Language: Dutch.

Nu ja, lijmen. De mensen bepraten en dan doen tekenen. En als zij getekend hebben, krijgen zij het ook werkelijk thuis.

http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi1470693913/

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

For many people watching football is mere entertainment; to some it's more like a ritual; but to others, its highs and lows provide a narrative to life itself. For Nick Hornby, his devotion to the game has provided one of the few constants in a life where the meaningful things - like growing up, leaving home and forming relationships, both parental and romantic - have rarely been as simple as or as conplicated as his love for Arsenal.

Fever Pitch catches what it really means to be a football fan - and in doing so, what it means to be a man.

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier.

With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly Golightly is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Her brownstone apartment vibrates with Martini-soaked parties, as she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home.

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Language: English.

Odessa, Texas has seen better days. For sale signs are everywhere, movie theaters are closed, store fronts are empty. Still, Odessa has a dream. Once a week every fall, the Panthers of Permian High School take to the football field under Friday night lights and 20 thousand fans fill the stadium with cheers for their beloved team and their own dreams.

In Friday Night Lights, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa, its teachers, parents, politicians - and most of all its students and players who carry the city's image on their young shoulders. This account examines the role of high school sports in America and many of the issues at the core of our society - race, politics, education and economics. A portrait of American life.

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

Massive graphic novel, that everybody should read, really. Every page is a piece of art.

Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth—and frailty—of their connection.
 
At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

When he is asked by a fishing-enthousiastic Arab Sheikh to become involved in a project to create a salmon river in the highlands of the Yemen, fisheries scientist Dr Alfred Jones rejects the idea as absurd. But the proposal catches the eye of several senior British politicians. And so Fred finds himself forced to set aside his research and instead figure out how to fly ten thousand salmon to a desert country - and persuade them to swim there.

As he embarks on an extraordinary journey of faith, the diffident Dr Jones will discover a sense of belief, and a capacity for love, that surprises himself and all who know him.

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

In July 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, have just been married and are spending their honeymoon in a small hotel on the Dorset seashore, at Chesil Beach. The couple are very much in love despite being from drastically different backgrounds.

During the course of an evening, both reflect upon their upbringing and the prospect of their futures. Edward is sexually motivated and though intelligent has a taste for rash behaviour, while Florence, bound by the social code of another era, and as a child molested by her own father, is terrified of sexual intimacy: eventually this leads to an experience that will change their relationship irrevocably.

The novel focuses upon the couple's different personalities and attitudes and the development of their love in the dawning of a sexual awakening in 1960s Britain. 1962 was the year when the contraceptive pill became available in the United Kingdom. Before this, sex before marriage ran the risk of unwanted pregnancy and possibly unwanted marriage. Edward and Florence represent the last generation who would never have sex before marriage; in their case with disastrous results.

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Language: English (look closely at the book cover!). Deutsch hier. Nederlands hier.

Falling Man begins on September 11, in the smoke and ash of the burning towers. In the years and days following, we trace the aftermath of this global tremor in the private lives of a few reticulated individuals. Theirs are lives choreographed by loss, by grief and by the enormous force of history. From these intimate portraits, DeLillo shifts to an extrapolated vision: he charts the way the events have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory andour perception of the world.

DeLillo cleared the path with one of the first notable 9/11 novels. According to a 2007 interview in Die Zeit, DeLillo claims that originally he "...didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11." and "...had an idea for a different book" which he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with an idea for the novel.

Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle with the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met once again with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations. DeLillo, however, remained unconcerned by this relative lack of critical acclaim, remarking in 2010 "In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that’s where I belonged. If I’m headed back that way, that’s fine with me, because that’s always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I’ve always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing.”

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Language: English. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

One intended good deed turns Adam Kindred's life upside down - he loses job, reputation, home, passport, money, etc. He has no other option than going underground, joining the ranks of the disappeared and being chased by killers and acquainted to a crazy priest, a prostitute, a policewoman.

Or, how Alex Clark of The Guardian plots it: "Adam Kindred, a climatologist in flight from America and a sexual indiscretion that has thrown a spanner into his marriage and his academic career, is in London for a job interview. Dining alone, he strikes up a conversation with Philip Wang, an immunologist who subsequently leaves a sheaf of papers in the restaurant; when Adam attempts to return them, he finds his new acquaintance taking a siesta with a bread knife in his side. A clever man, Kindred immediately does two stupid things: he removes the bread knife, thus ensuring both death and fingerprints, and goes on the run, pursued by Wang's killer. With a murderer and, shortly, the police on his trail, he creates a hidey-hole in an overshadowed piece of rough ground on the Embankment and settles down to a life of subterfuge, vagrancy and killing seagulls for dinner."

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Language: Dutch.

Nooit meer slapen (1966) is a peculiar novel in the work of W.F. Hermans, because it resembles his profession as a geologist. We follow Alfred Issendorf, geology student, on his expedition to Norwegian Lapland for his dissertation. His goal is to prove the hypothesis of his professor, Dr. Sibbelee, who says that the round craters squatted all around the area are caused by meteorites.

His colleagues, the rough Norwegian tundra and the down-the-drain reputation of Sibbelee, make the expedition very tough for Alfred. However, the quest makes him aware of his (geological) destiny.

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Language: Dutch. Deutsche Übersetzung hier.

Midas Dekkers, a famous Dutch biologist, researches the role of children in nature and culture. Dekkers makes us aware of the two roles homo sapiens play in the course of life. Just like a caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly, human beings have their own metamorphosis: small children transform into grown-up adolescents.

