Rainy Day Reads

I almost gave up on this book before I really got started, because I didn’t feel like reading another badly written WWII book. I assumed this would be a book with a number of family anecdotes tenuously tied up with the actions of the war. But luckily I was wrong. This was really well written and in no way boring or disjointed. It is based on Albright’s experiences during the war, but more so her father’s as she was only a very young child at that point. Her father meanwhile, worked for the displaced Czechoslovakian government in London during the war and he was a diplomat before and after the war. Albright ties together his work and musings about their country with events in the war in an engaging and instructive way. I learnt a lot about the war, a subject which I considered myself pretty well versed in, before I read this book. But reading about the lead up to the war and the events that took place in Central Europe while Hitler aggressively moved his plans along and the Wes...

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.