Rainy Day Reads

I picked this one up for my bingo reading challenge because I have seen a number of the Hogarth Shakespeare retellings floating around Booktube, and this one just happened to catch my eye at the library.   This is a retelling of “The Taming of the Shrew”, and it follows Kate, a college-dropout (or more like kick-out) who is living with her dad and taking care of her younger teenaged sister.  When her dad’s research assistant Pyotr finds himself in need of a green card, Kate’s dad hatches a plan to get Kate to marry him so he can stay and work in the laboratory. Kate of course takes great offense at being treated like property, but almost in spite of herself she finds that she sort of likes Pyotr.  I read this one without having read the play, so I can’t say how faithful it is to the original play. I imagine it is quite faithful, because it felt a little rushed, like we just had a number of markers to hit and we needed to hit them sooner rather than later. I r...

Challenges:   Bingo: Night by Elie Wiesel Diversity Bingo 2017: Jewish Main Character This book is set during World War II and our protagonist is Eliezer, a young boy living in Transylvania with his family. Soon the Nazis make their arrival and Eliezer and his family are first forced to move into a ghetto with other Jews and then they are moved to a camp.  This book is told from the perspective of Eliezer, and we follow his struggle with faith as these harrowing things unfold. He started as a devout Jewish scholar who wanted nothing more than to study the Jewish mysteries, but at the end of the book he is deeply questioning his faith.  This book is quite short but very powerful and while there are many books dealing with the Holocaust I think this one has a bit of something more, as we follow Eliezer’s internal struggles with faith and morals as well as the external struggle to just survive.  I gave this book 5 stars out of 5. 

I forgot I had this book on my bingo chart for the year, and I wasn't planning on writing a review until I remembered, because I don't really have a lot to say about it. The book follows Janie, a young black woman in the American south in the 1920s. She wants more out of life than the marriage her grandmother strives to get for her. When she kisses a boy her grandmother quickly sets her up with an older man and they are married. Janie resents this life and when a happy-go-lucky fellow comes by her garden gate she takes up with him. He gives her a different life from what she had, but she still isn't happy with it. When she finally meets Tea Cake she is content. As I said I wasn't planning on writing a review, because I didn't really enjoy this book, but I didn't hate it either. I just don't think it was for me. Janie seems unsatisfied with her lot in life, and she is portrayed as someone with gumption and drive, but then she sits back and lets the me...

I have been meaning to get my hands on this book for a while, and having set myself a goal of reading 12 non-fiction books this year AND placing this specific book on my 2017 Bingo Board I figured it was time to buckle down and do it! I think we all know who Malala is. As the title says she was the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taleban. I had never heard of her before she was shot and it was all over the news. I thought she was more or less randomly targeted by the Taleban and only took up her fight for education for girls after the fact. But it turns out that she did a great deal of campaigning and activism before she was shot, and this was the reason she was targeted.  In this book we learn about her life mostly before the shots and we see how her home in Pakistan slowly but securely came under the thumb of the Taleban. Meanwhile Malala and her father, himself an avid activist for education, fight to keep Pakistan from turning into the Taleban...

I had 20 challenges on my bingo board for 2016 and I managed to do 15 of them. I am quite proud of that! You can see all of my reviews of the books I read here .   At the beginning of the year I was killing it, crossing off books left, right and center, but towards the summer  I just seemed to peter out. I still read books, just not books from the bingo board. I think the reason for that was just that once I finished a book I would want to move on to the next one fairly quickly, but most of the books on the board I would have to get from the library and it would usually take a week or more for them to get them in. So I would just read something else, and once I finished that one, it would be the same palaver.  Still, I managed to read quite a lot of the books/themes on my board and I am pretty happy with my results. I did also try to read one more theme, a vampire book, but I started a total of three (!) books and just didn’t care enough to finish them. So ...

I picked this book as my “historical fiction book” for the Bingo Board Reading Challenge, because I’ve heard so many good things about it.   It is set in 17th century Delft in the Netherlands and is told from the perspective of a young girl named Griet, who goes to work as a maid in the house of Vermeer, the famous painter.  We learn early on that her father has had an accident at his work and can’t work any longer, so now the two children must support the family. The son is an apprentice tile maker and that is all well and good, but Griet must work as a maid and the parents are so ashamed of what this family has come to, and say things like “We lost you when you became a maid” etc. If it’s SO shameful to be a maid why are you letting her? And if it is so necessary for her to work as a maid to support YOU why are you being so bitchy about it?  Anyway, she goes to the house and gets stuck into work. And here she meets a bunch of people and the book is re...

I did a bingo board reading challenge this year for the first time and rather enjoyed it. I'll have a "review" of how well I did going up soon, so keep an eye on that. For now, I will be presenting my bingo board for next year, as I have decided to keep it up. It is a fun way of challenging yourself and reading a bit out of your comfort zone, or just taking a chance to check off some of the books that have been bumping around on your TBR for way too long. Below is the bingo board I have made for 2017. This year I have been a bit more specific, picking a number of specific authors or even books, as I found last year's rather vague list to be a bit of a hindrance sometimes. If I first had to find out what "modern translated fiction" entailed, I was more likely to just pick up whatever was lying around and read that instead. So I have tried being a bit ahead of the game this year and picking some specific things from the get go. Modern translated fictio...