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Nieuwe aanwinsten Geesteswetenschappen: Leestips

Winter reading!

by Judith van Herten on December 15th, 2023 | 0 Comments

Whether you’re yearning for a break between paper deadlines or whether you need some peace to digest your tenth oliebol – what better way to wind down than lying on your sofa with a book?

The librarians for the Humanities have compiled their favourite books and novels to read in wintertime, to help you imagine that winter wonderland or start next year by learning something new.

The library team wishes you a happy winter break and hopes to see you again in the library in 2024!

Should you have any questions about the collection or the library in general, or need help finding sources for your paper, don’t hesitate to Ask Your Librarian

 

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Ali Smith – Winter (2017)

Winter is the second book in Ali Smith's wonderful seasonal cycle.

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire.

Four people – two elderly sisters, a son of one of them and an outsider – celebrate Christmas together in a cupboard of a house in Cornwall, even though they are essentially strangers to each other. Will it be peace on earth for them?

 

 

 

 

 

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Gerard Reve - De avonden : een winterverhaal (2017)

De avonden is een van de belangrijkste boeken uit de Nederlandse literatuur; het is klassiek geworden als de aangrijpende beschrijving van de saaiheid die Nederland in de naoorlogse jaren beheerste. In Frits van Egters weerspiegelt zich de jeugd, die zijn leven ziet verlopen in zinloosheid, eentonigheid en eenzaamheid. Humor en de hoop dat er toch een hoger en groter Iets bestaat, houden hem op de been. De geluiden van afschuw over dit boek, bijvoorbeeld door Godfried Bomans, die meende dat Reves geestelijke gezondheid 'bij een langer aanhouden van deze gesteldheid ernstig gevaar loopt', zijn inmiddels ernstig tegengesproken door de velen voor wie De Avonden het mooiste boek is dat ze ooit lazen.

 

 

 

 

 

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Vinciane Despret - Living as a Bird (2022)

In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play? Or do birds suddenly become territorial - and, if so, why? By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.

 

 

 

 

Donna Tartt - The secret history (2022), 30th anniversary edition

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

 

 

 

 

 

A rabbit on a rockDescription automatically generatedMargaret Atwood – MaddAddam: a novel (2013)

Bringing together characters from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, this thrilling conclusion to Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction trilogy confirms the ultimate endurance of humanity, community, and love. Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, which is being fortified against man and giant Pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasihuman species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. While their reluctant prophet, Jimmy--Crake's one-time friend--recovers from a debilitating fever, it's left to Toby to narrate the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb. Meanwhile, Zeb searches for Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. Now, under threat of an imminent Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters. At the center is the extraordinary story of Zeb's past, which involves a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge. Combining adventure, humor, romance, superb storytelling, and an imagination that is at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Margaret Atwood, and a moving and dramatic conclusion to her internationally celebrated dystopian trilogy.

 

 

A book cover of a mountain rangeDescription automatically generatedDonald Niedekker - Waarachtige beschrijvingen uit de permafrost: roman (2022)

Bekroond met de F. Bordewijk-prijs 2022. Januari 1597 overleed in het Behouden Huys op Nova Zembla een bemanningslid wiens identiteit nooit is vastgesteld. Nu, 425 jaar later, nu de permafrost begint te ontdooien, ontwaakt hij uit zijn ijsgraf, waarin hij door Willem Barentsz en zijn mannen is begraven. Hij die als anonymus op de scheepsrol stond, maar was ingescheept om als dichter een loflied te schrijven op de expeditie naar de Noordoostpassage, kan nu de Grote Dooi is gekomen alsnog zijn relaas doen. In zijn barokke stijl maakt Donald Niedekker van de legendarische overwintering een wonderwereld waarin fictie, geschiedenis, sprookjes en actualiteit vervlochten zijn tot een betoverend geheel. ‘Deze poëtische roman is een unicum in de Nederlandstalige literatuur. Niedekker geeft het woord aan een dichtende zeevaarder wiens geest na eeuwen ontsnapt uit de smeltende permafrost. Het levert een zinderende ode op aan de taal en de geschiedenis, die tegelijkertijd geraffineerd een licht werpt op de tijd waarin wij leven. Een roman om je aan vast te vriezen.’

 

 

A book cover with a painting of people on a frozen lakeDescription automatically generatedHendrick Avercamp – De meester van het ijsgezicht (2009)

Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) is veruit de bekendste schilder van ijsgezichten uit de Gouden Eeuw. Zijn werk is rijk aan details; schaatsende paren, kinderen die elkaar bekogelen met sneeuwballen, colfspelende heren, mensen die door het ijs zijn gezakt of er hun behoefte op doen.

Deze publicatie is de eerste sinds lange tijd die weer recht doet aan deze virtuoze veelkunner. Alle aspecten van Averkamp en zijn werk komen aan de orde - artistieke ontwikkeling, techniek, functie van de tekeningen, netwerk en afnemers. Aanvullende hoofdstukken belichten de kleding van de figuren en de klimatologische omstandigheden in de 17de eeuw, die leidden tot extreem koude winters. Deze verklaren tevens het onderwerp van veel van Avercamps schilderijen en tekeningen.

 

 

A book cover of a bookDescription automatically generatedChristopher P. Heuer - Into the white : the Renaissance Arctic and the end of the image (2019)

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally "abstract," the far North - a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination - offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a "nonsite," spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts - and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy.

Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth - long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

 

Emily St. John Mandel - Station eleven (2014)

An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

 

 

 

A book cover with a silhouette of a person holding a wandDescription automatically generatedSarah Park Dahlen & Ebony Elizabeth Thomas -  Harry Potter and the other : race, justice, and difference in the wizarding world (2022)

Race matters in the fictional Wizarding World of the Harry Potter series as much as it does in the real world. As J.K. Rowling continues to reveal details about the world she created, a growing number of fans, scholars, readers, and publics are conflicted and concerned about how the original Wizarding World--quintessentially white and British--depicts diverse and multicultural identities, social subjectivities, and communities. Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World is a timely anthology that examines, interrogates, and critiques representations of race and difference across various Harry Potter media, including books, films, and official websites, as well as online forums and the classroom. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, a deeper reading of the series reveals multiple ruptures in popular understandings of the liberatory potential of the Potter series. Young people who are progressive, liberal, and empowered to question authority may have believed they were reading something radical as children and young teens, but increasingly they have raised alarms about the series' depiction of peoples of color, cultural appropriation in worldbuilding, and the author's antitrans statements in the media. Included essays examine the failed wizarding justice system, the counterproductive portrayal of Nagini as an Asian woman, the liberation of Dobby the elf, and more, adding meaningful contributions to existing scholarship on the Harry Potter series. As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Other provides a smorgasbord of insights into the way that race and difference have shaped this story, its world, its author, and the generations who have come of age during the era of the Wizarding World.


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