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Johnny

johnny@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 month ago

I'm mostly a sporadic reader but I felt like I needed a place to talk about what I read.

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Murder on the Orient Express (2007, Harpercollins Pub Ltd, imusti) 4 stars

While en route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, …

Neat puzzle

4 stars

Murder on the Orient Express is certainly a decent "whodunnit", although at this point the conclusion of the story is so well-known that I can't really judge how well it was executed from the viewpoint of a reader without that prior knowledge. It's a quick, fluent read once you get used to Christie's vocabulary and style of writing, which is (unsurprisingly) rather antiquated in some passages. I was a little surprised at the untranslated French interjections and phrases; people who don't know at least a little French might stumble upon them.

All in all I found it to be a great book to read for fun in 2 days. Some of the details and the general way the pieces of the puzzle fit together ended up being pretty satisfying and less one-dimensional than I remembered from whatever movie adaptation I watched ages ago.

Die Berlinreise (Hardcover, 2014, Random House GmbH) 4 stars

Anfang der sechziger Jahre fährt Hanns-Josef Ortheil zusammen mit seinem Vater in das geteilte Nachkriegsberlin. …

Ein ganz einzigartiges historisches Abenteuer

4 stars

Als jemand, der im heutigen Berlin aufgewachsen ist, dann aber als Erwachsener weg gezogen ist, hat mich dieses Buch wie den Autor selbst auf eine Reise genommen.

Ich habe zusammen mit dem Autor das Berlin der 60er kennengelernt, habe geschmunzelt über seine liebenswürdigen Ausführungen und Einschübe, wurde emotional berührt von den Geschichten, die sich hinter all den besuchten Orten verbergen.

Eine überraschend eindrucksame kindliche Perspektive voller Wissbegierde, Neugier und Bodenständigkeit gepaart mit einem wunderbar simplen, aber bildlichen Schreibstil. Wem Berlin am Herzen liegt oder wer dort vor 50-60 Jahren spazieren gehen möchte, der wird viel Freude an diesem Buch haben.

The Captain and the Glory (Hardcover, 2019, 2019) 2 stars

Shallow and unimaginative satire

2 stars

What if the USA were a constantly moving ship on the ocean? What if the US President was the captain of the ship? What if Donald Trump was a really stupid captain? That's the premise of this book, and that's what it keeps to. It builds a ship-analogy for most of what happened during Donald Trump's presidency, sometimes pretty ridiculous ones. While doing so, it fails to be witty or insightful – it's a child's understanding of how the world works, it infantilises the Trump character, it falls short of finding a more nuanced critique than "everything used to be great but then a bunch of idiots came and ruined everything".

It's a bit tragic, because at some points the author shows that he could have done better. The best parts are those that don't try to be smug, the small parts that are about the individual humans and their …