Karl's Reading List

Published by The Chicken House: Somerset, UK, 2004. Originally published in Germany as Tintenherz, 2003. Translated from German by Anthea Bell. I read this book in the background of English classes during silent reading time, and honestly, if I had been more organised and found another book, I probably wouldn't have finished it. It's very slow. Having some awareness of the book - mostly by knowing there was a movie based on it some years ago - I knew that Mo, the father figure in the book, has the ability to "read characters out of books." That is a hugely important part of the book, and not really a spoiler; its important to the set up. And yet, we don't learn about that ability - we're not even absolutely sure that the book is a fantasy - until chapter 16, which begins on page 143 out of 543. There are hints, but only hints. And yes, books can work well when they drop hints about things without outright telling you, but there needs to be other interesting th...

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC: New York, NY, 2016. I made it! This is the 26th and final book in my Alphabet Soup reading challenge. I finished the first book in this challenge on the 11th of August last year, having started it a week earlier. So, finishing in May means it took me 9 months to finish this challenge. I suppose I could have done it quicker if I only read Alphabet Soup books, but where would be the fun in that! Anyway, Judenstaat is a strange book. It falls into the 'alternate history' category of fiction, with this world having a slightly different outcome for the Jewish people post-World War 2. Instead of being granted a state of their own in Palestine (aka, the modern nation of Israel), they are instead granted a state of their own within the borders of Germany. This is justified both as a sort of punishment for Germany's acts of atrocity, and also as a statement of resilience from the Jewish people - that the place where they have faced their w...

Published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.: Carol Stream, Illinois, 2002 (1995). Book 3 in the 'Mark of the Lion' series: " A Voice in the Wind "; " An Echo in the Darkness "; " As Sure as the Dawn ." The final book in the Mark of the Lion series, As Sure as the Dawn changes its focus from Hadassah and Marcus to Atretes, the German gladiator who appeared in A Voice in the Wind . Picking up where that book left off, Atretes is an angry wreck of his former self, betrayed by the woman he loved and grieving the apparent death of his son. However, early on he learns (from Hadassah) that his son is still alive, and sets out to reclaim him from the woman who is now raising him: a Christian widow named Rizpah. As with the previous two entries in this series, As Sure as the Dawn focuses a lot on the relationships between the main characters, with Rivers' pre-Christian background as a writer of Romance fiction skillfully helping us to care deeply about ...

Published by Random House New Zealand: Auckland, NZ, 2002. I'm starting to get a taste for non-fiction Alphabet Soup books; who knows what I'll pick for Z! With a little extra time on my hands while Elise and I recover from Covid, I've been able to get through this 10 person biography about prominent New Zealanders - or at very least, people with some connection to New Zealand. I say prominent, but there were a few individuals covered in this work that I had never heard of, and that is coming from a New Zealander with an interest in history. Not a full-on passion I guess. I mean, if I was full-on passionate about history I'm sure I would have heard of these people before, right? What makes this different from a regular biography is that the majority of the chapters were originally written as New Zealand Geographic articles. This results in an unusual feel; each chapter tells us the story of the individual in question (or at least part of it) while also describing the...

Published by Coronet Books/Hodder and Stoughton/Hemisphere Publishers Ltd: Great Britain, 1983 (1982). What a book to end the year with! Schindler's Ark is the book that inspired the movie Schindler's List (and is known by the latter name in some countries). It is also a Booker book, which meant I really had no idea what I was in for. The book (and the movie) tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German factory owner living in the Polish city of Crakow during World War 2, relating how he saved the lives of about 1200 Jews by labelling them as 'essential workers'. Stating it that way makes it sound as though Schindler did very little 'heroic', yet throughout the book he continually takes big risks to achieve his goal, both in terms of his own safety, and also in financial terms. The book, being about Jews in WW2, is obviously not a 'light' book, yet Keneally tells it in a way that really 'works'. His style here is an interesting one; he tells...

Published by Penguin Books: North Shore, NZ, 2004. This book tells the story of three Maori brothers, Pita, Rangi and Tu, who one by one join the Maori battalion and end up fighting in Egypt and Italy during World War 2. Tu, our narrator, is the youngest of the three, and the vast majority of the book is presented as his journal entries from the war, with an additional framing device being that he is handing these journal pages on to his niece and nephew in order for them to understand their father, Pita, more. While Tu's journal entries are obviously mostly focussed on his own experiences, other chapters are interspersed with the 'journal entries', telling Pita's story in a third-person narrative. It is a little confusing as to how these may or may not be being presented to Tu's nephew and niece, as if we are to take the narrative at face value all of these chapters should be Tu's journal, but obviously are not. However, putting that aside we get a good idea of...

