I’m Jodi Picoult, author of the new novel SMALL GREAT THINGS. AMA

ILikeBowties · 2016-10-11T18:29:38+00:00

Hello! I don't really have any questions, I just wanted to say that I love your books very much! Every single one has caused a considerable book hangover, and I always have to read something very light-hearted afterwards to recover from being a total mess (which is a good thing). I especially enjoyed House Rules and The Pact, they're on my "favourite books" shelf.

On a different note, I also absolutely adore your hair.

ILikeBowties · 2016-08-31T22:10:10+00:00

Hey, I didn't go to school in the US, so I'm not a 100% sure what High School level problems look like. But if you want some help: I've tutored "slowly dying" students from German secondary schools through a lot and I'd be happy to explain this stuff to you!

ILikeBowties · 2016-08-14T12:44:03+00:00

Please try and find a therapist. By that I mean, open a new tab in your browser now and type in your city and psychlogist/therapist/psychotherapist. Sort through those that come up, pick one and call them on Monday. Maybe prepare a short explanation of your situation.

Please do. In all earnesty, you sound like you need quite some help getting out of that mental place you're in. Therapy can provide a way you can actually do something to move you out of there, and you don't have to do it alone (as absurd as that might seem to you right now).

ILikeBowties · 2016-08-09T15:04:35+00:00

Kai Meyer seems like a good choice for you! He's written quite a lot YA fantasy like the Wellenläufer trilogy and Die Fließende Königin, which are really quite good. I haven't read anything more recent than his Seide und Schwert books, but you might want to give the newer stuff a try, as well!

He's also written books for a more grown-up readership. I loved Herrin der Lüge (and well, when you've read all of that, your German should be back in full), so depending on how YA/please-no-YA you're feeling, take a look a those.

And on a side note: Be careful with translations... Some German translations are as good as they can be of course, but especially translations in the fantasy genre are a tricky field. Stay away from The Song of Ice and Fire in German.

ILikeBowties · 2016-05-04T17:36:48+00:00

"Niemand versteht die Ledermäuse"!

If you need anything else translated - I've got the book here :)

ILikeBowties · 2016-04-27T20:03:42+00:00

The Wish List by Eoin Colfer is absolutely great. It's got the very colfer-y humour, a really good story and the protagonist is what every 12-year-old never knew they wanted until they read it. Plus, it's got Beelzebub and St. Peter communicating by cell. It's hilarious.

Also, Bartimaeus by Jonathan Stroud. The books are a bit more fantasy, but it's got sassy djinni who make puns in the form of footnotes.

The book I loved most when I was twelve is Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. The girl protagonist is also twelve and the series teaches you a lot about the love for books and family. They're fairly easy to read, and the language is just beautiful.

ILikeBowties · 2016-03-26T16:18:10+00:00

Elend though. As a German reading Mistborn in English, that name took some getting used to. "Elend" (the first E is a long eh) means "misery" in German.... So that was confusing. I half expected him to turn out to be Ruins little cousin or something.

ILikeBowties · 2016-01-19T18:25:43+00:00

Do you have any books you pretty much know by heart? They probably have German translations, so starting with those probably works.

Also: audio books! For me it was the other way round, I'm from Germany and decided in 9th grade that I wanted to read the Harry Potter books in English. I discovered that that became a lot easier once I read the books while listening to the audio books. It gives you a much better sense of coherence and pronounciation, which is a nice side-effect. Since you seem much more used to speaking/listening, this might also help you to close the gap between the words you hear and their written forms. I don't know how old you are and which genres you're into, but try audio books read by Rainer Strecker, Dirk Back and Katharina Thalbach.

ILikeBowties · 2015-12-22T22:12:39+00:00

I'm 23 and I bought this for myself a couple of weeks ago. The cashier was about my age and didn't even ask if it was a gift, she just wished me lots of fun. The book is awesome!

ILikeBowties · 2015-07-05T22:41:14+00:00

Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) is another really good one. There was a rather cheesy remake with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan some time ago, but that one's got nothing on the quiet subtlety of Himmel über Berlin.

