Anne Frank — Het achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 juni 1942–1 augustus 1944

12 juni 1942. Ik zal hoop ik aan jou alles kunnen toevertrouwen, zoals ik het nog aan niemand gekund heb, en ik hoop dat je een grote steun voor me zult zijn.

In Stephen King's 11.22.63 Jake Epping doesn't get the chance to go back and kill Hitler. There's no time machine. Just a wormhole to 11:58 a.m. on September 9, 1958. That means that, by just hanging around a bit in the past, he eventually might get a chance to prevent Kennedy getting shot in Dallas, on Elm Street, on November 22nd, 1963, and thus making the world a better place. You know, that other old tid-but about butterflies flapping their wings and hurricanes in China.

But of course, it's a Stephen King novel, so it isn't that straightforward. Our hero finds that the past doesn't like to be changed, and that actually living in the past generates its own set of complications. Also, you have to account for Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act.

Let's be clear: as a self-confessed Stephen King fanboy, I find it hard to be objective about 11.22.63. I just think it's a damn fine book, definitely one of his best.

Stephen King — 22.11.63 (a novel)

I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

The monomyth is divided in several stages, which I won't go into here. If you want more, there's a practical guide to the hero's journey, that originated as a memo in the movie industry. Which should come as no surprise, because aren't they in the business of telling stories that appeal to as wide an audience as possible? You can imagine how a framework that has developed autonomously in numerous cultures from all over the world would be helpful in achieving that aim.

Back to the book. I included it on my list of 40 books to read before my 40th birthday because it's basic premise, all myth boils down to the same thing is relevant to my interests. There are many parallels between current religious myth and all those that have now been degraded to ye-olde fairy tales of yore—I mean, it's not as if virgin births and/or resurrections are unique to christian mythology—and I thought it would be informative to read some more about that. And that it was. It also reminded me why I don't usually read non-fiction: the parts between the abundant examples of the various myths can be dry as a very dry thing.

Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised, writes Sigmund Freud, that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. […] —from the preface.

And when I say based on, I mean loosely based on. Really loosely, in fact. I mean, sure, there's three kids called Swallow, Brat and Poor Baby—well, those are not their proper names, nobody could be christened with names that—and there's this stranger who might be Jesus or just an escaped convict that hides in their barn, but that's it. It really is.

Basically, they took the main story, themes and some of the characters, and ran with it. To name a few differences: in the book, the children's mother ran of to South Africa with this guy Peregrine. In the musical, she died. Amos, the James Dean-bad boy-rebel without a cause on a motorbike from the musical is a nine year-old who needs looking after from a nanny in the book. Getting the gun from the emergency box near the train tunnel? Didn't happen. There are no preachers who ask you to take up snakes to test your faith in Jesus. Swallow doesn't fall in love with either the man or Amos? She's twelve, after all.

So, all in all, I read a quite different story than the one I was familiar with. Still a good story, though. It focuses more on the children and how they keep believing, no matter what the grown-ups tell them.

Mary Haley Bell — Whistle Down the Wind

I am ten, and they call me Brat.

Om met het gedeelte 'thriller' te beginnen: er gebeurt in het hele verhaal bijzonder weinig: een gezelschap Italianen reist in 1647 naar Parijs, waar een opera opgevoerd dient te worden. Maar dat blijkt achteraf gezien een zet in een politiek schaakspel te zijn. Einde verhaal. Veel expositie door middel van fragmenten uit boeken, brieven en verhandelingen over het verleden, en geen noemenswaardige actie.

En dan kom je bij 'literair.' Volgens mij is dat in dit geval vooral een excuus om pretentieus te zijn. Dat begint al op pagina 2, bij het overzicht van personages. Dat zijn er om te beginnen 22. In een verhaaltje van 96 pagina's. De schrijvers attenderen je erop dat Alle namen, data, plaatsen en grote gebeurtenissen uit dit boek zijn ontleend aan archiefdocumenten. Alle personages hebben echt bestaan. Het laatste boek dat ik las dat zoiets vermeldenswaardig vond was The DaVinci Code, en dat was nu ook niet bepaald een literair hoogstandje.

