A New Beginning

Sometimes there are too many things happening too fast. Although that is exciting, it often also means that you forget to take time for the things you love, such as reading, thinking and blogging.
And that's when it is time for a fresh start.

After almost a year of inactivity I am finally admitting that I am not continuing this blog.
However, I want to make blogging about the classics a part of my life again, simply because it makes my life better... and also because I felt myself becoming more and more uneducated each day during my hiatus!

So, from now on I will be blogging about Life and Literature from West of the Moon, East of the Sun. In case any of you are still interested in reading what I think, please go and follow my new blog. I am excited to start anew!

The Heart of a Lion

There is a gorgeous cake in our kitchen, complete with delicious icing and cherries on top. It is my grandfather's birthday cake. He turned eighty-eight two days ago, but since we decided to put off celebrating until Sunday the cake is still untouched.
My grandfather has been old for all my life. I cannot remember a time when his hair was not white as snow, but I've been told that it used to be red and gold, just like mine. I have never been able to talk to him easily because he has been heavily hearing impaired for years, and to be honest I was more than a little afraid of him when I was small because he did not understand what I said and, since he had no idea how to talk to a little child, I could not make anything of the strange things he said either.
But thankfully that has never stopped him from telling me stories of his life, from trying to connect with me despite all hopelessness of the attempt. And as soon as I was old enough not to be intimidated by his age anymore I learned to appreciate this; appreciate it very much indeed.

For most younger people the second World War is nothing but a collection of dates and names from history lessons, but not for me. For me it is a collection of stories. Born in 1925 my grandfather was recruited when he was barely a man. He was already lined up with dozens of other young men destined to go to Russia, to fight in what would be the battle of Stalingrad, when someone asked if any of the recruits could work as a tank driver. Without having any idea of panzers, my grandfather volunteered and was sent to Egypt instead. After only a few months in combat his division was captured and held in war captivity until the end of WWII. While many other soldiers tell nightmarish stories of captivity, my grandfather was once again saved by pure luck: the son of the British general commanding their detention centre had studied in Austria and on top of being naturally easy-going and well-meaning, the general was especially fond of Austrians. Therefore, the war stories I have heard contain quite a few light-hearted, even funny episodes between the dark, brutal ones. His sarcastic, almost black sense of humour is another thing I have inherited from my grandfather, or so they say. One story I have heard so often that I could not forget it even if I wanted to: His division was stationed just outside a city and while all the other young men went into the bars and clubs of the city at night, my grandfather drove his tank into a shallow river and spent the whole evening cleaning it - that is how much he loved his vehicle.

After the war ended he returned home and became a police officer, quickly rising through the ranks even though he had only been to primary school. My grandpa fighting against crime and injustice: that is one of the things which have always made me proud to be his graddaughter. The others are for example the fact that he was respected as the best shot in town or his incredible craftmanship; even though he was already so old he repaired everything and had his own professional workshop in the basement where he crafted toys for us children and a collection of beautiful metal objects such as gongs and little bells.
It was another characteristic of his that brought me really close to him in spirit, though: he has always been an insatiable reader, devouring books at an almost unearthly speed. It did not take his stories of how he - just like me - read at night under his blanket when he was a child to win my whole heart for him although we did not see each other very often.

Unfortunately the downside of having such an old grandfather is the shadow of illness and death always lurking in a corner. During the last few years he has had considerable trouble breathing because of a pulmonary emphysema, which came as no surprise since he used to be a heavy smoker. While we were always afraid that he would simply suffocate one day, it never happened. He was so often just an inch away from dying, beginning when he should have walked into doom at Stalingrad and ending at several hospitalisations with problems from which he theoretically should not have recovered.
My grandfather survived death for so long that I lived in the impression he was immortal.
I was wrong.
His lion's heart stopped beating today in his sleep, a few days after he was rushed to the hospital.
On February 28, when he was hospitalised with severe cardiac pain he apparently still asked the doctor jokingly if it had to be exactly that day, because it was his son's birthday. Nobody expected him to die now of all times.

I did not visit him in the hospital and my last words to my grandfather were actually spoken on the phone to my grandmother who promised to relay them to him. They were as mundane as "Happy Birthday" and she told me he would be so glad I had remembered.
This is the first time ever that somebody close to me has died. It feels utterly unreal as if my grandpa simply can't be gone because he has always survived everything.
He doesn't die.
At the same time I feel bad for every day I could have visited him and did not and ache for every conversation that will now never be held. But nothing hurts more than looking at the splendid birthday cake and knowing who will never eat it.

A Modern March

I admit, I am not exactly early in signing up for this event, but the heaps of snow weighing down on the landscape here have made March seem very far away. Apparently Austria is experiencing the coldest winter in twenty years; it's foggy, not a single snowdrop has fought its way through the frozen soil yet and I am very close to developing a serious case of seasonal affective disorder.

Anyway, since it is almost March despite what the weather says it is high time I announced my participation in Allie's Modern March. As the name implies, this literary event focuses on Modernist writers, which I find especially exciting because to my shame I hardly have any experience with them. But to be honest I am a tiny little bit apprehensive at the same time since my attempt to read Virginia Woolf last year didn't go too well. Mrs. Dalloway seemed interesting enough, but unfortunately I did not understand a word of it. Whenever a personal pronoun was mentioned I was at a complete loss because I had no idea who was being referred to. I'll try again in the next few weeks, but don't expect stream-of-consciousness and me to become friends anytime soon.

Apart from Mrs. Dalloway I have To the Lighthouse on my shelves, which I will probably read to give Virginia Woolf a second chance. And, if all else fails I still have Kafka's The Metamorphosis waiting for me in its original version: the privilege of a German reader.

Last but not least I am looking forward very much to a first encounter with F. Scott Fitzgerald. My copy of the iconic Great Gatsby has finally arrived and I cannot wait to start it. As always when I am about to read such a famous and well-loved classic I am even a little nervous.
Here's to hoping that March will be exciting (and warm)!

Tristan by Thomas Mann

Tristan was an assigned read for my German literature class and a merciful attempt of my teacher to familiarise us students with Thomas Mann without expecting us to read his most famous and dreadfully long book, The Magic Mountain.
It is a novella which already introduces most of the themes that appear in Mann's later works, most prominently the conflict between life and death and in consequence between reality and art.
While I don't usually enjoy the texts I have to read for that class I was surprised how interesting  I found this short work: it is challenging mostly due to Mann's naturalistic style. While very descriptive, his style is strangely detached and so neutral that it makes you almost forget the author behind the narration.

