Thursday 1 September 2011

August 2011 Wrap-Up - German Literature Month

After the rigours of my Victorian-themed Rereading July, I expected to slip into a more relaxed, leisurely month of reading, and reviewing, assorted odds and ends.  Instead, August turned into a near non-stop festival of fiction in the German tongue, in which I read just about as many German-language books as in the whole of 2010.  Totally unplanned as it was, my German Literature Month was great fun and a big success - and it went like this...

*****
Total Books Read: 14
Year-to-date: 88


New: 13
Rereads: 1

From the Shelves: 5
From the Library: 2
On the Kindle: 7

Novels: 4
Novellas: 6
Short Stories: 2
Poetry: 1
Non-Fiction: 1

Non-English Language: 12 (12 German)
In Original Language: 12 (12 in German!)

Books read in August were:
1) Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm
2) Die Leute von Seldwyla (Band 1) by Gottfried Keller
3) Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
4) Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten by Johann von Goethe
5) Novelle by Johann von Goethe
6) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
7) Literary Theory - A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler
8) Die Judenbuche by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
9) Frau Jenny Treibel by Theodor Fontane
10) Leutnant Gustl & Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler
11) Die Glücksritter by Joseph von Eichendorff
12) Erinnerungen einer Überflüssigen by Lena Christ
13) Mathias Bichler by Lena Christ
14) Die Verwandlung by Franz Kafka

Murakami Challenge: 0 (2/3)
Aussie Author Challenge: 0 (13/12)
Victorian Literature Challenge: 6 (26/15)
Japanese Literature Challenge 5: 0 (2/1)

Tony's Recommendations for August are:
Arthur Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl & Fräulein Else 
and Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung

Obviously, August was dominated by G-Lit classics, and I decided to split my vote between a very old friend (my copy of Die Verwandlung is a relic from my first year at university) and a rather newer one (one of my newly-beloved Hamburger Lesehefte!).  Honourable mentions to William Faulkner's classic - which may have benefited from Schnitzler's stream-of-consciousness work! -, Theodor Storm's stormy novella and Keller's collection of Swiss novellas.

It was a good experience to immerse myself in German for a month, but I think it's time to head back into English prose (and more modern times!).  What will September bring?  You'll just have to wait and see...