Rainy Day Reads

I read this for the Feminist Orchestra book club and I must say I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I’m just not that into short stories as a genre, I think. It takes a while for me to get into a story and a short story is just too…, well, short for me to really get into it.  All the stories of this book are about not only women, but black women, who experience oppression based on gender AND race. I thought this perspective was interesting, but I think I would have been more engrossed if it had been told in one longer story, rather than a burst of short stories.  I thought most of the stories had an interesting point about either race or gender or both. I think the one that made me think the most was the one about porn. This story tells of a black man who enjoys porn magazines with white women. That makes his (black) wife feel like he doesn’t care for her at all. So he tries to buys magazines with black women, but that doesn’t really help, because while the white women a

This is the third and final book in the Legend trilogy by Marie Lu. I can’t say too much without spoiling the other two books, but I will try. At the end I will also write a few words about the short story “collection” (there are only two) “Life Before Legend”, which is also part of the series.   As I said in my review of Prodigy, I felt like the series wrapped up pretty nicely in the second book, and I was wondering what was going to happen in the third. While stuff certainly went down in the third book, I feel like it was a completely different storyline. It felt like the original storyline wasn’t big enough to fill up 3 books, so they decided to plaster a new story line to the tail end of the old one and string it out to a trilogy. That being said, I did really enjoy this book.  The characters weren’t really evolved all that much in this book either, I think, they were pretty much going over the same old dilemmas from the other books.  As for the plot, it was an

As part of my bingo chart reading challenge for 2016 I decided to pick up a crime novel. It’s not really my genre, as I for some reason just don’t enjoy crime novels that much. But I decided to step out of my comfort zone and give the genre another go. I picked this particular book because Robert Galbraith is a pen name for J.K. Rowling, and if nothing else, then at least the writing would be good.  This book is about a private detective who is having a bit of a hard time lately. His business is not going too well, and neither is his private life. An old acquaintance contacts him in order to have his sister’s suicide investigated, as he believes it wasn’t a suicide at all. The detective, Cormoran Strike, accepts the case and works it with the help of his resourceful and intelligent assistant/secretary Robin.  I liked the story well enough and it was well-written, as I knew it would be. But I found that I wasn’t really all that interested in the mystery of it. The clues w

I debated whether or nor I should even write a review for this book, as I wasn’t sure I would have enough to say about it. In the end I decided why not? I’m sure I can think of something useful to say.  This book is written by Jojo Moyes, who also wrote “Me Before You”, the latest it-book in the chick-lit genre. It takes place partly in France during the First World War and partly in modern day London. We follow two women who are connected through a painting. This painting is called “The Girl You Left Behind” and it is a portrait of Sophie, the first woman, living in France during the war, painted by her husband. Many many years later the painting is bought by Liv’s husband, who gives it to her as a wedding gift. The husband dies and Liv sees the painting as a tangible connection to him, along with the house he built for them to live in.  When Liv meets a new man he turns out to be on the hunt for her painting, as it is believed to have been looted during the war. A nast

I have always felt a great urge to read the books defined as classics. I mean, they’re classics, so they must be good, right? And who doesn’t love a good book? This urge to read the classics has wavered over the years, because often I find myself not liking (and sometimes even detesting) these books. So is it me or is it them? I mean, it’s probably me, let’s be real, but often I wonder why a certain book is considered a classic.   So I have decided to start up with the classics again. I took to Goodreads and found several lists with “classic” books. It is hard to pick a conclusive list as the term “classic” is rather subjective and not all books on various lists are universally thought of as classics. I will use a variety of the available lists to guide me in my choice of books.  At first glance the lists almost all have a lot of well known books listed, and I have actually read quite a few of them. Most of the ones I read I have given 1-3 stars, but some of my absolute favori