Set in a sanatorium and following the model of Tristan and Iseult, the story explores the growing relationship between Mrs von Klöterjahn, the moribund wife of a wealthy and lively merchant and the writer and fanatical aesthete Mr Spinell. Their love is never consummated and serves only as the framework for a comparative study of the artistic and the bourgeois mind; one of them orientated towards the ideal of beauty in death, the other towards the less noble but more human idea of living a fulfilled life.

What makes this work truly fascinating is the way in which Mann deals with the artistic quest for beauty: Mr Spinell is the exaggerated personification of an idea we have all come across countless times in literature and the arts; the idea that a beautiful, a poetic death at the right time is preferable to a long, ordinary life full of vulgar imperfections. He destests reality because of its uncouthness and loves only beautiful ideas, such as the shadow of Mrs Klöterjahn as a young woman who is too fragile and special for life and therefore consecrated to death. To his mind her death is the only truly beautiful solution because the continuation of her life would only make her common; a fat, wrinkled housewife and mother.

This mindset is (subconsciously) all too common in every type of art, be it poetry or cinematics, but Thomas Mann is the first writer I have ever read to openly address it. I cannot say if he personnally criticises this romanticised death-wish or simply wants to bring attention to it; his style is non-judgmental and at the end of his narration Mr Spinell as an example of the morbid artist and Mr von Klöterjahn as an image of the fun-loving but crude burgher are equally dislikable.
The struggle between a sublime death and an ordinary, but long and happy life is an idea that is as old as the art of storytelling itself, with examples ranging from the Arthurian legend to, for instance, Wuthering Heights and after my first encounter with Thomas Mann one that will probably occupy me for a little while to come.

The Beginning of my Library

I would like to claim that I spent the day reorganising my bookshelves, but since my books have never been in any kind of order before that would be a complete and utter lie. Instead it would be more accurate to say that I laid the foundation of my own little library today.

Since I decided to start reading the classics in November 2011 more and more books have been accumulating in my already stuffed room. There has never been a plan behind my acquisitions: whatever catches my eye and is affordable usually ends up in my possession. So Dickens slowly joined Harry Potter and Tolstoy landed in a pile together with Twilight. The problem with this is obvious; there is no system and you never find what you are looking for (and the floor is covered in stacks of books to the point of my room being no longer traversible). Nonetheless I never felt like I had enough classics to give them a place of their own, after all I am still practically a novice to classic literature. Anyway, just out of curiousity I decided today to pile all my classics up and see if there are enough of them to give them their own shelf. Can you imagine my surprise when I realised that they do not only fill a shelf but a whole bookcase? That I have in fact enough classics to sort them by century?

The result of my work, sorted by century with the ancient Greeks on top left and the Modernists on the bottom right

To this day I have collected exactly 70 books by classic authors, some of which I loved, some which I did not like too much (I'm looking at you, Faust!) and some that I have yet to read. I know that those two shelves contain only a tiny percentage of world literature, but I have hope that this percentage will continue to grow at the same rate for many, many years to come. By then I will hopefully have moved into a giant manor with my books, otherwise I see no way to accommodate all of them!

Time flies

Yes, my blog has once again been on hiatus and I am terribly sorry, but the last few weeks were simply crazy. I thought I knew what being stressed meant, but this end of term has taught me better: before receiving my certificate last Friday I had to write so many tests, complete so many assignments and hand in so many papers that the idea of a full night's sleep became a ridiculous fantasy. Obviously being in the second last year means that they want to prepare us for our A-levels by giving us a stress-induced heart-attack...
Anyway, the reward for surviving this torture is one glorious week of semester break that has just begun.

Reading-wise I don't have many news since the only thing I had time to read was the assigned The Best Little Girl in the World, which is a young adult novel about a girl with anorexia and therefore not exactly what I usually read. Over the semester break though I have to finish both Jean Anouilh's The Lark (a play about Jeanne d'Arc) and Thomas Mann's Tristan, so I will have some literature to write about soon enough.
Oh, and on a side note: I have finally seen Les Misérables and now simultanously love and hate this movie as well as Victor Hugo. I definitely have to get around to reading the end of the book!

Unfortunately and contrary to my wishes the world does not stop turning simply because I am busy and neither does anyone stop blogging only because I have no time to read their posts. So, in addition to having to catch up with all your blogs I have missed the Classic Clubs awesome Classics Spin, which makes me really sad because it seems so much fun. But, thank God, the rules in the announcement post state clearly that we should "feel free to rebelliously break the rules at our leisure" and I am taking them at their word; so I  will just post a list of 20 titles now and use this random number generator to choose which book I will be reading. While I pretend to belong you will simply have to trust me not to cheat because that would be kind of pointless.

Five books I am a little bit afraid of:
1. Don Quixote, de Cervantes
2. Clarissa, Richardson
3. Moby Dick, Melville
4. The Faerie Queene, Spenser
5. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

Five I can't wait to read:
6. Emma, Austen
7. Peter Pan, Barrie
8. The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood
9. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
10. Gone with the Wind, Michell

Five neutral titles:
11. Henry VIII, Shakespeare
12. Moll Flanders, Defoe
13. Beloved, Morrison
14. The House of the seven Gables, Hawthorne
15. Catch-22, Heller

Five books I have attempted to read before and never managed to finish:
16. Les Misérables, Hugo
17. Oliver Twist, Dickens
18. Mrs Dalloway, Woolf
19. The Divine Comedy, Alighieri
20. The Perks of being a Wallflower

That's the list, now fate will decide...God, I'm nervous!

And the randomly chosen number is: 

15

Which means the book I will have to finish until April 1st is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I know virtually nothing about it, so I am very curious. I hope it will turn out to be amazing and that everyone else is happy with their chosen book. Good luck!

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

As this view outside my window suggests, winter has come back suddenly and with force. The whole country is covered in at least 30 centimetres of snow and while everyone else is enjoying the unexpected winter wonderland I have been lying in bed with the flu for the past week, unable to move because everything is hurting. I have had a lot of time to sort out my thoughts though (especially since I'm trying not to think of all I am missing at school) and so I am finally able to write something about The Hobbit apart from "It is the most wonderful book!" and "Go read it immediately if you haven't already!".

