Review: Die Bücherdiebin (The Book Thief) by Markus Zusak

Title: Die Bücherdiebin
Original Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak
Pages: 588
Genre: Novel
Source: Library
Language: German
Published: 2008 (Original: 2005)
Publisher: cbj/Blanvalet
ISBN: 9783570132746

Summary (Goodreads):

It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .

Narrated by Death, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she discovers something she can’t resist- books. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever they are to be found.
With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

My thoughts: I liked that it wasn’t written like every other Novel. Words were used differently and a little experimental. I have to add, that I read it in German, so I can’t say anything about how it is in the Original Version.There were also a few Drawings in it. The Story was going up and down. On one page you were happy with the characters in the book and on the next you were shocked, scared or sad. I have to admit I even shed a few tears at some point of the book.

For me it was special to read this book in another way too because it’s about the history of my Country. Not a very nice history tho. That made it even more sad.

Overall Impression: I really liked the Book and definitely would recommend it but I also give out a warning: Don’t  take it for granted to get a happy end or an easy read. Take your time for this one.

Cover: I like the Cover. It made me look forward to reading it.

More Info on the author: Markus Zusak’s Parents are from Germany and Austria and Immigrated to Australia. The Book is a Tribute to their personal History during second World War.

Rating: 4.5 Chocolate Hearts

Counts for these Challenges:

• The 50 Books Challenge
• The Heavy Reading Challenge
• 2011 Book Blogger Recommendation Challenge
• 2011 Outdo Yourself Challenge
• Reading Bucket List – Abroad (Germany)
• Support your Local Library Challenge

It’s Monday! What are you reading? #1

So the last few days I was busy doing Bloggiesta and learned so many new things. Also I found a few meme’s I really liked and decided to try for myself. So here I am doing my first one ever!

It’s Monday! What are you reading is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila at BookJourney. It’s about what you read last week and what you are reading at the moment.

What I read last Week:

City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare

I had this Book checked out of the Library and had to return it on Monday but hadn’t finished reading it the same day. So I hurried to finish it and made it just on time. I arrived at the Library at 18:59 (it closes at 19:00).

So this is the second Book in the Mortal Instruments (Chroniken der Unterwelt) Series and I really liked it a lot. This is one of the Books you stay up late for because you want to know how it goes on.

Die Bücherdiebin (The Book Thief) by Markus Zusak

The second Book this week I finished last night during Bloggiesta. It is also a Library Book. This Book is something special. It’s not an average easy read with a big Happy End. So if you seek one of these the book is not for you. The words in this Book are chosen wisely and used in a different way than normally in a Novel.

What I read at the moment:

Today I started Wie ein einziger Tag (The Notebook) by Nicholas Sparks, also from the Library as I cant afford to buy Books at the moment. I read so many recommendations for it and it is also in the Book Blogger Recommendation Challenge so I am looking forward to reading it and I am curious if I like it too.

That’s it for the Week. Happy Reading!

 

 

The Bloggiesta – Finish Line

It’s late and I am tired and there are only a few official hours left anyway so I end it here now. I had a blast during this whole Bloggiesta experience and will definitely try to do it the next time again.

8 Things why it was the best idea ever to sign up for the Bloggiesta (random order):

1. I found so many cool new Book Blogs.
2. I got the most hits on my Blog since the Blog exists.
3. The Blog looks way better now and a lot more personal even tho it is still not perfect.
4. I found motivation to restart the Blog after a few months of neglecting.
5. For the first time I felt connected to the world through my Blog (the world = other people than my friends)
6. I didn’t feel alone while sitting in front of my Laptop.
7. I learned so many new things.
8. I got so many new ideas and inspirations for my Blog.