Children and adolescents are different creatures, who sometimes (but far from always) have the same wishes and issues. Children live separated from adolescents in their own world of kindergarten, school and sports clubs, read their own books, and visit their own amusement parks and playfarms. Until they pupate into an explosion of pop music and acne, called puberty.

Many adults have the desire to go back to the other side of the generation gap. At home they don't read Ovid, but Harry Potter, for instance. It's like butterflies crawling back into their cocoon. The morale is obvious: growth comes always at the expense of something else, and the human race is no exception thereto.

Interesting book by an author who is well known to every child AND adult in The Netherlands. People who are expecting their first offspring (like me when I read it) will turn the pages of De larf with special interest.

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Language: English.

The Locked Room, the third part of Paul Auster's postmodern detective work The New York Trilogy, is the story of a writer who lacks the creativity to produce fiction. Fanshawe, his childhood friend, has produced creative work, and when he disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. The title is a reference to a "locked room mystery", a popular form of early detective fiction.

Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and a baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened?

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Language: English.

The second story of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, Ghosts, is about a private eye called Blue, trained by Brown, who is investigating a man named Black on Orange Street for a client named White. Blue writes written reports to White who in turn pays him for his work. Blue becomes frustrated and loses himself as he becomes immersed in the life of Black.

From a window of a rented room, Blue stalks his subject, who is staring out of his window.

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Language: English.

The first story in Paul Auster's highly praised The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, features a detective-fiction writer become private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, protagonist.

As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written.

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Language: English. Deutsch hier. Nederlands hier. Castellano aquí.

The war against the Shining Path is over. Yet when a charred and mutilated body is discovered during the annual Holy Week, the people of Ayacucho understand that death has once more returned to their land. Only this time the terror emanates not from the government death squads, nor from the guerrillas in the mountains, but from a single source. A serial murderer. Now everyone is afraid AND suspect.

Red April received the Premio Alfaguara, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world, in 2006. It is the most realistic account of the cruel, bloody and terrifying period (roughly 1980-2000) in which the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path spread their rule over Peru's mountain areas.

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Language: Deutsch. English version here.

Shortly after the military coup in Buenos Aires in 1976, a regimecritical lawyer takes shelter in a remote country estate. A dangerous act of survival for the parents turns into a great adventure for their two sons, with secret codes and double lives.

Not the bloody coup is the centre of this novel, but the changes caused by the dictatorship. Figueras tells the threatening story from the eyes of his 10-year-old son, nicknamed Harry. For him, the situation turns into a real life game of Risk, in which the family has to conquer the world for themselves. There is always hope, because the small land of Kamchatka can defend itself against the armies of the enemy.

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Language: Dutch. English version here. Deutsch hier.

When he is caught by the police for robbing a bakery, Colin Smith is sentenced to be confined in Ruxton Towers, a borstal (prison school) for delinquent youths. Taken there in handcuffs and detained in bleak and highly restrictive circumstances, he seeks solace in long-distance running, attracting the notice of the school’s authorities for his physical prowess. Long-distance running offers Smith a welcome distraction from the brutal drudgery of the Borstal regime and he is offered the prospect of early release from Borstal, if he wins in an important cross-country competition against a prestigious public school. For Ruxton Towers to win the cross-country race would be a major PR boost for the establishment, and Smith has an obvious incentive to cooperate.

However, when the day of the race arrives Smith throws victory away: after speeding ahead of the other runners he deliberately stops running a few metres short of the finishing line, even though he is well ahead and could easily win. In deliberately losing the race, Smith demonstrates his free spirit and independence. A raw-toned classic, written by a legendary writer.

Tom Richardson directed the film, Alan Sillitoe himself wrote the screenplay. Belle and Sebastian adapted the title for a song:

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Language: Dutch. English: here. German: hier.

The expectations are high when language professor Philipp Perlmann has to lead an international congress in Italy. It will be the crown on his glorious career, which brought him to the highest ranks of his field of research. However, no conference guest has a notion of the doubt and inability that crossed Perlmann's life after the death of his wife. He has lost his belief in science, the academic world and, above all, himself. To cover his inabilities, he jumps from one lie to another. When his lecture is due, he knows he has nothing to say.

Mercier published this novel long before his breakthrough Night Train to Lisbon. Like his bestseller, Perlmanns Schweigen is a highly philosophical and psychological account of an individual who is facing an enormous task, laid upon himself. Nice material, although, I must say, Night Train triggered me more.

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Language: Dutch. English translation (The Tea Lords) here.

This book gives great insights into the mindset of the Dutch colonists in the East Indies. The book is based on private correspondence and documents from The Indies Tea and Family Archive and also from clearly substantial records from various family collections. Haasse, at the end: the material in the book is "not invented but chosen and arranged to meet the demands of the novel".

Every one of two years, I pick up a novel by Hella S. Haasse (1918-), the grand lady of Dutch literature. Haasse combines a nice style with a very sophisticated and utterly sympathetic posture.

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Language: English.

For both the American and the Russian government, winning was of utmost importance. The Russians influenced chess up to the highest political range - there was nothing Spassky could do without it being exactly noticed. Spassky nevertheless, was a sportsman in the first place, an tried to find his own way into beating Fischer. Fischer didn't let anybody influence him or his team of muppets, although President Nixon tried to get some of the success.

The biggest chess match ever was played under strange circumstances: the soft-tempered Russian and the rebellish American weren't trusted by their influential governments, and thus fought their own battle inside a political chess game.

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