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”

I think in a way this quote from The Hobbit sums up perfectly what my trouble with writing this review is: if I dislike a book or find it mediocre it is all too easy to dwell on its flaws and explain why I did not like it or which parts of it I found bad, but what if I completely and whole-heartedly love a book? Then there is not much to say except that it is very wise and beautiful.

Next to Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings the little Hobbit is almost always overlooked and underrated, but that is a grave mistake. Even though they are both set in the same world and feature partly the same characters those tales could not be more different from one another. The Hobbit possesses nothing of The Lord of the Rings's epic grandeur; it does not deal with the impending destruction of the world and conquering evil, nor are its characters heroes. It is simply the story of a little fellow's journey through a wide world. There and back again, nothing more.

However, in my opinion it would also be a mistake to dismiss it as a children's book just because it was written for Tolkien's own children. Yes, on the surface it as an adventure story (and a very good one, after all it was exciting enough to keep me reading through the whole night), but there is so much more behind that.
The book is told in a very light-hearted way with a subtle and wonderful sense of humour, but still there is a deep wisdom hidden in the apparently simple story. Tolkien must have been an admirable judge of character, for in his fantastic book are incredible realistic descriptions such as this, when the dragon Smaug notices that a little golden cup from his vast treasure has vanished:

“His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”

And the miracle with Tolkien is that he always manages to teach you something, but never in a lecturing or patronizing way. So, whether you have liked The Lord of the Rings or not, whether you have seen the movie adaptation or not and whether you think you will enjoy reading The Hobbit or hate it, I can only recommend one thing to you: leave aside all your expectations and try it. You might find yourselves surprised.

Readathon Wrap-up

It is the day after the readathon and also my first day back in school after the Christmas break which is a bad combination because the effects of the sleep deprivation are fully kicking in.
But, while I almost fell asleep in Geography today I have not regretted participating for one second: I had an amazing time and made a lot of progress. I want to thank the lovely organizers who sacrificed much of their free time to make this run smoothly and did a wonderful job!

I am very satisfied with the readathon because firstly, it was incredibly fun to keep in touch with all the other bloggers and I added quite a few titles to my TBR list and secondly, despite being away the whole afternoon and evening I managed to devote more than 13 hours exclusively to reading.
On the Classics Club website there is a wrap-up questionnaire which I am answering below.

1. What book(s) did you read during the event?
2. What book(s) did you finish?
3. What did you like about our event?
4. Do you have suggestions for future Readathons through The Classics Club?
5. Would you participate in future Readathons?

1. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Both of them, which is almost unbelievable keeping in mind my reading pace!
3. Everything. The interaction with other bloggers from all over the world, the opportunity to start the year with intense reading and the fact that there were updates and check-ins on the Classics Club site every few hours.
4. Not really, since the only thing which troubled me was the time difference and that is something not even our wonderful organizers can fix.



I may or may not have eaten all other chocolates during the readathon

5. Definitely! The sooner the better! Although it is certainly not beneficial for my nutrition...

The Classics Club Readathon

I couldn't keep myself from taking part, even if I know that cannot read the whole day because unfortunately I have some meetings in the afternoon and evening.

Anyway, I will just read through the night! And, yes, I am mightily excited! Let the classics-reading begin!

On the Classics Club blog there is a starting post with a few questions to kick off the event. I will answer them here and then update this post every few hours with my progress.

1. Snacks and Beverages of Choice?
2. Where are you reading from today?
3. What are your goals for the Readathon?
4. What book(s) are you planning on reading?
5. Are you excited?

1. Any Christmas leftovers I can find. There are still lots of cookies and chocolates left from the holidays and it is high time I eliminated them and started eating healthy again. As for the beverages I will probably be dependent on coffee, but a few cups of tea are always nice.
2. My family's livingroom, in an armchair right next to the Christmas tree. For those who don't visit my blog regularly: this is in Graz, Austria. Thanks to the American time the readathon starts at 2 p.m. for me and I will hopefully read until 2 p.m. on Sunday.
3.  Simply to read as much as possible, visit other blogs and have fun. Oh, and to dutifully finish Faust.
4. The second half of Faust, the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway but mostly J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. I read very slowly, so that's probably more than enough.
5. I think I've already answered this one...

The readathon starts in five minutes, so happy reading everyone! I'm looking forward to updates on your progress.

3.20 p.m.
The first hour is over and I have finished Faust. The end was much better than the beginning, but my pleasure in having read it is mostly the pleasure of conquest.
Now I have to take a break from reading and go to the city for a meeting, but I'll be back in two hours to start The Hobbit.

10.20 p.m.
The break took longer than expected, but I actually managed to squash in an hour of reading between my afternoon meeting and my invitation to dinner. I read the first 50 pages of The Hobbit and got completely sucked in. How could I ever start this book without finishing it? It is so perfect! The light, amusing but still deeply moving writing and on top of that the setting in my beloved Middle-Earth...I can't even describe how utterly right it feels to read it. So the plan for now is pretty much to spend the whole night with Tolkien in front of the Christmas tree. We'll see if I can bear the sleep deprivation.

1.00 a.m.
Sunday has now officially arrived here and keeping my eyes open is getting a little tough. Usually I would just drink more coffee, but my whole family is already fast asleep and the coffee machine is dreadfully loud, so I'll have to do without...
My reading progress is slow but steady, I'm on page 104 of The Hobbit and still enjoying it immensely. Also, I am almost at the end of the part that has been adapted into the recent movie and know virtually nothing about the storyline later, so things are getting exciting. I'd love to read until the morning. There is not anyone reading this who by chance knows a super-effective secret trick for keeping awake without caffeine?

3.20 a.m.
Still awake, which already is an achievement! I am only halway through the Hobbit since I read at a tortoise's pace, but I would love to finish it. I'll probably read for another hour or two and then catch a few hours' sleep before tackling the rest of it in the morning. After all I have time until 2 p.m. before the readathon is over.

4.40 a.m.
I can't believe I have made it so far! I'm on page 218 of my dear Hobbit, who is a lovely companion for this readathon and about to take a nap before hopefully finishing in the morning. Good luck to everyone still bearing up!