Mini-Challenges I completed:

1. “10 Things Bloggers shouldn’t do” by Hannah at WordLily (@Wordlily)
2. “Google Forms” by Jen from Devourer of Books (@DevourerofBooks)
3. “back up your blog” by Jackie from Farm Lane Books (@farmlanebooks)
4. “setting goals” by Amy from My Friend Amy (@myfriendamy)
5. “Buttons and Banners” by Callista at SMS Book Reviews (@callista83)
6. “Email best practices and solutions” – Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? (@trishheylady)
7. “Mr. Linky” by Jennifer at Teach Mentor Texts (@mentortexts)

My Blog got:

• A new Name
• A new Header-Image
• New Reading Challenges
• Cleaned up
• One more Sidebar
• Rearranged menues
• Hits!

Total time spent: about 23 hours.

Additionally:

• finished reading Die Bücherdiebin (The Book Thief) by Markus
• Got followers on Twitter
• Follow a few more people on Twitter
• Expanded my List of Book Blogs I will follow

So all in all I think this was a really interesting experience and a fun weekend! Can’t wait for the next Bloggiesta. I miss you guys already!

The fifth, sixth and seventh Bloggiesta Mini-Challenges: “Banners”, “email” and “Mr. Linky”

So in this post I wrap up a few Mini-Challenges I did and which are too small for their own post.

My fifth Mini-Challenge was “buttons and banners” by Callista at SMS Book Reviews (@callista83). You can see the result above as I did a new header image for my blog in this Challenge (and changed the name at the same time).

My sixth Mini-Challenge was “Email best practices and solutions” by Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? (@trishheylady) and I cleaned up my – not so much used – Google mail account I use for my Blog. Sadly I hardly ever get anything else than Alert mails. I would love to get others too (*winks*).

My seventh Mini-Challenge is “Mr. Linky” by Jennifer at Teach Mentor Texts (@mentortexts) and will be completed within this Post as I will try to put Mr. Linky in here.

So let’s see if it works out. If you want to help, you can register with Mister Linky so that I can see that it works.

The Bloggiesta – Day 3

Wow, it’s Day 3 already! I did a lot the last two days but not as much as I hoped to do. So I will try to do my best today on the last Day of Bloggiesta.

As I did yesterday and the day before I will post here again what I have done today and what I still have on my to-do list and what I am doing atm.

In the end there will be another Post with the summary for the whole Weekend. But for now, let’s get started:

What I am doing atm:

• Insert my newly read book into fitting Challenges
• Trying to do the Mini-Challenge “helping each other out” by Tasha from Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Books (@heidenkind) (not that I don’t try to help people normally but now I focus on it)

What I have done so far:

• I woke up, does that count?
• Did the Mini-Challenge “Email best practices and solutions” – Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? (@trishheylady)
• Found out how these custom menus work and reorganised some of my sidebar menus
• After that I found out that it is pretty useless and removed all of the menus. Blog much cleaner now. Hopefully people still find what they are looking for.
• Checked my blog spamfilter and found a lot of lovely comments in it that were spammed by mistake! D’oh! Sorry to all of you!
• Did the “Mr. Linky” Mini-Challenge by Jennifer at Teach Mentor Texts (@mentortexts). You can read about it here.
• finished reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

What I still want/need to do:

• Do Mini-Challenges
• Do something with the Background
• Do my first review(s)
• make an image with my name to insert in the end of my posts.

The Third and Fourth Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: “back up your blog” and “setting goals”

So I did another Mini-Challenge earlier. It was “back up your blog” by Jackie from Farm Lane Books (@farmlanebooks).

As this was basically just a little reading and pressing one buttin I didn’t write a blog post of it’s own for this but thought I should leave at least a note somehwere what I have done now.

The next Mini-Challenge I want to do now is “setting goals” by Amy from My Friend Amy (@myfriendamy). I’m a little afraid of this as I am really bad at stuff like this, but I will give it a try. Stuff like this needs to be done and is very helpful.

So my first goal is to find back in some kind of habit or routine to write posts regularly again. I should aim for daily as it is easier for me to do something every day than with a break in between. Just maybe I won’t publish them every day but every 2 or 3 days, so I should build up some kind of pillow if I don’t have the time to blog or something like that somewhere in the Future.

