Rainy Day Reads

Challenges: Around the Year in 52 Books: A historical fiction I have been meaning to read this classic for a while (that’s why it was on my TBR obviously), but I’ve just never gotten around to it until now.  This book follows Scarlett, a young (very young!) lady in the American South during the Civil War in the 1860s. Before the war starts all she wants is to find a good husband and get married. When she can’t have the one she wants she throws a fit and marries someone else in a rage. And this is really the crux of her character. She is selfish and vain, and continues to be so, even in the face of all the struggles the war puts her through. At first I felt like I really couldn’t blame her, she is after all VERY young (15 at the start of the book I believe) but after a few years of hardship and misery, and seeing young men cut down in their prime on the battlefields and languishing away in hospitals, still all she cares about is how she looks in her new hat. So I go...

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...

I picked this one out of my TBR Jar and decided to give it a go. It’s one of those books that always seem to be floating around your subconscious but you never really actively think about picking it up. But I finally did! The narrator of this book is a man who comes upon a poster for an auction for the possessions of a lady. He finds out that this lady is a courtesan and I believe he had some sort of connection with her, because he goes and ends up buying a book. A little while later a young man comes looking for this book and wants to buy it off him. They end up becoming friends and the young man tells the narrator the story of his relationship with Marguerite, the courtesan, and why this book means so much to him.  The story itself is very Moulin Rouge-esque, but sort of lacklustre in my opinion. I think this is because I find that stories told in the first person always seem to lack something when it comes to building an atmosphere and a vibe. The same with the ...

So I ended up reading this even though I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for it. I do like Kinsella’s books normally but they just seem to fall into a sort of pattern often, which can get a bit boring.   In this book we follow Samantha, a high-achieving career lawyer in London. One day she makes a massive mistake that costs the company millions of pounds and she finds herself escaping to the countryside, where she ends up as a housekeeper for a mostly kind, but sometimes a little condescending couple. Here she struggles to learn the simple household tasks of doing the ironing and preparing dinner. Tasks she never had time for in her hectic London life. She settles down and when her old life comes knocking she has to make a choice whether to stay or go back.  This book was okay for me. It was fine, but not much more than that. It did follow the pretty predictable pattern of chick-lit in general, so there weren’t really any major plot twists or anything to keep you ...

TBR Jar review: Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan I’m really pleased I finally got around to reading this. I’ve never read anything by Levithan before, but I was pleased with what I read, so I look forward to more from him.  This book is centered around two boys kissing. Harry and Craig used to be a couple, but they are not anymore. When Craig gets the idea to go for the world record for longest kiss, Harry is there to help and support. As they kiss we meet a number of boys trying to navigate a world where so many people think that who they are is wrong. All the main characters of this book are gay, and each has his own struggles trying to fit in or finding the courage to stand out. Their struggles are followed with avid interest by the spirits of all the men who died of AIDS in the 1980s. These men put a wider perspective to each boy’s own personal struggle, and I thought that was a really interesting concept.  Although we don’t really get to know the char...

This was my latest pick from my TBR Jar and I looked forward to reading it as I really enjoyed reading "Before I Fall" by the same author. This book is about Lena who lives in the United States a number of years in the future. In this future people undergo a "cure" when they turn 18, ensuring that they won't contract the "disease" that is love. This cure is essentially a lobotomy that leaves people docile and dispassionate, "protected" from the throes of not just love but any strong feeling. It's not really clear to me why the government thought that this "cure" was necessary in the first place, but apparently they deemed it important. Lena is looking forward to being cured as her mother was smitten and killed herself when Lena was younger, and now Lena is afraid of ending up like her. Of course, in the last summer before her cure, she meets a boy. But not just any boy. Thi particular boy turns out to be exactly what she...

I want to do my bit to try and change the world for the better. But I am lazy and cheap, so getting off my ass to do something actively or paying more for organic isn’t always a priority, I must admit. I do try to do what I can, but sometimes I falls short. I figured this book could help me out with some easy, fun ideas to make a small dent in the workload.   It is set out as a diary or calendar with one idea for each day of the year. Special occasion days like Earth Day or NO Tobacco Day are marked and the ideas for those days are usually associated with that theme. I guess this book is meant for dipping in and out of and doing what is “scheduled” for that day in particular. However, a number of the things suggested does take so preparation so not all of the ideas are achievable in 5 minutes or so. I did also read longer passages each time I sat down with this book and I got the feeling that some of the ideas were a bit repetitive. But if you read them spaced out over the yea...

This was the most recent pick from my TBR Jar and I actually quite enjoyed reading this book.   It is the story of a young man, Tom, in his early 20s I believe, trying to get his life back together after having let it fall apart following the death of his uncle Joe. We hear bout how his family used to be close-knit, but after the death of Joe, everyone seems to be flailing. His father is drinking, his mother left with his sister, he pushed his friends away and screwed up big time with the girl he liked.  After taking a spill from a table cutting his head open and landing himself in hospital he slowly starts to pick up the pieces. I enjoyed seeing his life come back together. I got the feeling of how it used to be, both his family and his group of friends sticking by each other, and how everyone now seemed to be drifting apart. We see how he slowly changes from an angry, hurt, disillusioned young man into someone who takes responsibility for his actions and tries...

As you can tell from the title I DNF’ed this book. The story was about a young girl in what I believe was 16th century England. The summary said the book would detail how she was left alone and penniless on the streets of London and how she rose above that and came to be the king’s mistress. It had all the makings of a trashy period romance and I imagine it would have been almost like a “Gone With the Wind” in a different setting. And when I decided to pick up this book I felt like I was in the mood for just that. But moods change and once I had started this book I just wasn’t feeling it. At all. So I decided to put it down after just a few chapters.   What I did read was well written, but the main character of Amber really annoyed me. She reminded me of Lydia from “Pride and Prejudice”, petulant and selfish and feeling herself too good for her circumstances. She throws away everything to follow some random man who straight out tells her he won’t marry her, but she is just int...

I expected this to be fiction based on true events, but actually it is a non-fiction book detailing the life and love of James Kirkpatrick in India. It is marketed as a great love story between an English man and an Indian woman, destined to be kept apart by race, religion and social standards but overcoming the odds to be together anyway.   The book is very detailed and built mainly on letters, many of which survive in estates and the East India Company’s files. This makes for an accurate, but sometimes slightly dry retelling of actual events. There is so much detail about people and politics that the love story drowns in it. I would say this book is mainly about James Kirkpatrick and his life. His lover Khair features very little in it.  It takes a while for the book to get to James, as it first sets up the entire backdrop of the British in India and the principle figures, both political and familial. This just doesn’t really interest me and for this part of t...

I really enjoyed this book, and it was actually a pleasant surprise since I haven’t had the best of luck with my TBR Jar reads lately (or ever).  This book is about a young girl, Lennie, whose sister suddenly dies. She doesn’t really know how to cope and pushes everyone away until a new boy, Joe, turns up. They pretty much immediately fall for each other, but Lennie is not really making great life decisions and some of her not-so-great-ones come between them. This makes is sound like the entire book is about that relationship, but there is much more too it than that. We see how Lennie tries to deal with the grief of losing her sister and how this affects her relationships with pretty much everyone she knows.  As I said I enjoyed this book, even though I found it a little melodramatic at times. Both plotwise and the writing style itself. Sentences like “we drank the rain from each other’s lips” (quoted from memory so probably not exactly what it says but some...