8.30 a.m.
I slept for about 3 hours, which was more refreshing than I thought. Now I'm curled up with The Hobbit again, (although most others seem to have given up?). I hope I can finish before the readathon is over!

1.30 p.m.
The readathon is almost over, which leaves me exhausted but proud and very happy. I have just finished
The Hobbit with perfect timing, if I may say so. It is such a shame that next to The Lord of the Rings this book is so often overlooked! It is heart-warming and told in a light way, but absolutely beautiful and far from childish.
With this I am closing off the readathon and saying thank you to the wonderful organizers for their great work. It was an amazing experience and tomorrow I will write a wrap-up post.

January Plans to keep me focused

While I am still optimistic about the year ahead, my enthusiasm has suffered a severe setback yesterday.
I begun reading the apparently best-known and most influential piece of German literature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. Not only do I feel that it is a gap in education not to have read the most praised literary work in my native language, I also have to finish it until Monday for my German class.
But this book! In it I seem to have found a new arch-nemesis! Usually I am patient with books, I give them time to fascinate me and hardly ever give up reading them, but I'm only twenty pages into Faust (getting there took me about three hours) and find it unbearable.
Everything is so exaggerated, every line drops with pathos and I have the impression that Goethe only wrote it because he was in love with the way his writing looked on paper.
Yes, I will finish it, but sadly I don't dare to hope that I will enjoy it.

Why are you making my life so hard, Dr. Faust?

Since my first reading project in the new year is such a disappointment I thought I might create some January plans to motivate me a little. 

Firstly, on the Classics Club site I have seen that Bex is hosting a readalong of Mrs. Dalloway beginning on Saturday which I'd love to take part in. Somehow I've never happened to read anything by Virginia Woolf, so I'm excited to do so now.

Apart from that I want to finally read The Hobbit in January. I have started reading it several times but never finished, which is strange because I remember loving the beginning every time. Now with the (wonderful) movie in the theatres it is high time I got around to reading the original!

Additionally I want to read a French novel for my books on France challenge, but I haven't decided which one yet. Perhaps it's time to finish Les Misérables eventually? Like The Hobbit I immensely enjoyed what I've read so far, I just somehow never managed to read it until the end.

Oh, and I desperately want to take part in the huge Classics Club Readathon which sounds incredibly fun, but on Saturday I am invited out both for lunch and dinner. For me the readathon would start at 2 p.m., so I could still read for quite a while, but I'm not sure if that wouldn't feel like cheating. Should I sign up nonetheless and just read through the night and the next morning? 

That's it, I'll have to get back to Faust now... I hope you're all still enjoying 2013 and your first book(s) in it!

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

We are two days into 2013 and so far everything is going splendidly, which of course doesn't mean anything, but I'm taking it as a good omen. This review of Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow is my first post in the new year and at the same time the first proper review I have written since the 6th of July. I was absent from blogging longer than I thought. Anyway, Jude Morgan's novel about the Brontë family was on my wishlist for a long time and when I got Atticus for Christmas and saw that the kindle edition only costs six euro (as opposed to eleven for the paperback) I didn't have to think long about which book should be my first e-book. There is something absolutely fascinating about this family: all children uniquely gifted writers, living secluded in their own little world, but haunted by tragedy. How could they manage to write books that changed the literary landscape forever? Who were the women who came up with Jane Eyre, Cathy and Heathcliff? Why did all of them die so young and how on earth could Charlotte survive the loss of almost her whole family? Perhaps it is exactly the comparative lack of information about their lives that makes their story so intriguing.

Jude Morgan wrote a fictionalized account of the Bröntës' lives, starting with the death of their mother and ending a little after Charlotte's marriage. Although all family members receive sufficient attention the novel's focus is clearly on Charlotte, something which you quickly notice through the style that - sometimes more, sometimes less drastically - seems to imitate Jane Eyre. I don't say that as criticism, in fact it was very appropriate, especially since Charlotte inevitably reminds the reader of her famous heroine. Of course there are differences between them: the "real" Charlotte Brontë is less outspoken and, naturally, less fortunate, but her personality in Morgan's portrayal is very similar to Jane's.
Again, I am not criticising  this, because Jane Eyre obviously is based on her author.

Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with the details of the Bröntës' lives to judge how much of their feelings and thoughts in the novel are adapted from their real sentiments expressed in letters, diaries or stories, but I have to bow to Jude Morgan anyway for creating such believable characters.
Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell are not just dusty entries in literary encyclopedias, but authentic, tangible people. If they did not exactly do or say the things as Morgan writes them, it is at least very easy to imagine that they could have done or said them. Whether it is Branwell's descent into alcoholism because he cannot bear the weight of expectations on him or Emily's inability to feel comfortable around people she cannot remember always loving; this novel draws very realistic pictures of the Brontë siblings' lives and personalities.
The only character I found a little one-dimensional is Anne, who is completely unselfish and only concerned with making the lives of her family members as easy as possible without regard to her own happiness, but then maybe that was Anne's role in her family. I don't know, but I am now eager to read her books.

With 464 pages this book was not too long, in fact it was a quick read, but it is maybe a little stretched in the middle and then too hurried when it comes to the development of the sisters' novels. About Emily's motivation to write Wuthering Heights the reader learns virtuallly nothing, for instance, and Charlotte's inspiration for Jane Eyre is also only outlined roughly. (Looking at her live I have to wonder where Mr. Rochester comes from.) But again, perhaps there simply is no existing information on these topics and Jude Morgan didn't want to invent anything. To be sure, it doesn't impair his novel much: The Taste of Sorrow is a great book for anyone interested in the Brontës and I am looking forward to reading more from Jude Morgan, his novels on Shakespeare and the romantic poets for example.

Changes and Enthusiasm

As all of you currently reading this will probably have noticed, I have finally managed to upload a background image. Doesn't sound like a big deal, right? Except that it took me three whole days, various visits on nerdy IT-websites and several nervous breakdowns to make it work. And they say we're the computer generation...

Anyway, I am brimming over with enthusiasm right now, so I'll seize the opportunity to announce a few changes and plans for 2013. After all, it already is almost New Year's Eve.

A little early, but still: Happy new year!