My second goal is to move my Blog to my own Webspace and get my own domain name for it. This will take some time longer for me but I hope it will be done by the end of next Semester which is end of June. This will make me being able to include a nice goodreads flash-bookcase in my sidbar, embed google forms and other nice stuff. Really looking forward to this.

My third goal is to make the Blog prettier. Already started working on this during Bloggiesta and will go on working on this during this weekend and hopefully have a decent result by the end of Bloggiesta tomorrow.

My fourth goal is to find a new or the first real direction for my blog. Was swimming through ideas the last year and was not able to find a topic that matches all my interests. This includes also a new name for my blog. I already had an idea for that earlier so this might be done by today or tomorrow. Exciting!

My fifth goal (wow, didn’t think that I could think of that many goals) is to get more readers especially a) regular ones and b) ones I don’t know in person. What I will need (to improve) for this: Promote my blog more, new content on a regular basis and a lot of the stuff I thought about already in my first Mini-Challenge “10 Things bloggers should not do”.

picture by JohnONolan.

The Second Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: “Google Forms”

I was really looking forward to this Challenge as it sounded fun and I so wanted one of these fancy Google Forms on my Blog.

So I followed through every step of the really nice Introduction of Jen from Devourer of Books just to find out in the end that I can’t embed it into my not self-hosted WordPress Blog the way I wanted to do it. D’oh!

At least I can still use it, only not in the fashionable way, so here it is:

Klick me to see the precious Google Form I just created.

I plan to change to self-hosted WordPress for a while already and just got another reason why I really want to do this.

Happy Bloggiesta to all of you!

The Bloggiesta – Day 2

So it’s Day 2 of Bloggiesta already and I’m still thrilled about it. As it is my first Bloggiesta I didn’t know what to expect and had a little fear that the enthusiasm will wear off after a few minutes. But it didn’t! I saw the changes that my blog already made and it made me even more excited. Still way to go tho.

Yesterday I spent 7 hours for my blog what would have been more if I weren’t invited to see a play at the theatre (I had a blast, might write a post about it later).

So today is a new day even tho it is already noon (gosh, why is time running so quickly?). I will do today as I did yesterday and write down a list of stuff I did, do and want to do and update it every time I finished anything.

Amount of hours spent on Bloggiesta today: 7,25 hours.

Here you can follow me on Day 3.

What I did today:

• Added 2 more Reading Challenges and made the Progress Bars a little prettier. Decided to not enter any more reading challenges (for now.
• Did the “Google Forms” Mini-Challenge by Jen from Devourer of Books (@DevourerofBooks). The Post about it is here.
• Did the Mini-Challenge “back up your blog” by Jackie from Farm Lane Books (@farmlanebooks) and my Blog is now save! Yay!
• Did the Mini-Challenge “setting goals” by Amy from My Friend Amy (@myfriendamy). The post about this and the last  Mini-Challenge is here.
• Installed CS5 and Bamboo Software (might be needed for my new header / one mini-challenge)
• Did the next Mini-Challenge “Buttons and Banners” by Callista at SMS Book Reviews (@callista83) and made a new header-image for my blog. Will make a better one when I have more time and patience.

Total amount of completed Mini-Challenges: 5.

What I want to do:

• Sign up for 2011 Reading Challenges and create Pages for them
• Do Mini-Challenges
• Create an Image for my Header
• Do something with the Background
• Clean up the mess at the Progress Bars for the Challenges
• Find a better Name for my Blog
• Do my first review(s)
• make an image with my name to insert in the end of my posts.

So let’s go!

The First Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: “10 Things Bloggers should not do”

So now that I am warmed up it’s time to do the first Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge. I decided for: 10 things bloggers should not do by Hannah at WordLily (@Wordlily)

First Step: Read the Blogpost about 10 Things Bloggers Should NOT Do. – DONE

Second and Third Step: Rate yourself (1-5, 5 is the best) and brainstorm about what to do better. – So Let’s go and do this:

1. You Must Not Expect Results Overnight: Rating: 4. – I think I am aware of the fact, that Results won’t happen over night but I still hoped it would at least happen a little bit faster or steadier. Probably it is not happening because of the other things I should not do. I better check them out now.

