78 books like I Have No Regrets

I found this book uniquely moving, gripping, and enlightening.

With his diary, Klemperer, a German Jew, captures the increasingly brutal atmosphere of Nazi Germany and what persecution felt like in everyday life. I admire the sharpness with which he describes the various Germans he encountered–and the range of their reactions–as the deportations and mass murder got under way.

It is a remarkable testimony to the good and evil in humanity.

What I admire about this book is the courage to break with the standard narrative of West Germany from 1949 to 1989 as a success story. West Germans did not just settle down in prosperity and comfort but had plenty of angst and fear.

The book does a great job of showing how we can write a history of emotions.

There are plenty of books about memory politics and Germans’ slow and difficult way of reckoning with their evil past. What I really like about this book is how it brings to life these complex moral challenges through the story of a relationship between a younger man and an older woman who turns out to have been a camp guard under the Nazis.

The novel is about the tensions between love, responsibility, and forgiveness, but above all, it is about the difficulty of being German after the Nazis.  

This historical novel is about a young Romanian German who is deported to a Soviet labour camp by Stalin after the Second World War. Herta Müller herself grew up as a member of the Romanian German minority, and the novel is inspired by her conversations with survivors of the camps.

What made this book truly spellbinding for me–in addition to the story–was the playful melody of the language. It is a reminder of how rich and diverse the German language and culture were with the various communities in Central and Eastern Europe until the Second World War and the deportations and expulsions.

You can feel the danger lurking behind every day as radio journalist Shirer watched Hitler build on one horror after another.

Reynolds writes in a way you can hear him, in a stye that echoed his broadcasts. Even after the declaration of war, “life here is still quite normal… the theatres and movies, all open and jammed.”

And this item when he went to the front: “At last will get a chance–maybe–to see how this German colossus has been doing it, walking through Belgium, Holland and now, Northern France, so fast.”

What I like about Shirer’s approach is that he takes you along with him on every day’s events. There were so many things he touched on that often got missed in other books. I enjoyed being with him each day and you will, too.

There are loads of great picture books that feature Australian animals but one of my favorites is Diary of a Wombat. It’s a very simple story told from the perspective of a wombat and it highlights their adorable, but also irascible and fairly destructive personalities. It’s incredibly difficult to pull off an ‘animal voice’ without it sounding like a person or a bit patronising, but Jackie French really nails it in this book, probably because of her extensive experience with looking after wombats. And the illustrations by Bruce Whatley are full of fun and joy. It makes me laugh every time I read it.

If wombats read books, I think this is the one they would love best, and what book about animals needs a better endorsement than that? 

Rose wrote the Albany column in The Sunday Telegraph and it is tempting to dismiss him as a gossip columnist who spread amusing and implausible stories about the bons mots of Princess Margaret. In fact, Rose was a more substantial person. He was interested in the British establishment but aware of himself as an outsider (partly because he was of Jewish origin). He was also, particularly during the early part of his career, an odd kind of modernizer – close to Tony Benn, whom he had known at university.

After worshiping Leo Tolstoy and his writing for long decades, the much later discovery of Sophia’s diaries came to me as a huge revelation: I learnt that no writer or artist is an island, but always part of a human ecosystem that nurtures and feeds their art. In the case of Tolstoy, it was his family and most particularly his wife. In her personal writings we meet the woman behind the great writer, married to him for 48 years, and who bore him 13 children. She was pivotal to his work, encouraging and supporting his literary career. Through her pages, we find out about her love for Tolstoy and their tormented marriage, in which she often felt neglected and provoked. We see the hidden, dark side of the great man of letters, a vastly gifted but troubled individual, and we also learn about Sophia’s undying vital energy that allowed her… show more.

I wrote my first book and started submitting it to publishers when I was eleven years old. I dreamed of publishing a book before I graduated from high school.

Ultimately, that didn’t happen—I was 25 by the time I sold my first book. So you can see why I loved a story about a character who lived my dream; a 14-year-old girl who becomes a bestselling author. Most people didn’t believe that kids can be authors, but seeing another kid do it—even if her story is fictional—makes it feel possible.

Ratchet, the main character, goes against all the stereotypical norms: she doesn’t like fashion, she works on cars and understands mechanical concepts, and, by virtue of her dad, gravitates toward environmentalism.

There’s so much to love about this book: it blends poetry and prose, the supporting characters (including Ratchet’s dad) are often hilariously entertaining, and the story is one of Ratchet finding herself and learning to accept her own unique self.