Published by LibriVox. Originally published 1915. Audiobook released 13-07-2008 by LibriVox. Read by Adrian Praetzellis. This is the third book by John Buchan I have read (listened to) and also the third starring his protagonist Richard Hannay (the others so far were Greenmantle and The Island of Sheep ), yet it is actually the first one of the Hannay stories that he wrote. This is also possibly the most well-known, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock's movie version. Our hero, Richard Hannay, bored with life in England and dreaming of his earlier days in South Africa, is drawn into an adventure when a neighbour, Frank Scudder, enters his apartment and urgently asks for help. When Scudder is later found dead Hannay goes on the run to avoid the man's killers and to give himself time to solve the mystery of the man's encrypted notebook.  The book is full of far-fetched coincidences, with perhaps the most extreme being that the place Hannay chooses to escape to at random (Galloway in ...

Published by Librivox. Originally published 1918. Audiobook released 22-08-2008 by LibriVox. Narrated by Ralph Snelson. Over a few days of fluey-ness and needing a rest for my eyes, I rediscovered my Librivox app. Librivox is an audiobook app, but the twist is that all books are public domain ones, and are read by volunteer narrators, meaning that they are available free to the reader. It does mean that not all recordings are equal, but if you find the right narrator, it is a great way to listen to something that you wouldn't necessarily buy. Edgar Rice Burroughs is most well-known for writing the Tarzan books, as well as John Carter of Mars, but The Land That Time Forgot  is another that at least had name recognition attached to it. Really, Burroughs is a "pulp" writer, crafting entertaining and vaguely cinematic stories that flow fairly well, without being super deep in any way. Just what you need for recovering from a flu. Land That Time Forgot  takes place during Wor...

Published by Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd: London, Edinburgh, and New York, date unknown. First published 1900. This obscure book by a fairly obscure author (one who does not even have a wikipedia page at present, and who was actually an English clergyman writing under a pseudonym) has a special connection to me. This book, in fact this copy of this book, was originally given to my grandfather, Leslie Howan, and in turn was read by my mother when she was young. And, as a result, it is the book she credits with inspiring my first name, Karl. It is not a book I have ever read before though. It turns out that Prince Karl is quite a "wholesome" (as Elise described it) adventure story, and one that sucked us in despite being fairly straightforward. Hermann Reichal, his wife Elsa and son Michael live in the Black Forest in Germany, and are preparing for the annual trip down the Raal river on a raft of logs to sell. However, their preparation is cut short by the arrival of Princess El...

Published by W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd, London, 1978. This is the true story of the various criminals who combined to commit 'The Great Train Robbery' of 1963. We meet the main players and follow their lives as they enter the criminal world, learn why they turned to crime, and what eventually led to their decision to rob a night mail train. The life of crime is not glamourised - we learn very early on that most of their robberies don't pay off - and yet the criminals are seen in a slightly heroic manner. When everything begins to unravel following the robbery, the author points out how few things actually gave them away, and it is interesting to wonder how things could have gone differently and more successfully if the robbers had been slightly more 'fortunate'. There are elements of this story that I find fascinating to read in a non-fiction book, elements such as fake identities, secret plastic surgeries, and corrupt cops. This gives the work an odd 'a...

Published by Vintage/Penguin Random House New Zealand: NZ, 2019 (2008). This novel is primarily known as the book that inspired Taika Waititi's Oscar winning film Jojo Rabbit. It is also fairly well known that the book is quite different from the movie, particularly in tone. Waititi's films generally have a light-hearted quirky humour to them, even when dealing with weighty themes, and the adaptation Jojo Rabbit also makes the choice of including "imaginary Hitler" as a major character, something that does not happen in the book. The closest we get to anything like that is when the main character, Johannes Betzler, is wrestling with his 'non-Nazi' thoughts, and narrates: "If it's true I'd tried to get the young woman off my mind, by that time I was also trying to get Adolf Hitler off it. His constant reproach about my shortcomings irked me: my incapability, indecorum, infidelity, all starting with in and ejecting me out of his good opinion. Wh...