Train holiday - day 13

 Long trip home. Train to Cologne, the. Change to Brussels, then Eurostar to London, the. Dodgy train to Cambridge, then a lift home from Simon. Much appreciated as awful weather causing many problems in the UK

Home around 23:00

Train holiday - day 12

 Free day in Berlin, in the rain.

Walk down Oriannstrasse and into ‘Modular’ for arty stuff and coffee. Then some clothes shops and down the Ubahn to Stokx and bought a coat and top for Jo.

Then a poor meal with everyone together.

Train holiday - day 11

 Thursday, so off to Berlin.

Early to a bus to Dresden. A long coffee stop and then train to Berlin.

We forgo the late walking tour and head off on our own.

A pair of boots from Campers for Jo.

Then dinner up the tower.

Late for bed

Felt straight at home in Berlin

Train holiday - day 10

 Today still in Prague.

Free day. First to the Kafka museum which was ok. Nothing original which is a shame, excepting some early publications. 

Coffee and the. O the old Jewish cemetery, and synagogue. Very emotive and old.

We bought a ‘chimney cake’ each which was very nice.

Finished with a cheap meal in the large shopping mall.

A pretty good day, but not feeling about Prague.

Train holiday - day 8

 So up early to coach the train first to Vienna, and then on to Prague. A long journey of around 6 hours.

Finally a bus to a very nice hotel.

A bottle of fizz to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.

Train holiday - day 9

 Funny day today. Early tour with a strange lady. Fast visits to castle and old town, and the Charles bridge. So many people; I switched off. Lots of pretty stuff to look at and photograph. Just got bored with it.

Back to hotel for a nap, then mooch around shopping centre. Not feeling it today.

Train holiday - day 7

 So free day today.

First to the Synagogue which was emotional. Then to the ex-secret police HQ. First the police were part of the ‘arrow cross party’, then quick costume change, and then Soviet secret police. Keeping rank and everything. Very bleak to put it mildly.

Then a Hungarian meal of wild boar stew and back to the hotel.

Train holiday - day 6

 Coach tour of the city, including statues and the big church on top of the big hill above the city, and cathedral in the city.

Hilarious and awful ‘children’s railway’ ride in the hills. Very full of noisy kids. Really terrible but funny for it.

Took Kevin the tour guide off for a meal.

Train holiday - day 5

 Managed to find the sewer entrance from The Third Man.

Then heading off on train to Budapest.

Train was rather full, and arrived late. Big coach to the very nice hotel with big rooms.

Night tour up to the hill above the city. Then a buffet meal which was a good laugh. Had loads of food, including fois gras and beef tarter.

Train holiday - day 4

 Still in Vienna.

Took in the museum of modern art which was ok. Then design museum which was fab.

Greek for dinner. Then back to hotel for an early night.

Train holiday - day 3

 In Vienna.

Early breakfast, then coach to the Schonbrunn palace for a mouch around the gardens, followed by a guided tour of the palace. All very palacey. Very crowded and pretty. You get a sense of the postwar red occupation slightly tainting the city. It must have very hard.

Then broke away from the group and went into the city, into the Hapsburg crypt which was amazing. Then the National library which was very ornate but disappointing.

Finally a piccy of the Goethe statue, a nice early bratwurst, sourkraut, and frites, broke back to the hotel via Spar.

Train holiday - day 2

 So train journey that went on and on and on and on.

So left the hotel back on the coach to the station. An hour to hang around and left on the train late.

First leg was 3 hours or so, then change at Munich, then another 4 hours. One very numb bum later. Finally a short coach ride to the hotel. Then a reasonable meal and bed. The hotel much better than in Frankfurt.

Rubbish photos from the train.

Train holiday - day 1

Wake up in the Montcalm hotel near the Barbican. So set off from St Pancras on the Eurostar, off to Brussels. Then change trains for the ICE to Frankfurt.

Long day getting to the hotel around 17:30. Food rather poor and got overcharged for my single beer. So had to go back for a refund. Very Faulty Towers.

Not sure about the fellow 14 tourists, but we shall see

Rich and David

Jo and Martin?

Francis and mouthy 

Funny old day / Favourite books

 It's Tuesday 26th September in 2023. Just gone off sick from work. All very peculiar feeling rather lost about what my job is. Plus this hypothyroidism is a real pain at the moment.

