Rainy Day Reads

Challenges:   Bingo Board 2017: Read For Whom the Bell Tolls Around the Year in 52 Books: A banned book Me and Ernest just don’t get along. I feel like I’ve read or tried to read a bunch of his stuff, but it just isn’t for me. I put this book on my bingo board because I’ve been wanting to give him a second chance to woe me, seeing as he is considered a great writer of classic books. But no dice. I still didn’t like his writing… This book is about the Spanish civil war era and we follow a young idealistic American who has come to fight with the republicans. He is a dynamite expert (I’m sure there’s a fancy name for that?) and he is sent into the mountains to meet a small group of rebels who will help him blow up a bridge in preparation for a battle that is being planned.  He meets the rebels and honestly that’s as far as I got. I just could not stand the writing style. The dialogue was incredibly stilted and formal going something like this:  I...

I’ve heard a lot about this book and everyone who has read it has seemed to love it. It is about a woman who decides to become a vegetarian, which her entire family seems to have a massive problem with. We hear the story from the perspectives of her relatives instead of herself, so I found it pretty hard to connect with her.   First we hear from her husband. This is the period when she decides to become vegetarian. It not just the fact that she becomes vegetarian, she seems to have some sort of mental health issue in relation to this, but instead of being concerned about her mental health her husband is obsessed with the fact that she leaves the house without wearing a bra.  Next we hear from her brother-in-law. Now the woman seems to be in a mentally healthier state and she helps out with her brother-in-laws art project. This art project consists of him painting flowers on her naked body and filming it. This man is sexually obsessed with the woman and wants nothin...

To be completely honest I gave up on this pretty quickly. I just wasn’t in the mood for fantasy, but at the same time it just felt like this particular book wasn’t for me.  I got about 60 pages in, and already there were a number of characters, battles and timejumps. This made it pretty hard for me to keep up, and keep not only the characters but the timeline in order. So I decided to give it up rather than power through and perhaps waste a lot of time on this massive book, when I have so many other (hopefully) good books to read. If it was meant to be, this book will find its way back to me. But somehow I doubt it.   That’s really all I can say about the book. I am well aware that I probably didn’t give it a proper chance, but…I don’t really care. The next book out of my jar is “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948” by Madeleine Albright. 

This book was making its way around Youtube a year or two ago and it seemed like so much fun. It was branded as Buffy the Vampire Slayer set in the American South with all  that  that entails of cotillion and manners and lemonade.   It does have slight Buffy vibes as the main character, Harper, is a high school girl who must step up to the task of protecting, not the world, but one particular person. But that’s about it, as far as the Buffy comparison goes.  Harper is a regular, albeit slightly high-strung, girl who on prom night ends up in a magical fight between the janitor and her history teacher. As it turns out the janitor transfers some powers to her, and her history teacher then tries to kill her. Harper decides that she must be going crazy, but while she is figuring out how exactly, she finds out that indeed she is not crazy, but some seriously weird stuff is going on.  I gave this book just over 150 pages before I decided to DNF it. T...

I recently had a look through my Pinterest board for books and ordered a bunch of books home from the library. I feel like this was on one of those Pins but I can't remember the theme or anything. In all events, I didn't really enjoy it. The main characters is a boy named Leopold. He lives with his family on a large estate in early 20th century England. He has a special interest in horses and not so much in humans, and he dreams of working for the master of the house on the stud farm when he is older. And that is pretty much all I got from the book. And I read about half of it, so I would say I gave it a good try. The book starts in January 1911 and tells of the life on the farm, the sowing, the harvesting, the work with the animals and so on. If you like reading about pastoral scenes and early 20th century farming then I think you would enjoy this book. However, I like more plot driven books, so this really wasn't for me. I didn't particularly like the writing st...