MissWatson's timely reads

I have come a bit late to the party. The idea of spending three months with a time period looks very enticing, so I'm giving it a try. I want to read a few of the many non-fictions I have been hoarding.

January-March 2016: pre-history

My first book is a very slim volume about the megalithic monuments in Brittany Vorgeschichte in der Bretagne which I picked up at Carnac. A little too scholarly for raw beginners, not scholarly enough for others, so not entirely satisfactory.

Welcome to the Reading Through Time Challenge. I am already looking forward to what books you will chose to read! :)

>Thanks, I 've got my eye on a book about pre-historic Italy...

On closer inspection I realised that the book under consideration does not fit the stipulated time frame, so I'm saving it for later. I think I can find something for the March theme, though...

April-June 2016: ancient and biblical times

Mémoires d'Hadrien, which was a very satisfying read. I didn't know that he spent most of his time travelling the empire, for one thing.

edited for touchstone

Romans, Celts and Germans looks at the archeological remains in the Germanic provinces of the Roman Empire. very well written, to my mind, and recommended.

Tod des Dichters fits the February theme of celebrating the authors, it is a novel about Portgual's national poet Luís de Camões.

I do not often buy books fresh off the press, but in this case I did, because Die Söhne des Mars promised to do what Harry Sidebottom's Ancient warfare abysmally failed to do. And it did deliver.

The author takes us from the question of how war emerged to the first archaeological remains of weapons and battle sites and on to the Greeks and Romans. He manages to explain different views of these fundamental questions in layman's terms, he does not overburden the reader with too many details, and he has an amazing way of summarising long-term developments in one succinct sentence. He even takes the trouble to translate technical terms (coined from Greek and Latin which is no longer part of the general education) into German. A five star read.

June theme read: School days

Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling. I picked it for my ROOT group, and was pleasantly surprised to see it also fits here.

One more for the ancient times: Latein ist tot, es lebe Latein!, which is a history of the Latin language. This was another five star read.

July-September: Arthurian Britain

I finished Sword at sunset, an interesting variation of the Arthur story. There is absolutely no magic in this story, no Merlin, no lady in the lake, no sword in the stone. I was surprised to find that it was written only a few years before The Crystal cave. The books share the first person narrative and the setting in a clearly recognisable post-Roman world. Rosemary Sutcliff's Britain is very insular somehow, although Artos travels to Gaul to buy horses for his cavalry, they seem to have no knowledge of the world beyond the sea.

I am not entirely happy with my edition of the book:I bought a UK edition and was annoyed to find it used American spelling, the note on the author promised in the table of contents was missing, a map would have been very helpful, and the font was very small.

July-September: Arthurian Britain

Some background reading on the Celts in Die Kelten which whetted the appetite for more.

July-September: Arthurian Britain

I have finished Die Sachsen des frühen Mittelalters, a non-fiction book about Arthur's enemies. Interesting, but sadly full of qualifying "as far as the present state of our knowledge allows" statements. They are a highly elusive people, these Saxons

July-September: Arthurian Britain

The winter king is the first in a series about Arthur by Bernard Cornwell. He belongs to the gritty, warts-and-all kind of historical fiction, and he gives us plenty of that. It's always fascinating to see how authors rearrange the personnel of popular legends, and here we have the story written down by a Saxon in Saxon for a Welsh queen.
All in all, I find it let successful than other versions. He is not quite so familiar with Roman Britain as Sutcliff was, and setting the tale in a concrete time always reminds you what was going on elsewhere. The winter king of the title is Mordred, legitimate grandson of High King Uther Pendragon, and a babe over whose kingdom the others squabble. In fact, most of the fighting takes place among the various kingdoms and they are every bit as barbarous as the Saxons they hate, but consider inferior. His Saxons are a blank, amorphous mass. The episode in Brittany is a distraction, as Arthur has no part in it. Ah well, I'll wait to see what the next book brings.

ETC

July-September: Arthurian Britain

Derfel in The winter king spends time in Brittany fighting the Franks, which looked a bit misrepresented to me, so I re-read Die Franken.

April-June: Ancient history

A recent acquisition, Die Skythen, gives a brief introduction to the Scythians, a nomadic horse-people of ancient times.

August: journeys

I finished The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a lovely re-encounter with a book from my childhood. I had never read it in English before, though, so it was a bit like new.