Anyway, after reading Woolf's Jacob's Room, just what are my top five novels????

Homer - The Iliad - Read it 5 times and counting. Just love it so

Dostoyevsky - The Brother's Karamazov or maybe Crime and Punishment

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore or maybe The Wind up Bird Chronicle

Franz Kafka - The Trial

Albert Camus - The Stranger

Heroditus - Histories

Woolf - Jacob's Room

Hmm, that's quite a large '5', and had to make some tough decisions

Homer - The Iliad - Read it 5 times and counting. Just love it so

Dostoyevsky - The Brother's Karamazov or maybe Crime and Punishment

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Heroditus - Histories

Woolf - Jacob's Room

OK 5 and a bit. I guess Murakami is the unexpected one, but at least not quite as predictable as the others

Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room

 Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room

Wow Wow Fucking Wow Fucking wow!!!!!

This at risk of being my best read ever?!?!? 295 books in and this may be the most amazing book that I'll ever read? It made my feel sick in my stomach I think. Still think V Woolf is a stuck up cow though.

Oh Mrs Flanders to lose your son.

The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.

Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations.

Plot summary

Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridgeand into adulthood. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in London forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy and then Greece.

Christopher Isherwood - The Memorial

 Christopher Isherwood - The Memorial

I'd already read 'Goodbye to Berlin'and 'Mr Norris changes Trains', so it was good to add another one.

The Memorial is an early book in his cannon, and it felt that way.

But it was freely written and had the some good thinking in it. Very poignant section at the WW1 remembrance ceremony shortly after the war.

Given to me by Mum-in-Law and had been read by them both. So clearly will keep

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

It was good to read the first Holmes novel, with the setting up of the Holmes and Watson pairing. Plus the magnifying glass and Holmes in disguise.

A Study in Scarlet is an 1887 detective novel by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become the most famous detective duo in literature. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, a consulting detective, to his friend and chronicler Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."^[1]

The story, and its main characters, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Only eleven complete copies of the magazine in which the story first appeared, Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, are known to exist now, which have considerable value.^[2] Although Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon. The novel was followed by The Sign of the Four, published in 1890. A Study in Scarlet was the first work of detective fiction to incorporate the magnifying glass as an investigative tool.^[3]

H G Wells - The Invisible Man

 H G Wells - The Invisible Man

A fairly straightforward story about an invisible man trying to become visible again, but going mad and murderous.

It was OK. Worth the quick read

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.

While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in The Invisible Man. The novel is considered influential, and helped establish Wells as the "father of science fiction".^[1]

Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

 Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

Absolutely loved it. I'd put it off for years, but finally got around to it. Just brilliant.

I'd say to was about alienation until finally finding his fellow tribe

Steppenwolf (originally Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse.

Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. The novel was named after the German name for the steppe wolf. The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse's spiritual world during the 1920s.

Steppenwolf was wildly popular and has been a perpetual success across the decades, but Hesse later asserted that the book was largely misunderstood.^[1]

Jorge Luis Borges - Fictions

 Jorge Luis Borges - Fictions

Some brilliant short stories, written between 1939 - 1953

Includes the famous 'The Library of Babel'

This is a keeper

Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

Drug Drug Druggy

A roller coaster ride of drug fuelled drive across the USA

A good read with some cracking drawings

Anna Lembke - Dopamine Nation

Anna Lembke - Dopamine Nation 

About addiction, blame, responsibility and much more

I think main take away is how long you blame others, before you start to take your own responsibility 

Might need to look at the 12 step programme

Henry James - Portrait of a Lady

 Henry James - Portrait of a lady

Jeez it went on and on and on.

Tedious la di da drivel

Dreadful journey 

 The notebooks of Malte Laurids Rilke - Rainer Maria Rilke

A difficult but rewarding read.  A mixture of a desolate life in Paris and his wealthy upbringing. Very meandering. Pages 133 to 160 are the best. Lots of existentialist angst.

 Claire Keegan - Small things Like These

Wow. 100 pages of beautiful story telling. A tradesman in 80's Eire, and the hint of the Catholic laundry scandal. Just tragic and beautiful. I love it.

 Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

Finally got through this heavy tomb. Very hard work. Very rewarding. Glad to have finally read 'The Grand Inquisitor' and 'The Tail of the Onion'.