Then and Now #30 (26/9/2022 - 2/10/22)

Happy Sunday! The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week 

This was my second week in Germany and I've definitely settled in a bit more. I finally signed my contract, which was a major relief because a new job never feels official or secure to me until the paperwork is signed xD I also met some more people from our department, who are all lovely, so I'm definitely excited to get started next week! Monday (3/10) is Tag der Deutschen Einheit, so I'm not actually going in to work until Tuesday. I'll have the office to myself next week so I can get used to it at my own pace before the real hecticness of the semester starts!

I've gotten loads of reading done since moving to Germany! On the one hand it was down to not having WiFi and therefore not having any distractions. On the other hand, now that I live on my own, I just have loads more time to settle down with a book. I'm gonna try to keep up with the reading once work starts, since I want to be a little more active with my blog again. My own personal Backlog Challenge is working out pretty well, in my opinion. I mean, there are literally hundreds of books I need to catch up on, so it's gonna be a long time, but nonetheless I am making some progress on it! 

Posted in the last 2 Weeks:

• Review: Die rote Königin/Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, trans. Birgit Schmitz
• Review: The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales by Nicholas Jubber
• Audiobook Review: Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, narr. by Vanessa Kirby
• Audiobook Review: The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco, narr. Emily Woo Zeller & Will Damron
• Review: Murder and the Movies by David Thomson
• Review: Lovemurder (Valerie Hart #2) by Saul Black
• Friday Friyay: Lone Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, trans. Philip Gabriel
• Poem Analysis: 'Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning' by Emily Brontë

Recommendation

I finally started watching Andor on Disney+! I had been delaying it because I was nervous, oddly enough, that it wouldn't be as amazing as I wanted it to be. BOY WAS I WRONG! This show is stunning. Like I said in my Tweet, it's not only well-written, it is also so insightful and precise about its social commentary, without any of that interrupting the plot. Below is the theme, which I think is absolutely beautiful!

Mailbox Monday

As part of my effort to reduce my TBR backlog I am being better at not requesting every interesting book I see, but nonetheless I did get some interesting reads in!

Maus Now: Selected Writings ed. by Hillary Chute (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor; 11/15/2022)

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it’s hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district’s English language-arts curriculum demonstrates.

    Maus Now: Selected Writing collects responses to Spiegelman’s monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material’s complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections— “Contexts,” “Problems of Representation,” and “Legacy”—and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus.

    Maus is revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world’s best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.

Maus is one of those books that I believe shouldn't be controversial. Yes, it deals with incredibly difficult topics but it is such an important introduction to these topics for younger readers but also older readers. I'm very interested in seeing the different responses to Maus in this book!

The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip (Watkins Publishing; 10/11/2022)

With a foreword by Neil Gaiman, this comprehensive, entertaining and authentic collection of English folktales is perfect for fans of Madeline Miller, Philip Pullman and the Brothers Grimm.

This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art – when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find “Jack the Giantkiller”, “Tom Tit Tot” and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms’ “Little Snow White” – as well as bedtime frighteners, including “Captain Murderer”, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.

Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale’s journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.

I ADORE FOLK TALES so naturally when I saw this book I had to get into this book immediately. No matter how many tales you konow, there are always new ones to discover. Also, a Foreword by Neil Gaiman is always a plus.

The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by Tore Skeie, trans. by Alison McCullough (Pushkin Press; 11/08/2022)

Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie ("Norway's Most Important Young Historian") takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire…

I mean, reading this book is almost a professional necessity! I'm really curious to see what Tore Skeie will add to this history and especially how he will bring poetry and literature into the mix!

So that's it for me!