If you are looking for some wise words about live, written in a straightforward language with philosophical depth and a good sense of humour, this book is for you! Ok, that’s not what you usually expect from a book mainly regarded as children’s fiction, but then you really do Tove
Jansson wrong if you just see her as the creator of some chubby trolls with funny names that entertain your kids.
At the beginning of the book, Moominpappa is grumpy because he thinks that his family does not need him anymore. They even extinguish a forest burn without asking for his help! He yearns for some danger to protect his family from, so he decides that the whole family should relocate to a lonesome, barren island far out in the ocean. Here, he thinks, he can earn some respect with his great knowledge of the sea. What starts out as a big adventure becomes a story about a family in a crisis. Displacement, unattainable love, the loss of gender roles, marriage problems and the challenges of growing-up, of friendship and of responsibility – all this is dealt with in this simple little story that Tove Jansson narrates with lightness and lots of charm.

This book with its vast collection of the works by American illustrator Charley Harper (1922-2007) is a bombproof spirit-lifter. No matter if you’re young or old, you can spend hours flipping through this treasure of abstracted geometric forms, energetic paintings, amusing drawings and an overall whirl of colors. Harper, who called his style for »minimal realism«, is best known for his highly stylized illustration of birds and wildlife, but this book gives you a wider insight and also includes the pieces Harper created for advertising and promotional art, his murals and illustrations for Ford Motor Company’s lifestyle magazine, Ford Times. There’s an affordable edition of this weighty tome out there, so feel free to enter Charley Harper’s universe.

Since in our (physical) letterboxes we hardly find anything but the utility bill these days, a pleasant surprise was the latest issue of LICHT magazine by dkdl that arrived today. A visual interpretation of creative and other accidents.

This book about the person we got to know as Marilyn Monroe is heavy read, Joyce Carol Oates leaves no room for joy or hope while telling her story (and all of us know the ending already). Anyway, you keep on reading in horrified fascination about Norma Jeane Baker’s transformation into the artifial Hollywood product called Marilyn Monroe. Oates makes no difference between facts and fiction when she builds her story out of inner monologues, narratives by different people, real and fictious quotes of books Norma Jeane read, poems she wrote and comments by contemporary witnesses. This is definitely one of Oate’s best books (it made me for the first time think about Marilyn as a real person and not just the cliché of a blonde) but maybe it is not your next holiday reading.