Like probably every other devoted reader during the last few years and especially now that they are becoming so mainstream I have given a little thought to e-readers. The idea of carrying around as many books as you want to and never lack space on your shelves again is an intriguing one, but in the end I am just a little too old-fashioned to decide on giving up all tangible books for a mere gadget. Thankfully this decision was made for me since I received a Kindle for Christmas! I'm still in the testing phase, but so far I'm -unexpectedly- loving Atticus (yes, I've already named him: which name could be more appropriate than that of book-loving wonderful Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird?). 

The first e-book I've downloaded is Jude Morgan's fictionalised biography of the Brontë family, The Taste of Sorrow. It is very interesting, but I'm anxious to finish it before tomorrow night because I don't want to start 2013 with a half-read book. It is silly, but for me it just feels better to start a new year with a new book.
Which brings me to my developing reading plans! I love making plans and participating in reading challenges, and I am especially excited since I had to cancel all my challenges this year because of my abrupt hiatus.

The amazing Narrative Poem Reading Challenge is hosted over at Half-Hilled Attic. I plan on finally reading Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso after loving Inferno so much. Additionally I feel as if it was about time I finally tackled Homer, so I will probably give him a try, as well as Edmund Spenser's The Faery Queene which I'm really curious about. And of course Paradise Lost, which I've wanted to read for years but somehow never did.

Another challenge which comes exactly at the right time is the Books on France Reading Challenge. Usually I am horribly neglecting French literature (and my poor French), but this is the chance to change that. I will probably be aiming for the level "beaucoup", meaning that I will read 6 French books, so one every two months, but it will take me a little longer to decide on the titles.

And my for the moment last challenge will be the Wishlist Challenge from Uniflame Creates. This one is especially fun because you only read books that are already on your wishlist; so you basically get to read those books you've been wanting to lay hands on for ages. During the next few days I'll write a separate announcement post detailing which 12 titles I plan to read for this challenge.

That's it for now! I hope I can carry some of this enthusiasm into 2013. Oh, and before I forget: I'm wishing you all a great last day of 2012 and a good beginning of the next year!

Stuck in the Labyrinth

Perhaps thinking really is the root of all evil, the source of all unhappiness.
Look at me half a year ago: quite obviously there was nothing wrong with my life, nothing, except the nagging  doubt in my mind. There were just so many unanswered questions; questions I tried not to think about because they only made me miserable, but I literally couldn't. One cannot stop thinking simply because  one wishes to. And the more I thought about them; the more I thought in general, the more I felt the sadness creeping in and seeping through my whole being.

What will become of my life? How shall I ever choose the right path for my future in this labyrinth of possibilities? What do I really want? Will I ever find someone with whom I can be just myself? Why am I so different from everyone I know? Why do I always have to pretend in society; pretend I like people I can't stand, pretend I'm interested in their trivialities, pretend I am just like them? Why can't I keep my mouth shut when I know it's better to be quiet? Why do I quarrel with almost everyone? Why do I feel best when I am hidden away from the world, reading? Why is the world inside my mind so much more beautiful than the one outside? Why is my life so boring? Will it ever be anything else? Am I making myself unhappy because I expect too much? How could I think myself in any way special, expect something special for me? Do I even want this life at all? What would be so bad about throwing it away? Why can't I just give up?  And, the ever classic: Is there a sense in life? What for am I on earth? When I die, will something remain apart from dust and shadows?

You see, five minutes in my mind are probably enough to drive anyone mad. But there is another especially burning question, one which may explain to you why exactly I refused to read anything since August.
Perhaps it is my own fault that I am so unhappy? Perhaps I have made myself sad by reading too much, perhaps the books have simply planted unrealistic ideas in my mind? Perhaps I would not be so unsatisfied with the real world if I had never entered the world between the pages of a book?
I have no answer to this, but I tried to find one by changing my life completely. I tried to be a typical teenager, just like everyone else around me. I tried to stop thinking, stop caring, I went out a lot, drank and smoked. Needless to say, instead of feeling happy I slowly started to hate everyone, and above all myself.

And now? Now I am back. Changed and with a vast collection of new scars, but still back. I realised I missed a part of myself, in fact I missed the very part of me that makes me myself. This part is hard to define, but blogging, reading the classics and all of you definitely belong to it.
I know that I will have to make a lot of changes on this blog (and in my life) and I don't quite know yet which direction things are going to take, but I am back for good. If you still want me, that is.

What a Week!

About a week ago I came back from holidays brimming over with enthusiasm. I wanted to blog all day long, write about books, talk about books and read all the books on my shelves at the same time because each book seemed like a glorious adventure. And now? There's hardly anything left of it and it's my own fault, so this is probably going to be the first completely non-bookish post I've ever written.
This week a lot of crazy stuff has been going on here. How come I'm always busier during summer break than when I have to go to school? This is a serious scientific problem.

I'll start with the sad news: my guinea pig Hermine (named after the German variation of Harry Potter's Hermione) died as an old lady of eight and a half years. I sat by her when it happened and if you have ever watched a little animal die, you'll know that it is heartbreaking. She lay on her side, something which she had never done before and now and then her whole body jerked violently. At the very end her eyes were wet and it looked as if she was crying. I had never seen anyone or anything die before, but when she suddenly lay very still I knew that she was dead. Not the best start into a week...

To "cheer me up" my whole family decided to organise a belated birthday party for me since I actually turned sixteen on the 29th of July, but was in Greece at the time. I suspect that they all just wanted to eat birthday cake, because they know exactly that I hate my birthday. There is something about being the birthday girl, being the supposed centre of attention that I never liked and since my family had a horrible quarrel during my birthday party some years ago I refuse to recognise birthdays as special days in any way. Well, my family celebrated nonetheless, ate their cake and were satisfied. Back to normal life now, please!

Finally something positive to tell! While my mood was definitely below average for a large part of last week, I have some amazing news. I am sure you all know shows like Riverdance or Lord of the Dance. What those incredible dancers do is Irish Dance, a form of traditional Irish stepdance which makes the dancers look as if they were weightless. Last week I listened to some Irish folk songs and suddenly wondered how one could not dance to these rhythms, so I did a lot of research and found several academies for Irish dance in Austria. Unfortunately they are all situated in Vienna which is about three hours' drive away from where I live. But since annoying people has often led me to success I wrote emails to all those schools inquiring after a possibility to learn dancing in Graz. To make a long story short, after several desperate calls to complete strangers I actually found a coach who is starting a beginners' class here in my tiny town in October.

