2022 Books
For 2022 I’ve kept my target back at twenty-four books, in spite of failing to make it in 2021. I did almost manage to catch up and did a bit better than in 2021 with twenty books read rather than just seventeen!
Credit: The new cover image is a crop of this interesting photograph by Eugenio Mazzone.
What I did fail entirely to do, was to continue writing these little mini-reviews for each book I had read… as you can see there was only the one.
The twenty books read for 2022 can be summarized with the following interesting statistics:
- 6 / 20 were German versions of comics (Asterix and Obelix or Lucky Luke)
- 9 / 20 were Terry Pratchet novels in either the Witches or Guards series
- 2 / 20 were German novels
- 2 / 20 were history books or technical manuals (one of those was a game design book)
January 2022
Meine russischen Nachbarn by Wladimir Kaminen
The first book I finished this year was a German one! Although it was but a paltry 221 pages, it now holds the record for longest German novel I’ve read. The longest German book that I’ve mostly read, would probably be the B1 textbook at around 300 pages, but I also didn’t exactly read that cover-to-cover in a month or two.
As to the actual book, it’s a collection of short stories about his interactions with his russian neighbour (the author himself is a Russian that emmigrated to Germany). The stories are usually funny and very random - in Afrikaans we would call them “staaltjies” - I see the English word for that is anecdotes. It was fun to read, even if I did struggle with the German at times…
I see his books are generally rated around 3.5 stars on Goodreads - from some light scrolling through the reviews, I suspect this is due to a large part of the audience being humorless Germans (by nature of the language the author chose to write in). I suspect the same stories would probably have fared a little bit better with a non-German audience.
