Teaser Tuesday: The Book Thieves

Like a runner taking the last lap before the finish line, the Wheel of Time has turned ’round to Teaser Tuesday.

Just in case you don’t know, Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish theme, and anyone can play along! All you have to do is grab the book you’re currently reading, open to a random page and share a few sentences from that page. But make sure you don’t share any spoilers!*

*I wish I could take credit for this introduction, but I shamelessly stole it from Heather over at bitsnbooks. To help me make amends, you should go check out her blog.

I’m reading merrily along in March, and thanks to picking up a copy of the Get Fuzzy comic strip treasury I’m Gluten Furious, my schedule it right on track. I’ll be reading another comic treasury come May, when Stephan Pastis visits Quail Ridge Books on tour for the release of the Pearls Before Swine collection Pearls Hogs the Road. Yes, it’ll be another long night, but this time Krystal is going – she wouldn’t miss it!

Anyway, I just finished Brand Luther this morning, so I created a Twitter poll to choose my next book from the TBR. Right now, The Book Thieves by Anders Rydell is leading the pack – the author himself even liked my tweet! – so that’s what I’ll tease.

The Goodreads’ Blurb

While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the MonumentsMen themselves Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe’s libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, Communists, Liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons, and many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research, and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners. But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. Instead many found their way into the public library system, where they remain to this day.

Now, Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin’s public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. For those who lost relatives in the Holocaust, these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have ever held. And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given, he shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it.

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The Truly Random Number Generator sends us to page 88:

The Nazification of the existing school system was never completed in the period of the Third Reich, but one should look at the reforms such as embryonic of the totalitarian utopia envisaged by Nazis such as Rosenberg. The new human could only fully come forth among those who were wholly untainted by yesterday's degeneration: on other words, the children. 

 

What are you reading today?