I am so excited! The only problem is that I have no experience in dancing at all and that I am not a very athlectic person. I have started working out in order to be fit enough when dance class starts (and lose a little weight, have you seen those dancers? Tiny elves, all of them!) and that is the reason I am currently reading so little. My muscles are sore, I'm tired and cannot really concentrate.
So, enough whining! I seriously have to get back to writing focused posts without self-pity. Maybe I'll manage that tomorrow...I have lots to say about Persuasion and Jane Austen.
I hope you're all having a nice week!

Not all those who wander are lost - My favourite classic

Like the vast majority of devoted readers I protest at having to choose one favourite book. That is simply not possible; what with North and South, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and The Divine Comedy, to name just a few. On the other hand nothing is easier for me than choosing the book I have the most personal connection with, the one which changed my life the most and which I spent so many hours dreaming over that its pages became my substitute for the real world. The title of this post already gives away which book I am talking about, at least for those of you who have read and maybe loved it.

To be honest, my history with The Lord of the Rings is not a cheerful story; in fact it is a story of loneliness and not belonging anywhere and after reading it even the last of you will be convinced that I am a complete nerd: how else could I feel this way about a fantasy book? But I don't care because for me The Lord of the Rings is so much more than just a book: it is my childhood, it is accepting myself, it is the world I explored before I had the courage to even want to go anywhere apart from Middle-Earth. For me, it is home.

I was nine years old when I first came across the strange name "The Lord of the Rings". Like so many others I have to thank Peter Jackson's wonderful movies (which are definitely my favourite movies ever, here it's easier to choose than with books) for getting to know Mr Tolkien at all. My mama saw all the movies when they were released and loved them so much that she bought the books, although she never read them. A few years later the movies were shown on TV here in Austria and after having put me and my little brothers to bed she sat down to watch The Fellowship of the Ring with my oldest sister. Had I slept well that night my life would have taken a different direction, but fate in the shape of a nightmare drove me to the living room not long after the movie had started. Normally no mother would allow her nine-year old to watch such a movie, after all there are quite a few rather tough fighting scenes in it, but somehow people seemed to be constantly forgetting my age when I was a child.
Of course I was always very tall, but more than that I was always "mature"; I led serious discussions about things no normal nine-year old girl would think of, I used big words and had even bigger ideas.In fact my mama sometimes says half-jokingly that she thinks I never was a child at all. And that is the reason why I hated a grand part of my childhood so much.

When I started school I had already taught myself how to read and write and I was impatient to learn more. I asked questions all the time and when I didn't understand something or when my opinion differed from my teacher's I actually argued with her. Now, I went to a catholic convent school and my teacher was a very severe and rigorous nun...You can imagine how well she understood my character. She criticised me all the time, often made me stay with her during the breaks and after school to lecture me and brought me to tears several times a week. The only thing that was worse than dealing with her was dealing with the other children in my class. I could as well have been from another planet so little did I understand them and they me! The only things they cared for were Disney movies, sleepovers, boygroups and Barbies. Of course they only acted their age, but I didn't know that then. The only thing I knew was that I was an outcast, I longed for adventures, stories, great ideas and dreams and I wanted to do something meaningful, to be so much more than just a little lonely schoolgirl.

That was the point of my life where I met Frodo and Sam, Gandalf, Legolas, Aragorn and all the others. All the heroes. There they were: brave and strong enough to face all their enemies despite their fear, even the smallest of them standing up and fighting for what is right, for hope, for freedom. They showed me exactly who I wanted to be. They became my friends when I had no others. For years I would imagine Gandalf by my side whenever I was afraid, Gandalf in whose presence I could only be safe. When I needed to be strong I slipped into the role of Aragorn and when I was frustrated because I was treated like a little child I remembered Éowyn. My brothers and I would spend hours in the woods fighting with our bows and "swords", escaping from black riders and defeating Sauron. Honestly I think a lot of the self-confidence I have comes from that time: I knew everything about Middle-Earth and learned a great deal about our world through it. I still know almost all of the songs (I even composed melodies for them) and poems which appear in the book by heart and some of them are about three pages long. Finally I had something special only for me, something which the people who bullied me would never understand. But now that I think of it, being a little girl who was able to handle a sword certainly helped to boost my confidence a little too.

I devoured all the movies and then I became the first to take the books from my mother's shelves and find comfort in their pages. I know that many people who loved the film were disappointed by the book and that makes me sad because these two are simply completely different things. While the movies tell the wonderful stories of a few characters, Tolkien does not really want to do so primarily. What Tolkien does is create a whole world, he doesn't just invent a few heroes, places and magical creatures like the fantasy authors nowadays do; he tells the story of his world, consisting of an incredible number of separate stories, each of them as complex as that of Frodo and the Ring. Middle-Earth goes so much farther than The Lord of the Rings. Every side character, even every place has a history and most of them are only touched upon in Tolkien's actual books. Middle-Earth is boundless and its complexity allows it to become real. It became my reality when I wanted nothing else than to get away from this world I hated so much. It was my world when I needed it and if you listen carefully it can become yours too.

"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost"

Seven years have passed since I first found a home in Middle-Earth. In this time I managed to find a place for me in the "real" world too, but without the dreams from my first home I would never have had the courage to look for it. And, believe it or not, if I try to be a little better a person today than others in similar circumstances, if I look for beauty in seemingly hopeless places, if I fight for what I believe is right and if I never give up I owe it to J.R.R..
You can call me a nerd now, of course, but you can also call me a patriot: a part of my heart will forever belong to Middle-Earth.

A Sign of Life

Do you remember almost a month ago when I wrote a post saying that I was going on a holiday to France but that I would be back in two weeks? Yeah, that's what I thought back then. The reason why you haven't heard anything from me since is that despite all probabilities I'm not back at home yet. As I'm writing this I'm sitting at the Cretan airport waiting for my flight home: my mama surprised me and my brothers with a holiday at the beach the very day after I came back from France. Isn't my life stressful?!

This is basically a don't-worry-I'm-still-alive-and-having-a-good-time-post, but unless another unexpected trip pops up I should be back to blogging regularly tomorrow. And good God, I'm swooning at the thought of how I'll ever be able to catch up with all your great posts! 