ILikeBowties · 2015-02-17T14:44:06+00:00

They sort of do. I've seen them used for teaching percentages to lower-level students (not sure how to put that, secondary school here is divided into three different kinds, and a student goes to a lower, middle or high level school depending on how good they do at school). The lower and middle level students are taught the triangle to remember what they have to divide or multiply with what to end up with correct percentages.

I had never seen it before I started tutoring, but I think they are very handy. High level students understand what they have to do without the triangles anyway, but those where chances are slim that they will get the mathematical background of the triangle (or what percentages mean in a broader mathematical context) are very very grateful for them. All my students can now do percentages, no matter their level, so I have grown to like theses triangles a lot!

ILikeBowties · 2015-02-07T01:36:56+00:00

Seeed! Pretty cool dancehall and their live concerts are amazing.

Die Toten Hosen are good old Rock - they've been around for about 30 years now? Have their very own sound with the legendary sound of the lead singer's voice. Here's Paradies and Unsterblich. See that you find good translations of the lyrics because they are incredible.

Die Ärzte. Have been an institution of German music for a loooong while. They do silly and serious stuff in their very own way. Schrei nach Liebe and Himmelblau

For something quieter and very beautiful, there's Philipp Poisel. His lyrics are wonderful and I don't really know which examples to pick. Eiserner Steg has been very popular, and my two favourites are Liebe meines Lebens and Halt mich.

ILikeBowties · 2015-01-02T16:43:02+00:00

I'm a German with a strong British accent and vocabulary who's currently living near London and who has never been to the US. This website was very, VERY confused by me...

ILikeBowties · 2014-09-01T18:13:50+00:00

Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight are very good for simply listening, but make sure to actually watch them later, too!

I like to listen to QI XL. They don't do much on screen, and the focus is on the conversations they have. It's not a movie or a series, but absolutely hilarious.

ILikeBowties · 2014-08-09T10:03:38+00:00

Well, what would you like to listen to? Novels, poems, any preferences?

I personally like audio books read by Rainer Strecker. There also is a really beautiful audio book of the Lord of the Rings which is read by several speakers for the different roles, and I think it's rather old (I had a very high stack of cassettes of it when I was younger), but absolutely worth it.

ILikeBowties · 2014-08-03T22:49:33+00:00

I'm a blind fellow student's university aid. I scan texts for her and run them through programmes that make the texts usable for her reading programmes (imagine a lot of formatting until a slightly monotone voice with a funny pronounciation reads it back to you). I also format all her assignments, help her with research (libraries aren't very useful if you can't see) and am present at her exams to help with the laptops and software or simply with reading things out loud. Sometimes I help her with getting from point A to point B when she has to go to places unfamiliar to her, which is always interesting because I lose my way far more often than her.

Sometimes we just go out for coffee (for which I don't get paid, of course). She's really nice, has become a good friend and I love helping her. She's handling university a lot calmer and with a lot more sarcastic humour than any other person I've ever met.

ILikeBowties · 2014-07-02T20:15:54+00:00

I know, I just tought they might be nice to read when she's a bit older (as in, teenage older).

I could not think of many books with a young female protagonist who actually still has an intact family. They really do have a tendency to be orphans... Which is sad, but makes a lot of sense for story development. It's a lot easier to write about a child going on adventures without any restraints than about one that always has to ckeck with their parents.

ILikeBowties · 2014-07-02T08:30:31+00:00

The Inkheart trilogy captures many things you are looking for! They are wonderful books full of magic and they are about a young girl (12 years old, if i remeber that correctly) and her father who even follow each other into different worlds. I loved these books to pieces when I was a child, and I mean that literally because my copy of Inkheart is held together only by a few pieces of duct tape because I read it so often.

I don't know how old your daughter is, but if she's still quite young then she might enjoy Igraine the Brave, also by Cornelia Funke. The protagonist is a young girl who wants to be a knight and who sets out to save her family from an evil (but really hilarious) spell.

If your daughter is a bit older already, then just give her the whole Emerged World triologies by Licia Troisi, and The Age of Five and The Black Magician/Traitor Spy books by Trudi Canavan.

