Rainy Day Reads

I read this because Jean BookishThoughts on Youtube often talks about John Wyndham, and for once I was pleasantly surprised. I really, really liked this book, and it had me interested from page one! The book is set in England, mostly London, but also some surrounding countryside, in the 1950s. I believe it was written in the 1950s too, so the setting is essentially “present day” but in the 1950s. Does that make any sense? What I am trying to say is that the author tells the story with his world view, which the reader at the time would know, so there is no need to explain things that might seem weird to us today (except the triffids). I hope that made sense…let’s move on! The main character is Bill Masen, who is in hospital, when we first meet him. As he wakes up, he slowly finds out that almost everyone else on the planet has gone blind due to a meteor shower the night before, which he was unable to witness because his eyes had been bandaged. He enters the streets of London on

I put Shirley Jackson on the bingo chart because I have heard so many good things about her writing on Booktube, but I had never really heard about her before. I picked “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” because that was the one that seemed to pop up every time someone mentioned Shirley Jackson.   The book starts with a presentation of the narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood or Merricat. She tells us that she is 18 and that she lives with her sister, and that everyone else in the family is dead. It turns out that the rest of the family except the two sisters and their aging uncle was killed by arsenic in the food 6 years ago. Her sister Constance was put on trial for it, but nothing was proved, and now they all three live together in the house. The villagers all bully the family and Mary Katherine is the only one who goes out. I can’t tell you much more about the plot without ruining it for you, as I really think you should go in as blind as possible.  Throughout the bo

This bridge was built in 1357 AD by Charles the 4th. It spans the Vltava River and from the eastern end of the bridge you can see the the royal castle on the opposite bank. Perhaps the most famous feature of this bridge are the many sculptures of saints that line the bridge, 30 in total. Most of these were put in place in the 18th and 19th centuries, but have been replaced by copies by now. The originals are placed in churches or museums.   The bridge was built to replace an older bridge, called the Judith Bridge, built in the 12th century. The Judith bridge was damaged in a flood in 1342 and The Charles Bridge replaced it. Until about 1870 this new bridge was simply known as the “stone bridge” or the “Prague bridge”.  The bridge is 621 m long and almost 10 m wide. The entrances to the bridge are protected by towers, one on the side of the old town and two on the side of the so-called “lesser Quarter”. The one by the old town is considered one of the most beautiful

I saw this book around Booktube a few months ago and everyone seemed to rave about it, so I thought I would check it out. And I must say I was disappointed. Once again! I seem to be disappointed a lot when it comes to hyped books lately.   The book is told from two perspectives. The fancy bit is that one perspective is told in the first part  of the book, and in order to read the second perspective, you have to flip the book over and start again from the “back” if that makes sense. This means that you can start from either end of the book, and that should supposedly give a different reading experience, depending on which part of the book/which perspective you start with.  The two narrators are a young girl who has recently lost her mother in the present day, and a Renaissance painter from Italy. The painter is however transported to the present day, and thinks back on his life in Italy.  I didn’t really like the writing style. I thought it made the story feel quite super

Now I don’t do a lot of DIY, as evidenced by this blog! But once in a while I get the urge to make something. And the other day I decided to make this little tea light candle holder. It’s easy, cute and inexpensive, so I thought I would share it here.   Really there is not much to it, but I felt so proud of myself for completing it that I wanted to share!  You need: A small glass jar Glue A brush for the glue Strips of paper or fabric (if you use paper make sure it’s quite thin, as this will be easier to work with) Now you just put some glue on the side of the jar and stick your strips of paper or fabric down. Brush glue on again to make sure it really sticks and continue until the jar is completely covered. Bend the strips under the bottom of the jar and glue them down. At the top of the jar cut the strips to just above the opening and then bend them into the jar and glue them down. Let it dry and you’re done!! Easy peasy!  I think th

A book that’s over 900 pages long can seem a bit daunting for most. But as usual with Dickens I don’t think the length is too much. The language is engaging and the story is interesting, so while the pages don’t fly by, they don’t drag on forever either. I think it really pays off in the end if you manage to forget about the page numbers.   Dickens can be a bit wordy and longwinded sometimes, but it doesn’t happen too often, I think. The wordiness usually comes out, when he is explaining some part of the world the characters inhabit, like the doings (or not-doings) of the Circumlocution Office and the social rules of the various places in the story. When the plot is developing I find the language interesting and descriptive, without being too much.  As for the plot of this book is it very intricate, as is usual for Dickens, I think. Seemingly unconnected characters come together in the end in unexpected, but not unbelievable ways. But it all begins with a man, Mr. Arthur Clenn