Don't get me wrong, the last three weeks were amazing, especially my time in France was incredible (perhaps I'll write a little post about it another time?), but I will be quite happy when I'm comfortably at home again. I have missed reading your thoughts on books and life more than I would have thought possible and I have a vast number of posts in my mind which will hopefully all be written soon. Don't be annoyed if I'm a little over-active in August, I have to make up for my involuntary blogging break in July!

Anyway, my reading has not been as scarce as my reviewing, in fact I have a whole bunch of reviews yet to write. In France I read Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, which surprised me completely by how much I loved it (I'm giving up, Diana. Never again will I doubt the awesomeness of a book you recommend!).

Then I finished An Ideal Husband, which I found good, of course, but not outstanding. Perhaps I've read a little too much Wilde recently? I'm getting very used to his humour. 

In contrast to it I picked up Wuthering Heights - you see I stayed faithful to the Victorians for Allie's Victorian Celebration, although unfortunately I did not manage to write my reviews in time for it. In my opinion the event could have lasted some more weeks, the Victorians and I are becoming the best of friends!

In August I hope to catch up with the Les Misérables readalong which I have once again shamefully neglected as well as participate in Alice's The Moonstone readalong; that is if she still lets me.

I have also promised to read a book by Jane Austen (and if you know me, you'll know what that means for me) but more about that in another post.

Lastly (quickly, because my flight was just announced) and completely unrelatedly I want to thank you all for the nice comments on my last post. I was really overwhelmed by all your lovely wishes for my trip. I couldn't answer them then, but now I do: thank you very much, I feel honoured to belong to such an amazing blogging community. 

So, time to go home!

Au Revoir

Yesterday was the date I anticipated most for many months: the last day of school. Finally I have passed all tests, written all essays, done all research projects and, thank God, received my certificate.
What lies before me now are two golden months of summer holidays before the madness begins again.
Summer holidays mean reading, sleeping until noon, lazy afternoons at the pool - and travelling.
Tomorrow my dad, Honeyponey and I are leaving at an unearthly hour for France. At least when she's in a good mood Honey is the sweetest "little" sister you can imagine, she is 18 but doesn't quite act her age, and my dad is a slightly confused person anyway, so most of the planning and navigation of our trip will be up to me. I don't really mind though, if nothing else it will be a splendid opportunity to practise my French. Five years of learning have to amount to something, don't they?


According to the plan we will be touring the south of France for the next two weeks and the weather is currently the very picture of summer, so I am really excited. From Graz we will drive to San Remo in Italy first  and then further on to France, along the shore of the legendary Côte d'Azur with a stop in Monaco to the Provence and then as far west as to Toulouse. I am still trying to convince my dad to extend the trip to Andorra for a day, but even if he doesn't give in I will still see places as famous as Nice, Cannes, Marseille, Avignon, Nîmes and Carcassonne. I think to say that I am excited is in fact the understatement of the year.
The only drop of bitterness is that I will not be around to blog and read your posts for two whole weeks. I will have a hard time catching up on all of you once I'm back!

I don't expect to have much time for reading, but since I never leave home without a book I am of course taking some Victorians with me. Wuthering Heights will stay in Austria because somehow I'm having a hard time getting into it and I'd rather read it when I'm craving some Bronte romance instead of having to force myself to read it. Apart from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (short stories are fantastic for travelling) I will also be taking my edition of Oscar Wilde's plays with me and probably finish An Ideal Husband. 
Anyway, what I am most excited about is North and South, I have read the first hundred pages and want to read on and on and on; in short I'm utterly loving it and could continue to write about it for a long time, but my unpacked suitcase is calling me. Au revoir, mes amis et à bientôt!

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

 A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Little Women and now of course Anne of Green Gables - How come I never read any of the common children's classics when I was young? Sadly, those wonderful English books are hardly known here and if children are familiar with their stories at all, then only thanks to movie adaptations. Perhaps all those classics are so little-known in Austria because they always lose some of their charm when they are being translated, but I cannot help wondering why we don't have any German classics to pass from generation to generation instead. The only thing I'm sure about is that I will hand my copy of Anne of Green Gables on to my future daughter, so that she will know what her mother was like when she was her age.

Here is something which should never appear in a review, but which I have to admit in all honesty: I cannot talk neutrally or objectively about Anne of Green Gables. Anne Shirley is so much like the little girl I used to be that I desperately wish I had read about her when I was still a child. Then I would have known that so many kindred spirits are out there that even books are written about them! I read some passages (especially speeches of Anne dropping with big words and greater ideas) to my mother and she was amazed because apparently I regularly delivered similar monologues when I was a child. Quite coincidentally I even had red hair until some years ago when it lightened to strawberry blond, and believe me, being called "carrots" is a capital offense which totally deserves being punished with eternal hate.

Anne's passionate nature, her limitless curiosity and of course her imagination are very familar to me too. Unfortunately I also share her habit of losing my temper when someone treats me disrespectfully.
Reading this when I was still Anne's age would have been a wonderful experience, but I enjoyed it very much anyway now that I finally came across it. While reading I was reminded of many episodes of my childhood which I had completely forgotten and I have to say that perhaps it is a good thing I never heard of Anne Shirley when I was young: I cannot even imagine all the mischief her stories would have inspired me to.
Needless to say, I love the character of Anne Shirley and envy Diana quite ardently for being her bosom friend.

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

Mrs Montgomery certainly had a fantastic talent for creating characters, for although I will probably quickly forget most of Anne's childhood adventures, the people surrounding her will stay with me for a long time. Matthew's pride of and care for Anne especially warmed my heart and Marilla reminded me of my grandmother in her harsh but loving way. The ending was so sad that I actually cried, which happened the last time to me at the ending of A Tale of Two Cities.
Oh, and I am very curious what will become of Gilbert Blythe, I think I see some romance coming. Usually I don't care too much for long series and I don't promise I will read all eight Anne books, but I guess it's safe to say that Anne of Avonlea will be among my birthday presents this year.

Half a Year, twenty Books and a whole new Person

It is the first week of July and halway-through-the-year-posts are mushrooming everywhere over the blogging community. Of course I meant to join the general trend anyway with an update on my reading challenges, my progress in personal life as well as in reading and plans for the rest of the year, but until last night I had no idea how much this past half-year really changed me.