Of het een opzettelijke poging is semi-barokke taal te uiten, of dat het door de vertaling komt weet ik niet, maar er staan een paar draken van zinnen in het boek:

Lulli, zoals hij algauw door de musici werd genoemd, had een ware passie voor muziek, ook al had de hertogin van Montpensier, een nicht van de koning, hem meteen de keuken ingeschopt in plaats van hem in te zetten voor haar lessen Italiaans, gezien de geringe aanvalligheid van het ventje.

Tien bonuspunten voor wie mij uit kan leggen wat er hier vredesnaam bedoeld word. Of wat dacht je van Slimmer dan hij was Mazarin geweest, …? Slimmer dan hij? Een van mijn stelregels voor het Nederlands is dat als het niet goed klinkt, het vast niet goed is. Ik krijg van dit soort zinnen jeuk op onbereikbare plaatsen.

Nee, ik was niet echt onder de indruk van dit boekje. 't Is heel leuk hoor, bakken research doen om een verhaaltje aan feiten op te hangen, maar dan moet je wel een interessant verhaal hebben om te vertellen. Ik voel me dan ook niet genoodzaakt me in het verdere repertoire van Sorti & Monaldi te verdiepen.

Monaldi & Sorti — Versluiering (Dissimulazione, vertaal door Jan van der Haar)

Zou ik u heel misschien een vraag mogen stellen, monsire Naudé… waagde ik met mijn bovenlijf vooroverhellend naar mijn gespreksgenoot, terwijl we in het donker van het poststation, ternauwernood beschenen door het zieltogende haardvuur, wachtten op de paardenwissel.

No, this wasn't the first time I read The Hobbit. It was the first time I read it English, though. And although it's nowhere near as good as what came next, it probably won't be the last time I've read it either.

J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Unfortunately, the book didn't live up to the introduction. Jillette, a self proclaimed loud, aggressive, strident, outspoken atheist, and […] an asshole took the ten commandments, replaced them with ten godless suggestions and used those as structure to tell some stories. These stories somehow deal (be it ever so slightly) with the suggestion. And so God No! sometimes is more like a memoir than a book on atheism.

Which isn't a bad thing per se. Jillette knows how to tell a story. It's just that these stories sometimes fail to be, well, relevant to my interests. So a straight man had an awkward evening in a gay bathhouse. Big deal. On the other hand, when he's on, he's on. There's a couple of really good pieces in the book, and you can pull some nice quotes from it.

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Penn Jillette — God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales

If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child—would you do it?

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a bunch of fun. Chewing the fat over old Holden Caulfield. I can see why this novel is considered a classic. Because it is.

J.D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Meanwhile, unknown to each other, two competing ships are racing to their destination, the Holy Island of Terravitae, the homeland of Ondun, the Creator of All Things, and the island from where his sons, the founders of their respective religions, once set sail to explore the world and to find the lost Key to Creation.

Of course, in the end all works out. Both ships meet just before reaching Terravitae, and because both are badly damaged, forcing the opposing factions to cooperate. And then it turns out that the Holy Books from both their religions have nothing to do with what really happened and with what is actually, you know, real:

It bothered him to think that the beliefs that shaped a persons soul were more a result of geographical circumstance than proof or truth. Shouldn't devotion to the Book of Aiden, or Urec's Log, be based on the values of the teachings themselves, and noth whether a baby happened to be born in Tierra or Uraba?

Then the long dead Ondun rises from the dead, and they all race home to save the day. If that's not a Deus ex machina, I'm the pope.

As I said in my comments on the previous parts of this trilogy, the religious angle that permeates everything annoyed the living daylights out of me. So concluding your trilogy with the discovery that both religions aren't actually all that different and that it would be, like, totally awesome just to be nice to each other for a change is a bit of a cop out. And asking me to accept that this would work as an solution to years of bloodshed and violence is a bit too much, even for a fantasy trilogy. In an ideal world people would just get over themselves, but in the real world it's not gonna happen.

Kevin J. Anderson — The Key to Creation (Book Three of Terra Incognita)

As he rode across Tierra, the constant pounding of hoofbeats echoed the pounding of his heart.

Jonathan Friesen — Rush

Pure insanity.