833: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

833.914: Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. London: Orion House, 1998. 218 pp. ISBN 0-75380-470-0.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 800: Literature
• 830: Literatures of Germanic languages
• 833: German fiction
• 833.9: Authors born from 1900 to present
• 833.91: Authors born from 1900 to 1990
• 833.914: Authors born from 1945 to 1990

While suffering from hepatitis at the age of fifteen, Michael Berg gets ill in the streets of Bern. Hanna, a woman twice his age, finds him and helps him compose himself in order to get home safely. From there starts a wild, tortuous, and sad love affair that haunts both Michael and the reader. Hanna and Michael spend countless hours together, and she encourages him to read to her as much as possible. One day, though, she disappears without a trace. When he finds her years later, she is standing trial as a former guard at a Nazi concentration camp, and the repercussions of this profession drive the second half of the book. Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is a look the nuances of societal shame versus legal guilt and the affect that has on post-WWII German youth.

287 William and Catherine by Cathy Le Feuvre

287.96092: Le Feuvre, Cathy. William and Catherine: The Love Story of the Founders of The Salvation Army, Told Through Their Letters. Oxford, UK: Monarch Books, 2013. 315 pp. ISBN 978-0-85721-312-9.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 200: Religion
• 280: Dominations and sects of the Christian Church
• 287: Methodist and related churches
• 287.9: Churches related to Methodism
• 287.96: Salvation Army
• +092: Biography

In 1852, a young man in London wrote a letter to a particularly striking woman he saw in his congregation. Catherine Mumford was a woman who knew from the beginning that the man she would agree to marry would be deeply religious, abstain from alcohol, and be a man of sense. William Booth was a Methodist preacher in Clapham, and when the two met, a deep love formed. Cathy Le Feuvre’s William and Catherine covers the letters exchanged between the two starting in 1852 until Catherine’s death in 1890. In those 38 years, the couple married, matured, created a family, suffered setbacks and loss, and eventually changed the world with a new Christian Mission, one that would be named The Salvation Army.