Booklist 2007

[baleanoptera]

Inspired by richlayers list over books read in 2007.
Sometimes by month, sometimes jumbled together.

Fiction:

January, February and March 1-12th.

Christopher Logue: War Music (re-read)
Megan Whalen Turner: The Thief
Catherynne M. Valente : The Orphan’s Tales: In the night garden , Vol. I
Sarah Walters: The Nightwatch
Homer: The Iliad(Robert Fagles translation)
Karl-Ove Knausgård: En Tid for alt. (in English: a Time for Everything. )

March 13-31

April
Cees Nootebaum: In the Dutch Mountains

May-June

Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet
Sherman Alexia: Flight

July

Martin Cruz Smith: Gorky Park


Non-Fiction:

January, February and March 1-12th.

Christopher Clark: The Iron Kingdom – The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947
Christopher Tyerman: God’s War – a New History of the Crusades
Emma Hartley: Did David Hasselhoff end the Cold War – facts you need to know about Europe.
Neil Oliver: Not Forgotten – War Memorials of the Great War
Joanna Bourke: An Intimate History of Killing
Toby Clark: Art and Propaganda
Moritz Wullen: Die Deutschen sind im Treppenhaus – Der Fries Otto Geyers in der Alten Nationalgalerie
Thomas Doherty: The Projections of War
Jeanine Basinger: the World War II Combat Film
Rod Green: The Real History behind Foyle’s War.
Aleida Assmann: Zeit und Tradition. Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer.
Paul Cartledge: The Spartans
Wolf Lepenies: The Seduction of Culture in German History
Rosamund Mckitterick: Perceptions of the Past in the early Middle Ages.

March 13-31

Michael de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life
George S. Williamson: The Longing for Myth in Germany - religion and aesthetic culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche
April
Andreas Huyssen: Present Past: Urban Palimpsest and the Politics of memory
Andreas Huyssen: Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
John Reader: Africa - a biography
Paul Ricoueur: Memory, History, forgetting

May - June

Robin Cormack: Byzantine Art
Crowly Heyer: Communications in History
Studs Terkel: The Good war
John Julius Norwich: Byzantium Vol. 1
Stephen Runciman: The History of the Crusades Vol 1. (reread)
John Adams: The Best War Ever
Jay Winters and Sivan: War and Remembrance in the 20th Century
Hans Khan:The Mind of Germany

July

Lawrence Nees: Early Medieval Art
Duncan Anderson: Glass warriors - the Camera at war
Peter Garlake: Early African Art and Architecture
David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson: Film Art - and introduction

There are some recurring themes here huh? Also the Fiction section is a bit thin, so any suggestions about fiction would be very welcome. And possibly something not in connection with the Second World War. It might be healthy to read about something else as well. ;)
(but if any of you have a suggestion about a WWII book I wouldn't mind hearing about it...)

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

I forgot to rec Shoshaman: A Tale of Corporate Japan by Arai Shinya for fiction. I had to read it for a class, and was dreading it a first - "businessman reconnects with youthful idealism" has been done so many times and so badly, after all - but I ended up loving it. The author doesn't take the easy route of "Big Company = TEH EBIL," for instance (the president of the company is actually a really good guy who cares about his employees, although it's hard to tell sometimes beneath his reserved demeanor), and the romance subplot didn't work out at all the way I expected. And it has lovely writing, even in translation. Unfortunately, it might be hard to get ahold of a copy - even big chain bookstores in my area usually don't stock it.

For non-fiction that isn't connected to WWII, two more books which, once again, I read for school. Since they're not WWII or Germany, I'll recap in case you haven't read them before. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice by Robert C. Davis is about regularly staged fistfights on the bridges of Venice, and all sorts of things connected with them - honor, factionalism, social cohesion, all sorts of things.

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzberg is full of Ginzberg's ideas about a pagan, peasant culture surviving until quite late; regardless of whether one agrees with him on that or not, the story about the miller is fascinating. This miller put together quite an unusual cosmology, and in some of the excerpts from the Inquisition trial records, you can almost hear the Inquisitors asking, "Is this guy for real?"

[baleanoptera.livejournal.com]

Oh THANK YOU! These sound great - especially the Venice one sounds very interesting! I love cultural history like that - and Venice is one of those places I've always wanted to go to, but never have. So in the meantime I content myself with reading about the place.

[sunnyskywalker]

You're welcome! I enjoyed the Venice one a lot. Sometimes the city officials staged the fights for visiting dignitaries to show off, and sometimes they were more spontaneous, so there was a whole range. And the history of the factions and how the fights evolved from far more lethal stick fights was great. And the city geography is a huge presence in the book, especially the bridges spanning the territories of rival factions. I've never been there either, but this gave me a vivid picture of what a city built around islands and canals would be like.

The miller book, on the other hand, was a bit frustrating after a while, because I felt the author was using the oral peasant culture to explain the miller's ideas and then using the miller's ideas to prove the existence of the oral peasant culture. Not quite kosher, I think... But the miller's story was neat.