50 book challenge

40.

Slam, by Nick Hornby.
Still one of my favourite books, and I am still not sure what to think of the content. It is an interesting commentary on teenage fatherhood, in a genre in which I've only ever encountered accounts of teenage motherhood, and the style make this one awesome, but there are just some things I really have problems with, like Sam being "whizzed into the future" by a poster. Just... No.

39.

Herr Lehmann, by Sven Regener.
The first chapter I slept through entirely. I was bored and annoyed by the main character and really, really could not be bothered to feel for him. This continued to stay the same until his best friend was about to have a nervous breakdown. Before that, the plot just seems to be incredibly bland, and the style aggravating, a variation of "young male intellectual gets laid by beautiful woman". Who at first appears to be a match for his loquaciousness, but then is of coursed too baffled by the sheer force of his manly maleness and rhetoric to continue being brainy.
From the moment on at which his best friend starts cracking up I started to love this story, and now the novel's strange, passiv and detached, yet supposedly brilliant and completely useless main character are somehow endearing to me. The way it utterly fails to give an account or relate the events in this novel to the political situation of the Wende is believable, as the more significant events of the political reality completely get lost among the gritty, smaller events of every-day life.