2. You Must Not Ignore Your Readers: Rating: 3. – So I try not to Ignore them but it probably has happened as I am not totally sure how to listen to them (correctly). Will have to think about it but have no idea how to change that yet.

3. You Must Not Scrape Another Bloggers Content: Rating: 5. – I write my content myself I don’t need to steal of others. I’m even scared of doing this by mistake or something like that and always write down names if I use a picture or something like that.

4. You Must Not Expect Success Without Promoting: Rating: 2. – I did a little bit of promoting but obviously way to little. Will have to use twitter and facebook more often and find other sources like comments on other Blogs.

5. You Must Not Be Another Blogger: Rating: 5. – I believe that I am myself, at least most of the time.

6. You Must Not Fail To Update Your Blog Regularly: Rating: 1. – A few months ago I would have written 5 here, as I was updating my blog nearly every day but then I stopped and haven’t written anything for the past 5 months or so. This has to change! I need to go back to my old habit.

7. You Must Not Ignore SEO: Rating: 1. – I haven’t really informed myself very well about this. Will have to read some more stuff about SEO’ing and improve in this. I just have a rough idea about all that.

8. You Must Not Ignore Networking: Rating: 3. – I do a little bit of Networking but I guess not enough of it. I am always in fear to spam people or to annoy them. Should get over this.

9. You Must Not Have An Unreadable/Unnavigable Site:  Rating: 5. – I believe that my Blog looks pretty ok. Not over the top (yet) but I believe people find what they are searching for. At least I always try to focus on that. (Also improved the site about that just this morning during the Bloggiesta)

10. You Must Not Throw Mud Around: Rating: 5. – I am way to nice to do this! I couldn’t even do if I wanted. Except maybe someone would be really mean to me.

There would be a fourth step where you can write down what you did especially great and give Tips about it but unfortunately I’m not at that Level so far.

Result: Even tho I have my blog for over a year now (wow time flew by) I am still a newbie about blogging. At least I am aware of that and try to improve. This Mini-Challenged already helped to find out where to start!

The Bloggiesta

Long time no see!

I was pretty busy lately but now with the new year I am back. As I want to pimp my blog and give it a kick-re-start I decided to join the Bloggiesta.

The Bloggiesta is some kind of Challenge that runs from today until Sunday the 23rd and basically is hardcore working on your blog, including some mini challenges.

This is my Startpost to show everyone that I am in for it! Looking forward to what will happen this weekend!

If you want to read more about the Bloggiesta or if you want to join yourself, you can find it here.

So roll up your sleves and get started! Ready, set, go!

I will edit this post as I go and add what I have done or plan to do (atm I don’t really have a plan yet but hopefully  I will have one soon).

What I did:

• Created new Categories for Reading Challenges and rearrange 2010 Reading Challenges
• Split up the 1001 List in a List and a Challenge Post
• Changed the Design of my Theme to two Sidebars and rearranged Stuff
• Created a Page for the 2011 Reading Challenges and sort existing ones in
• Created a Page for Perpetual Reading Challenges and sort existing ones in
• Threw Reading Challenges out of my Life List and created a better option for Reading Challenges
• Checked out the Blogging Tips Forum and a few of the Mini-Challenges while having Lunch
• Mini-Challenge #1: “10 Things Bloggers shouldn’t do” by Hannah at WordLily (@Wordlily) completed. Post about it is here.
• Cleaned up the Progress Bars of Reading Challenges that have ended already and added dates to the remaining.
• Signed up for 2 new Reading Challenges and create Pages for them
• Signed up for 4 new Reading Challenges after Theatre break.

What I plan to do during Bloggiesta:

• Sign up for 2011 Reading Challenges and create Pages for them
• Do Mini-Challenges
• Create an Image for my Header
• Do something with the Background
• Clean up the mess at the Progress Bars for the Challenges
• Find a better Name for my Blog
• Do my first review(s)

Spent a total of 7 hours today on working on my blog on day 1. If you want to see what I did on day 2 click here.