Yesterday I was sitting on the balcony and reading Wuthering Heights when my sister came by in a very bad mood and asked how I could read such boring books. Needless to say, she never read Wuthering Heights or any other Brontë, in fact the only classics she ever touched were a few German and Austrian books she absolutely had to read for school. Never did she read or even want to read an English classic, she knows nothing of Dicken's adorable characters apart from what she saw in the Mickey Mouse adaptation of A Christmas Carol, she never stayed up until the early hours of the morning to finish a case with Sherlock Holmes and if you mentioned the name Wilkie Collins in her presence I'm sure she would think you were talking about a woman. More than anything, she never read a thought which so essentially mirrored the depths of her soul that the author must have known her, must have written these sentences about her because surely no one else in the world could feel exactly the same, just to be reminded that those thoughts were published hundreds of years before she was born.

How dare she call the classics boring and stupid when she has never read them? To say it with her own words: because they are old, and old books cannot be interesting. She is not able to imagine that maybe even when an author wrote his book by hand and had never heard of a thing like the telephone he may have felt the same feelings as she does and captured them in his writings. She cannot envision that she will feel less alone because in Jane Eyre there is a girl who thinks exactly the same way she does and who is entirely so like herself that the fact that she never lived matters little. She knows nothing of kindred spirits.
And, despite my angry attempt to explain all this to her, she can't waste her time trying to read something which she knows to be absolutely boring when there are so many good, i.e. new (fantasy) books out there.

After our argument I was furious because she condemned something I love without knowing anything about it, without giving it a chance and without listening. A little later I was sad, because I realised that most people think like my sister and that in fact I don't know anyone in real life who reads the way I do. While I love the blogging community and find it wonderful to exchange thoughts and opinions with all of you I cannot help feeling lonely at times because I can never have a face-to-face discussion about the books I read with anyone. Anyway, right now I'm feeling neither sad nor lonely, but happy and thankful for this past half-year.

I started reading the classics and simultaneously blogging in December, so now I am looking back on the first half-year of reading classic literature in my life. Not counting a few non-classic titles, I have read twenty books until now. That is not much, but you cannot imagine how much those twenty titles have changed me. Half a year ago I would have shrugged and wondered a little about it if someone had told me that all books written before 1900 were boring, now I am starting a fiery argument because those twenty books turned me into someone else. They changed me because A Tale of Two Cities made me turn pages quicker than the finale of Harry Potter could and because the love story in Jane Eyre captivated me more than the one in Twilight. Even though I am still a raw beginner, have not read a tenth of what I would like to have finished by now and in all honesty know virtually nothing about literature, I feel like I have progressed immensely. I may not be doing too well in my reading challenges, which is rather I am failing them epically, but I am not worried at all. Firstly, I have two months of holidays before me to catch up and will probably read from sun-up to sun-down and secondly I feel that I have already learned that which is most important and which so many never do because they are either too lazy or to prejudiced: to love the classics with all my heart.

Mark Twain and The Awful German Language

And there I thought I was having a difficult relationship with German! Compared to Mark Twain I am a faithful and devoted admirer of its curiosities. In his essay The Awful German Language he spares no pains to prove its horrible shortcomings, complete disorder and lack of system; in fact Mark Twain takes his criticism as far as the boundaries of satire and his imagination will let him.

First off: I don't really know how I liked this "brilliantly witty piece of literature" as the blurb of my edition states. It is a very light, short and entertaining read for anyone who has ever had troubles learning an illogical and complicated language. While I of course could not relate to the problems any foreigner must have learning German (for I admit it has a horribly difficult grammar), I remembered a lot of similar difficulties I had with other languages such as French, Spanish and Italian. And this is where my criticism begins.
I am by no means influenced by national pride -there is hardly a harsher critic of my land and language than a true Austrian-  but for a native speaker of German some of Twain's remarks are simply ridiculous.

Mark Twain cannot have had much experience studying foreign languages, because the predominant part of his critique can be applied to almost any European language, not just German. The completely random distribution of sexes for example is a part of any language I have ever studied (except for Japanese, but that has its own stumbling blocks). That the English language is free from grammatical sexes of any kind is a wonderful relief, but then I don't know any other language whose grammar is so simple and clear as the English. I can tell you, though, that English has its own difficulties for eager students (vocabulary! You have so many words for one and the same thing! And then tenses! In my opinion there are roughly twenty ways of expressing that something will happen in the future...but I'm departing from the topic).

What really irritated me was that some of Twain's points of criticism are simply wrong. In one paragraph he talks for instance about the German habit of over-describing things.

"A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman -- Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Engländerinn," -- which means "the she-Englishwoman." I consider that that person is over-described."

Now, first of all the particle to signalise a woman is -in, not -inn (the multitude of spelling mistakes in this short essay makes Twain's authority as a competent judge of the language somewhat less believable). Secondly, "die" means exactly the same as "the", so "die Engländerin" translates literally to "the Englishwoman", which makes it exactly the same as in English. In my opinion it is even easier, because an -in at the end of a word always means that the person is a woman, which avoids a lot of confusion. I can have a male friend, "Freund", and a female friend, "Freundin" and instantly know the difference, whereas when someone talks in English about a friend I am always wondering whether this is a woman or a man.

Then at one point Twain moans about the long German words. It is true, we tend to use only one word when the English use several, but I don't really see why "Unabhängigkeitserklärung" which literally translates to "independencedeclaration" should be so much worse than "declaration of independence". And some of his remarks are nothing but inaccurate: contrary to Twain's claim there is no German word which changes its meaning depending on which syllable is emphasised. Also, I get the impression that he never learned French, which is far, far more intricate and haphazard, since he believes that "a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in 30 hours, French in 30 days and German in 30 years".

Obviously I cannot consider myself as gifted, for I have spent the last five years studying French and am nowhere near fluent. 

But who would dare to question Mark Twain's expertise in German, a language he has studied for nine whole weeks?

I have just noticed that this post sounds much harsher than I intended it to be. Who would have thought that? Perhaps I am a tiny little bit proud of my mother tongue after all? Anyway, I admit: German grammar is systemless and this essay really amusing, just don't take it too serious. It is probably more enjoyable and easier to dwell in Twain's dry humour for someone who cannot control the accuracy of all of his critical remarks.