April-June: Ancient and Biblical times

I returned to Ancient Rome with Hirten, Bauern, Götter, a history of Roman agriculture. Very good.

October-December: Medieval times and Vikings

The Technicolor Time Machine shows off Harrison's strength: a rather irreverent look at time travel. It's from 1967 and set in Hollywood, so very sexist, but it was inspired by recent (at the time) discoveries of Viking settlements in North America, and although some clichés are obviously ineradicable, he makes a nice effort to include dialogue in Norse. Very entertaining.

October-December: Medieval times and Vikings

The Tang dynasty is reckoned as Chinese Middle Ages, so Impératrice fits here: it is the life of Empress Wu Zhou, told by herself, from her birth, her years as a concubine and then wife of a Tang emperor, until she takes the throne herself and is finally toppled by an intrigue. It's a remarkable life, which we know only through the distorting mirror of Confucian, misogynic males. One of the most interesting aspects of this was the constant re-writing of history, as the Empress posthumously assigns titles and nobility to her ancestors.

ETC

October-December: Medieval times and Vikings

Habent sua fata libelli...
Samarcande is the story of a fictional book, a manuscript of the Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam himself, told by a young American who actually found it centuries after having been thought lost in the pillage of Samarkand, only to lose it again when the Titanic hits an iceberg. If you summarise the plot like this, it sounds preposterous, but it is so convincing because it could have happened like this.
This is a wonderful book. The first part describes the life of Omar Khayyam from his arrival in Samarkand to his death, the second part is the tale of Benjamin Omar Lesage, actually named after the poet, who goes looking for the manuscript and witnesses the painful and abortive attempts of Persia to join the modern world and build a democracy – abortive because they were thwarted at every point by the Russian and British empires playing their Great Game. In many respects, we reap today what their arrogance sowed back then.

December: Victorian era

Gräfin Erikas Lehr- und Wanderjahre is set in the late 19th century and thus fits the time frame. The story of a society beauty, and a portrait of an aristocratic world that no longer exists.

December: Victorian era

I sometimes have trouble remembering that the US Civil War took place during Victoria's reign, so Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted fits here. The subject matter is important, but the prose and the characters are very dated.

ETC

January-March 2016

I am a year late with this, but it fits perfectly for the theme of pre-history: Die Kinder des Prometheus.

February: Storico Italia

I couldn't finish Stabat mater because I just couldn't get inside the head of the heroine. Die Nonne von Monza, on the other hand, makes me eager to read Manzoni's opus magnus, I promessi sposi.

February: Storico Italia

I also finished Jean Sbogar, set in Venice and Istria, a Venetian province until the French marched in. A story of robbers and damsels in distress as they were in fashion in the early 19th century, the heroine is an unbelievably passive, limp and weak creature. The hero is rather Byronesque but singularly charmless. Both are mere puppets so the author can debate about religion and the godless ideas of the French revolutionaries. I gleaned a few bits of information about Venice, nothing more.

January-March 2017: the XVIth century

Muerte súbita is set in Rome in 1599 where Caravaggio and Quevedo fight a tennis match as a substitute for a duel with swords. In between we get a lot of facts and factoids about tennis, the Conquest of Mexico and the Counterreformation. Since the tennis match is fictitious, I am not sure how much of the rest is trustworthy. The book was also spoiled by an amazing number of typos.

January-March 2016: pre-history

I bought Rulaman last year for the pre-history quarter and didn't get around to it in time. First published in 1878, it reflects knowledge about pre-history as conceived at the time, but much of what David Friedrich Weinland imagined is still considered correct today. Also a great adventure story.

January-March 2017: 16th century

I came across Roxelane by accident when I saw it in a charity bookshop. I had never heard of the author before, but the subject seemed interesting: a novel about Roxelane, favourite wife of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
And it was, because the author shows things from the Turkish perspective and the view is always from the inside of the serail which the women can leave to go shopping or for visits. But she never accompanies the sultan when he goes to war, so she must rely on letters for months and years. Tralow tells us why this Empire was ruled from the harem and how: all the sultan's brothers are killed when he ascends the throne, so there are no male relatives, whereas the princesses are married to the important dignitaries and from their various posts in the empire they report back to homebase: the sultan's mother and/or wife.
I was also surprised to recognize many of the institutions as Byzantine, the Turks appear to have simply adopted them. The author actually lived in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century and has seen the places he mentions. He didn't write this book until 1942 and spent the time in-between researching it, and it shows.
There are a few disappointments, though: typos that were annoying, a glossary of all the Turkish titles would have been useful, it ends abruptly without telling us what became of some of the characters, and I couldn't warm to his habit of writing inner monologue or reported speech in the subjunctive. Not even Thomas Mann used it to this extent. Nevertheless, I've got another book in this tetralogy on deck and will certainly track down the others.

