January Meme: Favourite books read in 2019
Zen Cho's "Sorceror to the Crown" and "The True Queen" were certainly among my favourite novels. (My review of them is here. Another novel which I loved but haven't written about is Robert Löhr's Das Erlkönig-Manöver, which uses just about every conspiracy theory ever related to Marie Antoinette's children (see some of them listed here as a MacGuffin to hang a hilarious Dumas-esque plot on, in which various German literati - Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Alexander von Humboldt, Bettina Brentano & her later husband Achim von Arnim - are enlisted, cajoled, wood or blackmailed into a rescue operation (OR IS IT?) for a young man supposedly the long lost Dauphin and about to be killed by Napoleon's men. Half the fun is Löhr's way of including quotes from the works of everyone involved in a completely different context that still works perfectly within the story, where it makes for fantastic banter between a bunch of cranky writers. Also, Kleist's increasing outrage that Goethe still hasn't read his latest manuscript. (In rl tragic, here, just the right kind of fun. Not to mention that Kleist at least gets finally laid, by Alexander von Humboldt, no less, which is a good consolation price.) In between all of this, you have daring undercover missions, masquerades, hair-raising escapes and last minute rescues, in short, all you'd want from a swashbuckler. I'm just not sure how it would translate to an English speaking audience who'd barely able to identify one Schiller or Goethe line and doesn't know who Bettina was, hence no proper review.
Non-fiction: no contest. As described in this earlier post , my non-fiction book of the year is actually three volumes of one, the original publication and then two volumes with addenda, i.e. the cut entries the earlier volume was missing, to wit: the Diaries of one Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff, adorkable chamberlain to Frederick the Great's unwanted wife and life long friend-with-benefits of Friedrich's younger brother Heinrich.
The Other Days
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Non-fiction: no contest. As described in this earlier post , my non-fiction book of the year is actually three volumes of one, the original publication and then two volumes with addenda, i.e. the cut entries the earlier volume was missing, to wit: the Diaries of one Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff, adorkable chamberlain to Frederick the Great's unwanted wife and life long friend-with-benefits of Friedrich's younger brother Heinrich.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1386291.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.