I picked this one up because Jean on BookishThoughts on Youtube raved about it and I thought it sounded interesting.  It is about a man who is fascinated by language and the soul. Growing up he has a very close relationship with his mother, while his father mostly seems to be in the way of the two of them. Together the two go looking for dead animals in the woods, because for some reason the mother wants the son to see what things look like dead. This sort of sets the tone for the entire book, where all the son’s relationships and thoughts and deeds are just a bit off. Well, more than a bit.  When he was a child his mother would also tell him a story about children raised in complete silence in order to see if they would speak an “original” language, a language of the soul, so to speak, and he becomes fascinated with this thought. A chain of events leads to him meeting a young woman and having children with her, and he sees this as an opportunity to conduct a similar

This was the latest pick of my TBR Jar, and while it was definitely better than the last book from the jar, I definitely had mixed feelings about it.  It is about a young boy named Leonard Peacock, who is struggling to keep it together. On his 18th birthday he decides to kill a boy from school and then himself with his grandfather’s Nazi handgun. Before he shoots though, he wants to say goodbye to the few people who matter to him. We follow him throughout the school day, as he makes his goodbyes and slowly we figure out why he wants to kill that particular boy.  As mentioned above I have mixed feelings about this book. First of all I absolutely detest foot notes! I don’t understand how anyone can think they will enhance the reading experience. Especially when they sometimes stretch over two pages. What?? It completely disrupts my flow in reading, and just bugs me to no end. I found it a little hard to get into the story, maybe because of the foot notes, maybe because it

This topic is going to be a bit hard, because the prompt clearly states that it is characters you are most like, not who you would LIKE to be like. It does allow you to pick individual character traits, though, so I guess that’s my loophole ;)  In no particular order, I would say I am most like:  Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series. I can definitely recognize myself in her work ethics, her crazy studying and always being on time with her homework. I was such a little goodie two-shoes in school, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I had quite a stress free school life, because I was always on time with assignments, and when occasionally I would completely space out and forget something, the teachers would cut me some slack because of my stellar record. Life tips for you right there! Lyra from His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. As a kid I would make up stories constantly, like Lyra does. I even did writing with two of my friends, dreaming of o

I picked this one up because I saw it making the rounds on Booktube and it sounded really interesting. It takes place after the apocalypse. A virus has swept the world and only a small number of survivors are left. We mainly follow a touring company of actors and musicians who travel a circuit between a number of cities and perform Shakespeare 20 years after the collapse.  What I think is the main story is set about 20 years after the virus, but we have a number of quite lengthy flashbacks to the time before the collapse and just after. These flashbacks are interesting, as we learn the backstory of some of the characters, but some of them seem way too long and unconnected with the story. At least at first glance.  As for the characters we follow a number of people, but they all tie back to this one particular person who dies at the very start of the book. All the rest of the characters are connected to him in some way. I thought this was an interesting way of structuring

This small museum is part of the museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo and it houses 3 famous Viking Age ships, as well as some other Viking Age finds. The most famous ship on display is the complete Oseberg ship, which was excavated from the largest know ship burial in the world.  The museum is built specifically to house the ships and other Viking Age finds from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Arnstein Arneberg won the architectural contest and his building was finished in 1957, the last parts of it delayed due to World War II. The ships were moved as soon as their respective halls were finished and the Oseberg ship moved in in 1926, while the ships from Gokstad and Tune moved in in 1931. As mentioned above the Oseberg ship is probably the most famous item in the museum. It was deposited in a burial mound in 834 AD, but the ship itself is thought to be older than 800 AD. It was excavated in 1904-1905 by the Norwegian archae

I randomly picked this up at the library, because it was marked as “something like Jojo Moyes” and I was in the mood for something lighthearted and easy.  The book is about a young woman, Sara, from Sweden, who is pen-pals with an elderly lady from Broken Wheel, a small town in USA. They both love books and this is how they became acquainted. They decide that Sara should come visit her, but while Sara is traveling, Amy, the elderly lady dies. Sara decides to stay on in the town anyway, as she hasn’t got anything to do back home, and to keep herself busy she opens a bookshop with all of Amy’s books. The townsfolk decided that they like her and Sara really likes it there too, so the townsfolk get up a crazy plan to get her to stay with them.  This book was okay. It was certainly lighthearted and easy, but perhaps a little too much so. Sara reminded me of myself, but even so I had a hard time connecting to her. The same goes for pretty much everyone else in the book too. I