Bedside Books: What am I reading?

Last week @riverflows started a small competition to motivate the book community here on steemit. The task is to present 3 books that we were currently really into (or forced to read), give our thoughts to them and share it with her and the whole community.

Check out riverflows’ original post and feel free to join in.

The books I picked are:

An old man’s love – Anthony Trollope

I currently started to watch a lot of the videos of the youtuber Books and Things who is a huge fan of Victorian literature and especially Anthony Trollope. After hearing about a million times how great his books are and not being willing to read his whole Barchester Chronicles series, I picked An old man’s love from his enormous collection of novels and didn’t regret it.

It is about a young woman who is the ward of an older man, that has fallen in love with her. Unfortunately, she been in love with another man for years, but she hasn’t heard from him in a long time, so she agrees to marry.

Classic romance novels seldom surprise a modern reader, but this one managed to mislead my thinking. The characters are very believable and act in ways the reader can sympathize with, it is really easy to care for them and whish them happiness in their hopeless situation. The book is written in a fresh, enthralling way and I highly recommend it to all lovers of classic literature and maybe a gateway to classics for people that want to get into it more.

All men of genius - Lev A.C. Rosen

I found the German translation of All men of genius (here called Die Erfindung der Violet Adams = The Invention of Violet Adams) in a thrift shop together with some other young adult and youth books for just 1€. I figured it would probably not be my cup of tea, but bought it anyway because I was interested in reading steampunk.

I’m glad I gave it a chance since it was so much more fun than I would have imagined. It tells the, already often done, story of a genius girl who dresses up as a man to study at a college only allowed for males. Of course there is a love story, too and a lot of clichés, but they weren’t that bad.

It is an exiting mixture of school lessons, adventures, love, friendship and an evil plot to unravel. Meanwhile one gets to know all the characters really well, what they feel, think and the past that influenced who they are today. It has definitely more to it than you would think just reading what it’s about.

Olalla – Robert Louis Stevenson

I’m normally not a huge fan of shorter fiction, both short stories and novellas, but since I liked Stevenson’s writing before, I picked up this little thing in an Omnibus Bookstores, which are Polish bookstores that sell English novels and books that help to learn languages.

And what can I say, I already finished it on my way home. I just wanted to peek at the first page, but I just adored the writing that much that I couldn’t stop. This is exactly in that kind of poetic writing that I love in classic literature, very intriguing, nice sounding but still easy to follow. The mysterious vibe just made me feel like in another time and place. The nice, strange humor also helped my enjoyment.

There is actually not that much story to it. A wounded officer wants to recover from war and is sent by his doctor to an impoverished Spanish aristocrat family to live with them for a while. The novella is mostly about the strange feeling the protagonist has around this manor and his descriptions of the family, but with that gothic setting, I didn’t need more.