This is the third and final book of the Grisha trilogy. It is hard to say too much about the book without spoilers, as it is the final book of a series, but I’ll give it a go! We follow Alina’s point of view, and as a result I feel like most of the characters aren’t really that fleshed out. We get to know Alina’s thoughts and cares, but we only see the other characters through her eyes. I almost always feel slightly disappointed by this, when a book is told in first person perspective, but I don’t see how it can be done better without changing the perspective. Which I personally wouldn’t mind.  There is practically no world-building in this book, which is really as it should be, as the world ought to be set up by the third book. As for the magic system I did have some trouble with it. It seemed awfully convenient and not very logical the way the magic would work and react to certain events. So I struggled a bit with that, especially the thing at the end where the magic shifts.

So I know I said a few posts ago that I wasn’t being books these days. But then my favorite online book shop had a sale…and I caved! I bought 8 books, but they all had 20% off, so I couldn’t not buy them, right? First I got the two first books in the Harry Potter series. I bought these, because I have them in Danish, and I really wanted the complete set in English. I don’t know if you can call it a “set” as such, as they are in three different editions….But I actually really like this edition, so I don’t mind the mis-matching set too much. Then I got “Between Shades of Gray” by Ruta Sepetys. I have heard nothing but good things about this book. It is set during WWII, and deals with the deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia on the order of Stalin. I just read the synopsis and the main character is a young girl who encodes her drawings to give her imprisoned father a chance to find them again. Now I want to read it even more! I also got “365 Ways to Change t

This is the second book of the Grisha trilogy, and I really liked it. There is not really too much to say without spoiling it, since it is a second book, so I’ll keep it short.   I think I actually liked this book a tad better than the first, just because I felt like there was more action in this one. Obviously a second book does not have to deal with as much world building as the first in a series, so there is time for more action and character development. I didn’t really feel like we got the latter though. The known characters remained much the same, and we didn’t really delve any deeper into them. The story is told from Alina’s perspective, so I guess it wasn’t really possible to dig deeper unless she did. And more often than not she didn’t. We also meet some new characters and I feel much the same about these.  As for the plot, in the beginning I felt like it was sort of in a rut. Someone is captured, then they escape, then they are captured again and escape again, and I

So this is the first book I can cross off my bingo chart reading goals for the year. I decided to read a book by Patrick Ness because I’ve heard so many good things about him. I have actually read two by him already “A Monster Calls” and “The Knife of Never Letting Go”. The first was based on someone else’s idea, so I felt like that didn’t really count, and I didn’t really like the second one, mainly because of the writing style, so I decided to give it one more go. And I am glad I did. This was a totally different experience regarding writing style and I liked it a lot more.   The book is about a young boy who drowns. But then he wakes up again in a seemingly abandoned world, all alone and very confused. The story unfolds as he tries to figure out what is going on, and how to survive in this world.  I liked the writing in this book. It is pretty straightforward, but still beautifully executed. We flip back and forth between this “new” world and Seth’s memories of what h

I first got into Charles Dickens, because I watched some adaptations of his novels on TV. I believe the first one was Little Dorrit, which my friend and I watched a number of times during our 4 month Asia trip. She had bought the DVD set and a portable player and we utilized this during any down time. The series was so beautifully made that it was easily able to stand a re-watch (or many) and when we came to a bigger book store we hunted down copies of the book and started reading. And   I loved it! Charles Dickens is a bit of a hit-or-miss for me. I LOVE some of his books like “David Copperfield”, “Bleak House”, “Nicholas Nickleby" and “Little Dorrit", but some of his other most notable works I really don’t like, e.g. “A Tale of Two Cities”and “Great Expectations”.  Dickens was born in 1812, and at a young age he had to leave school to work in a factory, as his father was imprisoned for debt. Despite this lack of formal education he wrote and edited thousands of pag

This book is the first book in the Grisha series. It is quite short compared to some other fantasy books that can surpass the 500 page mark. This book was about 350 pages, and while that sounds like a long book, they pages were quick to read, as they were rather small and the font was quite large.   As for the plot I liked it. It moved along quite nicely, except for a little bit of a slow patch in the middle, but just as I was starting to wonder what could possibly take up the rest of the book, something happened that took the plot in a completely different direction. As I said, I liked the plot, but it didn’t have me on the edge of my seat most of the time. It just ambled along nicely until the end of the book, when it became more thrilling.  I wasn’t terribly invested in the fate of the characters. I think maybe just because the book was rather short, so the characters were for the most part described and developed rather summarily. But I did think that the set of characters