Posted by:
Nightingale
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Date: April 20, 2023 08:30PM
OK, so this is my all-time favourite thread. :P
It's dark here already even though suppertime is a ways off and it's pouring with rain. What better atmosphere is there in which to curl up after a busy day and ponder my next book selection. Oh how I love new hardback books, especially the ones with smooth paper covers and a delicious tag line to entice me into its mysteries (often literal ones!). I just finished a forensic science story. It was quite graphic and icky. I've had enough of that for a while now. Maybe. I seem to have a good supply of paperbacks too.
I have to choose amongst a few that have been hanging about for a while now - I just haven't got to them yet. So many books. So little time.
There's 'Act of Oblivion' by Robert Harris, a novel about the hunt for two men who are charged with killing King Charles I, set in 1660.
Or 'A Winter Grave' by Peter May. I've enjoyed his series in the past. This novel is set in the year 2051 and guess what - the climate catastrophe has arrived. Of course, somebody trips over a dead body and a Glasgow pathologist has to solve the crime.
Then there's 687 delicious pages of Superintendent Thomas Lynley solving a crime in the Nigerian community in London in 'Something to Hide'. I've read all the previous ones in this series and have watched the English TV programs about Lynley too. Really love the actor they found to play him except I wish he would have smiled more. I guess his work was too serious.
I still have 'The Daughter of Auschwitz' that I've been putting off. I'm afraid it's going to be too incredibly sad, although the tag line on the cover is "My story of resilience, survival and hope". At the age of 4 Tova Friedman, along with her family, was shipped to Birkenau, a name that still makes you shudder. Tova made it through somehow and states on the back cover of her book: "I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor's obligation to represent one and a half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. They cannot speak. So I must speak on their behalf."
Another choice is 'Saving Freud' in which Andrew Nagorski tells the true story of Sigmund Freud's escape to England from Austria in 1938.
To round things out, I'm anticipating a good read in 'A Short History of Disease - Plagues, Poxes and Civilisations'. Page 13 includes this little slice of history:
"Disease has always provoked fear, sometimes worse than the disease itself. In 627, the Chinese emperor T'ai-tsung asked Lu Tsu-shang, 'an official of talent and reputation', to become governor general of Giao province in northern Vietnam. 'You have the ability to pacify this frontier; go and defend it for me, and do not refuse on account of its being far away.' Tsu-shang thanked the emperor, but when the time came to take up the post, refused to go on the grounds that 'In the south there is much malaria; if I go there I shall never return.' Tsu-shang's fear of malaria was greater than his fear of imperial wrath. The emperor was so enraged he had Tsu-shang beheaded."
Ouch.
I love that sentence: Tsu-shang's fear of malaria was greater than his fear of imperial wrath.
Mistake!
In the Freud book, a line that caught my eye as I skimmed through was the following, about Freud's feelings on escaping Vienna ahead of the Nazis and being spirited off to London:
'But the excitement he felt about his return to a city he had first visited and admired in his youth was tempered by the circumstances of his departure from Vienna.'
Such an understatement: 'the circumstances of his departure' - meaning the coming World War and the Holocaust.
If you want a little macabre "humour" (not my fave), there's this:
'The best indication of his vastly improved mood was his revived sense of humor. He took his first walk in the garden with Jones, who became a regular visitor. "I am almost tempted to cry out 'Heil Hitler'" he said. Fichtl, the housekeeper, overheard Freud going on in the same vein to Jones on another early occasion. "We thank thee our Führer that he forced us to emigrate here." he declared.'
I haven't read it yet so I don't know who Jones is but he gave Freud's eulogy. In his eulogy he included this thought: "His creative spirit was so strong that he infused himself into others." ... "If ever man can be said to have conquered death itself, to live on in spite of the King of Terrors, who held no terror for him, that man was Freud."
So many riches. This isn't even all the books awaiting my loving and appreciative attention. You can see why it's hard to choose which one to dive into next.
It's not just the amazing stories, whether creations or reality, but the way with words some authors have that compel me to pause in appreciation of such talent and emotion.
Of course, I can't start a new book until the kettle boils. :)