Fading Memories

J.W.F. Werumeus Buning

I may very well be the last Dutchman to actually enjoy Werumeus Buning's literary output, but it's still not easy to find his books in the second-hand bookshops. This little paperback Irina found for me in Haarlem. It's a combination of some poems I already had in his collected works, and a very sentimental, but also funny and pleasant little novelette which I read with a lot of pleasure.

The illustrations are by J.F. Doeve, who also illustrated other books by Werumeus Buning, and who is eminently collectible. That'll account for the rarity of a new find... Werumeus Buning is these days best know for his recipe books and his writing about wine, if people at all know about him...

Giovannino Guareschi

My parents had three Don Camillo books -- a little surprising, because they were both from a rather anti-papist Dutch Reformed church family, even if they were both Church-leavers, and the Don Camillo books are very Roman-Catholic -- and as a teenager I devoured them.

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Diana Gabaldon

Buy this book -- at your peril.

I quite like an historical novel now and then. I particularly enjoyed Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, for instance. But LJatPM is probably not a historical novel as I know it but part of one particular sub-genre of the genre: the researched-to-death-no-need-for-a-plot historical novel.

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C.S. Lewis

buy this book

The Screwtape Letters is one of those little masterworks of accessible theology that has done so much to foster prejudice against Lewis and his entire circle with the militant anti-church crowd that makes up the majority of the society where I live. Theology is bad enough, but acceptable if it stays stodgy and unreadable. Accessible theology, theology with a dash of humour and a sense of fun -- that is actively dangerous.

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The Dutch newspaper Trouw had already reviewed this book before we went on holiday to Thuringia, which used to by GDR. They were enthusiastic, so when we saw the book in a shop window in Steinbach Hallenberg, we resolved to buy the book. (Turns out it was cheaper in the bookshop, that it is at Amazon.de.)

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This book -- the first a moderately long series -- is really, really weird. It's the last gasp of a long-dead genre, the swashbuckling, China-men ridden adventure story of which Oppenheim was the last great representative. This book was first published in 1975, and apart from some token nods towards modern times (the cousin of the hero is leaning towards emancipation, that is, taking a boyfriend without intention of marriage), it's as if you're reading something written a hundred years ago...

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Just a quick notice, because I've still got three books by DLS to write about and a Wodehouse, and because this was a book I finished in under an hour.

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