Rainy Day Reads

It’s a good job libraries are free, because otherwise I would be broke! I went for a little browse around my library because I had a few books to return. And it’s a rare day that I manage to leave the library without (a few) new books in hand.  This time I browsed with no particular plan in mind and I came across a couple of books that took my fancy.  First I found “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve heard Regan at PeruseProject rave about this series and this author and I have been meaning to get around to reading a book by him. So when I came across this one I decided to pick it up. It’s about world ruled by a supreme lord and two unlikely companions planning the ultimate revolt. That’s really as much as I can get from any synopsis, but a classic fantasy story like this should be interesting and it comes highly recommended, so I will give it a go.  Next I came across Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”. Again the synopsis is extremely vague, but I have bee

I read this as my “Modern Translated Fiction” entry for my bingo reading challenge this year, because I’ve heard so many good things about it.   The book is the first in a series called “The Neapolitan Novels” and it details the childhood and early adolescent of a young girl in 1950s Naples, Italy. I have the feeling that this book is supposed to be autobiographical, but I can’t say if that is true or not. It is told in the first person, so that certainly lends the story the feeling of autobiography.  The story starts with two young girls, the narrator Elena and Lila, becoming friends. We follow their life in a poor neighborhood in the city and their struggles to follow their dreams. The girls both have ambitions to do well in school and bring their families out of poverty one way or another. While Elena manages to fight her way through school, Lila has to leave school to help her family make money. We then follow the girls as they grow into teenagers and as they try to

As one of my New Year’s Resolutions I decided to read more non-fiction this year, more specifically 12 non-fiction books. I picked this one as one of them because I don’t like the way the public debate has been conducted lately. There seems to be a lot of hate and intolerance and people try to justify it with “facts” apparently pulled out of almost thin air.   This book promises to take a hard look at these “facts” and refute most if not all of them, and unlike the propagators of the hateful speech, it actually backs up its claims. Granted this does get a little boring sometimes, but this is the stuff we need to refute the haters, so I definitely think it’s worth it to power through. And it really isn’t that bad. Saunders does a good job of giving us enough numbers to back up his claims and then adding a meaningful context to those numbers.  In the first part of the book Saunders takes the claims made by anti-immigrant, anti-muslim people and refutes them one by one. The

I picked this book up in my most recent library haul, because I had seen it last year I believe, in a number of videos on Booktube. It had been nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. So maybe it was in 2015 I saw it on Booktube…time flies! This is about a woman who loses her family in a freak accident on the eve of her daughter’s wedding. Her boyfriend, her ex-husband, her daughter and her soon to be son-in-law all die in a fire caused by a gas explosion. The woman, June, finds it difficult to cope and almost immediately after the funerals she picks up and leaves in her car with no luggage and no plan.  Meanwhile we follow the rest of the inhabitants in the small town where tragedy struck, who all seem to be connected to the deceased in some way or other. Friends and family of course, but also the caterer and the florist for the wedding.  We slowly unravel the backstories of a number of the main characters and discover what led to the explosion. We get a feel fo

In my most recent library book haul I described this as “Desperate Housewives” in book form and I stand by that description.   This book is about a group of people, connected by the school that all their children go to. Jane, a newcomer, meets one of the other moms, Madeleine, and gets sucked into the politics of the school, when Madeleine takes her under her wing. Jane is nervous and shy so when the power-mom at the school accuses Jane’s son of bullying her daughter she finds it difficult to stand up for herself in the ensuing war. However, with Madeleine on her side she finds the courage to take a stand.  The book is written as normal prose interspersed with bits from an interview, apparently. We hear from most of the moms and some of the dads at the school and from a police inspector, who is determined to find out what happened at the quiz night. This quiz night is the crux of the story as something major happens here. We start the story going back 5 months or so and

I loved this book! It was suspenseful, fast paced without being rushed and had an interesting cast of characters.   This book is set in an alternate universe where the Nazis won the war. Hitler has expanded his empire and rules it with an iron fist. Meanwhile the resistance plots to take him down. They plan to do this by having one of their agents, Yael, win the annual motorcycle race between the axis powers, Germany and Japan. A victory will ensure an audience with Hitler bringing Yael close enough to kill him. In order to race she has to pretend to be last year’s victor, Adele Wolfe. This is one of my few qualms with this book. Yael has the power to skinshift, essentially changing her appearance to look exactly like someone else. This power was…obtained (for lack of a better word) in the Nazi death camp where a doctor experimented on the young girl and somehow infused her with the power to change her appearance. This is the only fantastical element in the story, and while

This is a story about 16 year old Aysel, who wants to die.   I really wanted to read this book because it deals with suicide which is such a taboo subject, and I think we need to talk about it more. I bought it a long time ago, and it has sat on my shelves for this long because I started hearing not so great things about it. But I finally decided to judge for myself and picked it up a few days ago.   The story is about Aysel, whose father has committed a crime that she feels makes her a pariah in the community, and she is afraid she will turn out like him if she grows up. So she decides to kill herself and finds a buddy on a suicide website. She meets up with Roman, who turns out to be a once-popular kid dealing with some heavy stuff. They slowly get to know each other as they plan their deaths, and of course with a book like this you are hoping that they will come to realize that they have many things to live for.  There were a number of characters in this book and