Stranger than Fiction

  This year, for the 4th time, I took on the Nonfiction Reader Challenge, hosted by Shelleyrae at Book’d Out ( https://bookdout.wordpress.com/ ). I’ve finished the Challenge as a “Nonfiction Nibbler,” for which I had to “read and review any 6 books, from any 6 listed categories”. I also read a book in a 7 th category, and nonfiction books that didn’t fit into a category, or were in a category I had already reviewed (a lot of history and science). In addition to the 13 nonfiction books, I read a number of fiction books, but I don’t include fiction on this blog. My Challenge wrap-up is: History: Lady Sapiens Science: The Smart Neanderthal Health: Vagina Obscura Culture: Image on the Edge True Crime: The Trial of Lizzie Borden Food: Ancestral Appetites Published in 2024: The Brothers Grimm It’s difficult to say which book I liked best – they were all good choices for me. Perhaps The Smart Neanderthal stands out because it was my favorite book about Neanderthals out of the ...

  Grimm’s (or Grimms’) Fairy Tales are well-known all over the world, but I wonder if most people know that the name refers to the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. When I was a child I had assumed that the Grimms wrote the tales, but later learned that they collected the tales over a number of years in German-speaking regions of Europe. During my linguistics studies at university, I also learned that it was Jakob Grimm who developed ‘Grimm’s Law,’ which describes regular correspondences between certain sounds of proto-Indo-European to early Germanic and languages that developed from German (like English). It seems that his linguistics theories were inspired by the translations that were done for the tales he and his brother collected. But I did not know much about their personal lives or why they started collecting the folk tales and legends they became known for. So when I learned about The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, by Ann Schmiesing, I was very interested to find out more. ...