January-March 2017: 16th century / March: Meeting Madness

A few weeks back I watched a TV programme on the small town of Dillenburg and was reminded of a biography on my shelves: William the Silent who was born in Dillenburg, inherited the princedom of Orange and become the first leader of the Netherlands in their struggle for independence.
This is a very well written biography, you get a great sense of the man and his times, and it's easy to overlook a few outdated concepts. He would have been a very interesting man to meet, even-tempered and liberal in a time when people were fanatical about religion.
My only complaint is that the pages were not bound in proper sequence which resulted in a jumbled mess.
Now I want to read up more on the times. Didn't Friedrich Schiller write about this? Off to check the shelves.

ETC

April 2017: It's a Family Affair

I finished Habsburgs verkaufte Töchter. It portrays six Habsburg women who were married off by their fathers or brothers for political reasons, ranging from the 15th to the 19th century, and five of them actually ruled. The two regents of the Netherlands and Anne d'Autriche are comparatively well known, the others less so. Maria Karolina was queen of Naples-Sicily and a fierce opponent of Napoleon, Leopoldine was Empress of Brazil. Kunigunde, who was married to a Duke of Bavaria, remains unknown, there is simply not enough documentary evidence about her. The others have been much maligned by (male) historians, and the author sets out to rectify this. Since she doesn't cite her sources, her book is of limited use in this respect, but it gives a useful overview of who was related to whom and who feuded with whom over which territory, which could be quite useful for my next book.
The main impression, though, is that it was simply awful to be a woman in those days. Nearly all of them were mistreated by their menfolk either physically of psychologically, locked up for long stretches of time or worse. One other interesting nugget of information was that most of the Habsburg girls appear to have had a gift for languages, if they were not brought up with two or three at home, they usually learned the language of their new countries in amazingly short time. I am tempted to get sidetracked into a few other biographies from the era...

April 2017: It's a Family Affair

Die Herrinnen der Loire-Schlösser was not as good as I hoped, too much gossip, too many exclamation marks, not enough about the women living in the Loires castles. The most interesting bit was to see the same people who appeared in my previous books through the lense of French politics and interests. It also reminds me that I still have a few books to read in Druon's Les rois maudits series...

ETC

April-June 2017: 17th century

It took me four months to finish The economy and material culture of Russia 1600-1725, as it is an exceedingly dry tome of economic history. Basically, a history of prices, which also gives an idea of what products were available to Russians at this time.

July-September 2017: 18th century

Another heavy non-fiction tome, Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel traces the fortune of a family grown rich as sugar planters in the Danish Virgin Islands, from the founder of the enterprise to the present. But the main focus is on the two first generations and thus on the 18th century, when the plantations were first established, and it covers all aspects of the slave trade, sugar production, Atlantic trade, colonialism, emancipation etc, as they happened in Denmark.

July-September 2017: 18th century

Teori is a novel about Georg Forster's voyage with Captain James Cook, taken from Forster's own writing. It seemed to me pretty much preoccupied with bodily functions, presumably because these are usually glossed over in official writings. It gives a human touch to the adventure but it wears thin. Georg often discusses the ethics of their treatment of the indigenous people with the painter Hodges, which makes me curious to read Forster's original papers. There's a frame story about his last days in Paris which tells us that he participated in the 1789 revolution in Mainz. Now that's really interesting and would be worth a book.

April-June 2017: 17th century

I spent two weeks on the North Frisian island of Föhr and managed to read a few books about the regional history, first of all was Die "erschreckliche" Flut von 1634 und der Untergang von Alt-Nordstrand, which is a historical novel set in the year of a huge storm tide which flooded large parts of Northern Germany. The island of Strand broke in half, more than half of the land vanished and all that remains of a rich community are the islands of Pellworm and Nordstrand. Unfortunately, this was first published in 1900, and most of the book is about a strict Protestant minister haranguing his flock for their sins, and very little about the flood itself.

