The 2018 Reading Challenge - #11 - A Book by a female Author who uses a male Pseudonym

Hello bookworms :)

Hope you are having a wonderful week so far! What are you up to?
Its Wednesday again and that clearly means a new book review ^^
Today its for the category: A Book by a female Author who uses a male Pseudonym, a pretty exciting one ;) and not to many options and therefore not to hard to choose a book.
I went for

Out of Africa

by Karen Blixen as Isak Dinesen

Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen.

The book, first published in 1937 and it recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. It´s is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there.

It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish.

The book has sometimes been published under the author's pen name, Isak Dinesen.¹

Again a little summary from goodreads:

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"Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century.""

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pic source - also a great source if you want to know a bit about Karen!

I´ll give it a 8 out of 10

Its a lovely book, a mamoir about a thrilling and so interesting life and all the amazing experiences starting with 

"Equitare, Arcum tendere, Veritatem dicere" - "To ride, to shoot, to tell the truth” 

"I had a farm in Africa"...the first words of a classical five-act tragedy, kind of, but with an ending to underline idealism, never lost through years of a life in Africa and a love story between two earthly human beings. 

The whole story...even tho it took me personally a few pages...kind of draws you in and chapter after chapter it fascinates you...reading about the life of a woman faced with extreme challenges and disappointments after disappointments and of tragedies mounting upon themselves... that would drive even a well-balanced person to clinical depression.

You read about a woman setting out with great hope and many aspirations only to meet divorce, bankruptcy, and death of the greatest friends, a woman that turned all these immense disappointments into a great work of poetic prose, leaving you with all the emotions and showing you its possible to work through ;)

Its just another part of Scandinavian literature which fascinates me.

Out of Africa is part of Karen Blixen’s experience, personal and emotional, and also of Western literature and of the great Romantic movement taking place at the time of her birth. For nearly two thousand years, from the ancestors of Beowulf to Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Scandinavian literature has turned tragedy into entertainment. And I´ll always be amazed by Scandinavia from its amazing authors to the incredible architects, they just have such a special way to...just do everything ;)

Well thats that ;) I hope I did not go a bit to far there ;) I´m just a fan...who would have thought that hu? ;)

Well, I have to say I love the book...yes I had to get into it and it took me quiiiite long to really start liking it but as you can see I learned to really love it ^^

“The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and leveled out by the hand of distance.” 

For a little more inspiration and some alternatives ^^

- Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell - Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights

- Louisa May Alcott as A.M. Barnard - Little Women

- Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin as George Sand - La Mare au Diable/The Devil's Pool
- Mary Ann Evans as George Eliot - Middlemarch

- Violet Paget as Vernon Lee - Hauntings: Fantastic Stories

- Katharine Burdekin as Murray Constantine - Swastika Night

- Alice Bradley Sheldon as James Tiptree - The Girl Who Was Plugged In

- Nelle Harper Lee as Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
- J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo’s Calling

Which book did you choose for this category?

Did you read Out of Africa and what do you think about it?

With lots of love

♥♥♥