The Diary of Petr Ginz by Elena Lappin

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
A rare historical find, the diaries reflect the day to day activities of a Jewish boy in Prague during 1941 - 1942. Unfortunately, the diary as a standalone book is somewhat banal. Many of the entries are simply talk about the weather and what happened in school that day.



Peppered throughout the books are glimpses of the oppression the Jews were facing. You do get to see some of his personality - he has a sense of humor. On the very first entry, he mentions that all of the Jews in town are required to wear a star on their lapel. He calls his classmates sheriffs and designates his street as the Milky Way. He also was a little bit of a prankster and mad scientist of his class. He made little cannons and exploding pencils.



The book became much more interesting to me when I googled the names and dates in the book. I don't understand why the editor claims to have the diaries from 1943 - 1944 up until he was sent to the concentration camp, and the editor even mentions that they were very interesting and full of emotional tension. She even teased us in the introduction with a few excerpts. Why weren't these diaries published?



Another point, while it's completely understandable, some of the more traumatic events in that time period, he skipped writing in the diary. When his best fried was sent to a concentration camp, he doesn't even write an entry for five days. I figured out by looking online and reading the notes in the back of the book that his friend Harry was deported and sent to an extermination camp around the missing days of Petr's diary. I don't blame him for being too upset to write, but when I simply read the diary - it seemed like nothing interesting happened that week. I had no idea that there was a whole story around those missing days.



I think some more clever editing would have helped out a lot. In the back of the book, there are detailed notes explaining the events in history, or some of the cultural references Petr made. I think these should have been printed next to each other. First of all, I didn't know that the notes existed until I finished the diary. By then I was already Googling all of this information on every other page. And I got to the notes, and they didn't make any sense unless I flipped back to the original diary entry. Some clever editing would have made this book so much better.



All in all, I found it an interesting document, but not a compelling read.


View all my reviews.

Gamers! Free convention in Indy this weekend!

It's been a few weeks since I played a new boardgame. This weekend I am going to WhosYerCon , A FREE convention hosted by WhosYer Gamers in Indianapolis this weekend. I wanted to take some time to mention how great these guys are. They come to my own gaming event I hold where I work now and then. They bring their own games and they teach teens attending the event how to play them. And I can't belive they are hosting a free event this weekend. I'll have lots of new games to gush about really soon.

As for books right now I'm reading a new addition to our collection. It's the big giant hulking picture to the left of us. (I'm still learning, guys. Cut me some slack.) Anyway, the book is a series of autobiographical stories of being a big geek in high school.

I've only read the first story in the book, "My Friend Likes You" by Lisa Gabrielle. Oh my god. It was like reading my seventh grade diary. It was all full of those morbidly embarassing crushes that physically hurt you because they are so real. Of COURSE, just like the author, my crushes never knew I existed - or if they did, I was just part of the wallpaper. Also, she talks about not knowing much of the boys' personalities. They were just SO cute and SO popular. It was almost painful to read. I'm loving it so far!

The next story starts out with a boy meeting Zsa Zsa Gabor at his doorstep. So I don't think I'll be able to relate to that one as much.

Edited to add: Meh.. this book is hit and miss. I've liked two, felt kinda meh about one and skimmed over another.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

I just read Storm Front by Jim Butcher. One of my library regulars asked me to read the book and I read it without expecting much. It was great. It reads like an old hardboiled detective novel with some wizards and magics. And because of the "film noire" aspect of it, it doesn't have the old standys in most urban fantasy. No descriptions of clothing that go on for pages and pages - stuff like that. Harry Dresden is just this old crusty guy who happens to be a wizard.

There were some people complaining about the chauvanism and sexism in the book. I just didn't get that vibe. I dunno why people thought that this was more offensive than Twilight . I actually lost my temper reading that book a few times. I guess it's OK to have a weak female character if she's the main character?

I thought the sexism in this book was a "Harry Dresden" thing. He seemed so clueless about women and the sexism was just part of that. I thought we were seeing women through his eyes and that's what he saw. And I've met a lot of Harry Dresden type guys. Like him or not, he's a very real person.

Harry Dresden is a great character. He's a total loser. He can't get a date and knows almost nothing about women. He has no money, lives in squalor and can't even work basic electrical appliances without them going wonky. But he's really good at being a wizard. I get tired of reading books where the wizards are just super powerful and amazing at everything. Harry is powerful with magic, but kind of pathetic otherwise. It makes him more real than other wizards I've run across.

I love Harry Dresden. Hell's bells!

These are a few of my favorite things

Edited to add: Most of my websites are not working. They were slightly broken when I first made them - so I tried to fix them and now they are just not right. I'll get better! I promise. You can get to the links by removing the "blogger.com" at the beginning of each website that I've linked. I've tried multiple times to remove it, but to no avail.

--
On with the show!

Is there a better way to introduce myself than to show you some of my online haunts? Nah! Let's go. Since my life and my job are all about books and board games, I will show you those sites first.

I like book reviews. One of my favorite sites is GoodReads. I'm not sure how to link that to my personal account, but once I do -- I'll let you know. I like writing my own book reviews and reading other people's. I tried a lot of different review sites, and settled on this one. I also liked LibraryThing but I had a really hard time keeping up with both of the sites. Between those two, I had the hardest choice to make. Goodreads finally got me because they were free and Librarything wanted money. I hope to post my reviews here once I figure it out.

One of my favorite book blogs is Bookshelves of Doom. I like that she's brutally honest and scathingly funny at times. She is more like a friend telling you about what she just read rather than a professional book reviewer.

As for boardgames, Board Game Geek is my favorite. It's a great database of just about every game ever made. I played a few tester games at Gen Con that probably only a few copies of the games exist, and even those games were there. I love reading the reviews on the site and sometimes you can download pdf copies of instructions or even game tiles that you lost.