A follow-up to this was Den Fluten zum Trotz which picks up the tale on the neighbouring island of Föhr, where many of the surviviors stranded. This was much more interesting, as it tells of the many changes following this huge immigration: a whole new town springs up, people turn from mere subsistence agriculture to trade, coastal navigation on an ever-larger scale and finally whaling.

edited for touchstone

July-September 2017: 18th century

Another new book bought on vacation was Der General des Bey where a merchant ship out of Hamburg is captured by barbary pirates and the crew sold into slavery in Algiers. One of them makes an amazing career at the court of the Bey of Constantine and returns to his native island of Amrum a rich man. This is based on a real person, Hark Olufs.

I also finished a YA book recommended by my sister, who read the German translation: The gentleman's guide to vice and virtue. The topic, a young English aristocrat's adventures on his Grand Tour, is quite interesting, the execution less so. It would seem this is one of the cases where the translator improved on the original by correcting a few things.
I didn't mind the gay aspect of it, but the first person narrative is strictly from a modern teenager's mindset and never convinced me. Not to mention a few factual mistakes concerning the English aristocracy which do not argue well for the author's credentials as a historian.

edited for touchstone

October-December 2017: Napoleonic Era

Onnen Visser, der Schmugglersohn von Norderney is an adventure story about a young man whose father gets summarily executed for violating Napoleon's continental blockade, is pressed into the French army, marches to Moscow with them, deserts and then returns home after many adventures, including the siege of Hamburg. Very much anti-French, of course, written in 1885, but mostly true to the facts, especially how the French occupation plundered and starved the occupied regions. She gets carried away with her description of the undisciplined, plundering French in Russia, I can't imagine they would have reached Moscow if they had been in such a bad state from the word go.

October-December 2017: Napoleonic Era

I have finished all 924 pages of Vor dem Sturm. My edition is divided into four volumes that looked deceptively slim, so it's taken me a while to read it. The tone and the style are conversational, nothing much happens, and it is full of anecdotes, much like his books about hiking across Brandenburg. I found an old train ticket from 1988 inside, used as a page marker, and it is remarkable how much more I enjoyed this book at my now advanced age. Fontane was no spring chicken himself, when he wrote this.

October-December 2017: Napoleonic Era

Strictly speaking this is not the Napoleonic Era as it actually happened, since there are dragons involved, but everything else is exactly as in a Georgette Heyer or Patrick O'Brian novel: Throne of Jade was fun.

October-December 2017: Napoleonic Era

I finished Maria Pavlovna : Die frühen Tagebücher der Erbherzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenachwhere she spends most of the time covered in these diaries on the road, fleeing Weimar for safety from Napoleon.

This was a fascinating read. They are written entirely in French, a habit left over from her schooldays, when diaries were a means of practising language skills (those were the times when parents and teachers still read and corrected their children's diaries). They are mostly an aide-mémoire for herself, noting people and places she met during these travels and at the various courts. The war itself is mostly mentioned in passing, but the editors have often filled in the gaps with excerpts from her vast correspondence which she kept up with her family in Russia. The editors have tried to identify each person, building or painting mentioned and are mostly successful, so the notes are three times as voluminous as the diaries themselves. There are many familiar names turning up again and again, and it is useful to keep a few genealogies at hand, who is related to whom is sometimes important. The most surprising thing for me was that Maria still deferred to decisions and orders from her brother, Tsar Alexander. I would have thought that the interests of her husband's family should have been her first priority. This shed a new light on the purposes of dynastic European marriages for me...

October-December 2017: Napoleonic Era

Next book in this topic was Der Brand von Moskau, recently picked up from ther bargain box.

The author is a French historian, so her sources are overwhelmingly from the French side of the campaign, but since her main question is to find an explanation for Napoleon's rationale for marching to Moscow and then turning back, that's legitimate. She uses a few carefully selected memoirs from which she quotes extensively, mostly people close to Napoleon during the campaign, some from fighting units, from doctors, and a handful from the Russian side, which included, to my surprise, Clausewitz. I had no idea he served with the Russian army. Quite a few familiar names pop up, and others surfaced unexpectedly, such as John Quincy Adams as the American envoy in St. Petersburg. Or the daughter of the governor of Moscow at the time who married into the French aristocracy and wrote those moralising children's books, Comtesse de Ségur.