddha and finds his own path to enlightenment. I think it is time for me to reread that book and see how much it still resonates with me. Siddharta is the Buddha. Hesse‘s book is a basically a biographic novel. I loath this bo...

Several small remarks: I did not find Dans turn really sudden. never really liked her since Merken and was rather glad that finally people started to see her (and show her) for what she really was. To me her character was rather like a reminder of Robespierre - the enlightener who became a tyrant. ...

A friend was so kind as to offer me Home Deus... I'm really hooked with those two books. So thought provoking.

I am through..... what a week this has been! "Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet nev...

Raving: like in being enthousiastic? (It can have such different meaning in German that I struggle) Anyway, I have not read Gene, but his book "The Emperor of all Maladies, a biography of cancer" (my sister wrote a review about it, when she was herself fighting breast cancer). Before Sapie...

I am currently reading Sapiens, a history of humankind and am utterly hooked after the first 100 pages.

Loved this quote on page 31: There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

No, I think the English title is Money Heist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQYvQIrM1FY I watched in Spanish, with Spanish subtitles, switching to German (subtitles) whenever necessary. I am/was/ want to be totally hooked. The Spanish they speak - omg so quick, so full of colloquial, such a pleasu...

La Casa de Papel.... I am totally obsessed.

Just that it was violence that stopped the original Nazis. One can't use that as justification to get violent with neo-Nazis because the circumstances are totally different, but I don't think it's correct to say that violence never stopped an idea. It did stop the Nazis, but not necessarily their i...

Well, having always lived under a multiple party system I see it as huge advantage, because it avoids extremes, tends towards compromise and avoids the concentration of much power in one hand, as it usually goes along with a non-presidential system. But actually I only wanted to thank Túrin for that...

I read it on real paper, not on website. I’ll have to look up if there is an online version. But tonight I’ll go to the theatre to watch a piece about the centenary of the Russian Revolution!

I read a very interesting article the other day, unfortunately in German. The question was if a social “pursuit” of death exists. (Gibt es einen sozialen Todestrieb?) There was an interview which gave an analysis of those questions discussed in the USA which are not concerns or questions in the rest...