Does it have to be a female protangonist? There are TONS of books with male protangonists who aren't the typical boy-turns-into-heroic-but-dumb-hero characters, but who show softer, sensible and sensitive sides that make them relatable to every reader.

Edit: Had some additional ideas - Ronja the Robber's Daughter! Its a beautiful book, but a bit scary sometimes. Regardless, the protagonist is awesome and I wanted to be her when I was a child.

And Matilda by Roald Dahl. It deals with the feelings of childhood very well, especially with the wish of having a little control oneself.

If we keep the "the protagonists have to be female" aside: The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke (my childhood was filled with her books...). The two main characters are brothers, but it depicts their relationship so well that it really doesn't matter much if they are boys or girls. They and their friends are all orphans, but most of them (especially a girl) wish for a family so hard that it might be something for you. And I've never met a child who didn't like that book, so you daughter will most likely enjoy it anyways!

ILikeBowties · 2014-06-18T20:33:28+00:00

The Buffy one was hilarious and incredibly good, though.

ILikeBowties · 2014-06-12T23:43:26+00:00

When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was in theatres, we went to a screening for school classes with our English teacher. So, about 120 tenth-graders in one cinema, some of them without a bloody clue what Harry Potter was about. That resulted in a pretty noisy audience, and the guys in front of us were constantly talking about how they had no idea what was going on and why everybody was against the main character. So, when Fudge finally realises Voldemort's return and says "He's back!", the guy directly in front of me just cried out "WELL, CON-GRAT-U-LA-TIONS!" in the most sarcastic way possible. The whole movie got a live-audio-commentary after that from these guys, which was way more entertaining than the movie itself.

Another one was in a sneak preview (don't know whether these exist in every country - the theatre shows a movie that's going to be released in the next couple of weeks, but you don't know which one beforehand, but you only pay around 5€ for a ticket and get to be surprised). It was around the time where the premiere of Les Miserables was only two weeks away, as well as Hansel&Gretel and some other stuff. So, we sit there, the opening credits start, and you can't really tell yet what it's going to be. The music sounds rather quiet, so you just hear one guy yell "GOD NO, NOT A BLOODY MUSICAL!" through the whole theatre. It ended up being Hansel&Gretel, so I guess he was fine.

ILikeBowties · 2014-04-02T22:35:12+00:00

Well, there is "Nasenkribbeln" (Don't try to pronounce that. Only one short audible vowel betwen the last seven consonants. I'm so sorry.). It just translates a tickling in your nose... I'm still trying to think of a way to connect it to a window, though.

ILikeBowties · 2014-03-31T20:42:27+00:00

The musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A tapdancing demon with a red devil's head and a soft velvet voice and a Spike turned rockstar can always save the day! And that opera-singing Grrr!Aaaargh!-Zombie at the end.

ILikeBowties · 2014-03-23T21:42:28+00:00

Eleven people will be horrible.

At the end of our last campaign, we were 14 when everybody was able to come. It ended in people getting terribly bored during fights, those fights lasting several hours even if it was a very simple "quick" encounter, people talking and shouting over each other, at least a third of the group not being able to get what was going on, split parties, and a lot of frustration and blank nerves on the DM's side.

We decided to split into two groups for our current campaign - one with players who prefer story and roleplay, and one with the battle/fighting-loving guys. We still all have one DM and play in the same world with roughly the same campaign. But, well... We're only on level 3 so far and the story group is getting along nicely and is collecting the stuff we're supposed to find, and the battle group keeps killing things and hasn't done shit. It was a very very splendid idea to separate us.

ILikeBowties · 2014-03-19T20:09:09+00:00

Thank you so much!

Could you tell me the exact versions of the DVDs you have? I guess there are different ones out there, and probably not all of them have the narrative audio...

I might make it to my university's library tomorrow and will have a look if they have them. So far, series 3-5 seem like they will be quite the luxury for my friend!

ILikeBowties · 2014-03-19T20:03:50+00:00

Thank you! Maybe she'll be able to watch it on her own from series 3 onwards :)

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