May 2015 Wrap-Up

Haven't done a wrap-up in a while thanks to demands of Uni work and home, but as I have a spare few minutes, I am doing my May one now.

This month I have had TONNES of reading for Uni and so my reading-for-pleasure has been a bit more limited - I got through six books (hoping it will be seven by the time Sunday comes!).

This is a very varied bunch of novels - the Daniel Defoe trilogy was part of my Uni reading. It incorporates the famous tale of Robinson Crusoe but also the two sequels which are less well known. Admittedly I just skimmed through them but they were enjoyable.

Moses Migrating by Sam Selvon is also a book I have read for Uni essay preparation. It is the third in Selvon's 'Moses trilogy' - novels which focus on the experiences of West Indian immigrants in mid twentieth-century London. Selvon captures these experiences through comedy, his characterisations, and his narrative and I have found that each one of the books in the trilogy has opened my mind to how difficult and frustrating it is to be a marginalised person in society. These books really do make you a better human being!

The Complete Works by William Blake is yet more Uni reading - in particular this month I read 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. Ok it took me a few read throughs to 'get' the poem, but it blew me away, parodying the whole concept of authority in religion. Really really good.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie was a fascinating account of a young boy who is born on the stroke of midnight on the day India gains independence. As a result, he - and other children who were born within the first hour of this momentous day - are born with special powers. The novel is very well-written, you get to feel like you know the families involved in real-life, and, although maybe a bit long-winded especially towards the end, it is a book that is pretty hard to put down.

Moll Flanders was read for Uni, just to keep the Defoe theme going and to identify the links with Robinson Crusoe and J M Coetzee's Foe. Moll is your loveable villain who gains husband after husband whilst committing crimes she avoids being caught for......until one day she wanders into a house.....

On my Kindle, I read Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. It's a family drama following the Lee family, their hopes and aspirations, their loves and hates, the risks of 'pushy parenting', and the aftermath of a tragedy that concerns one of the family members. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

I am three-quarters of the way through Kate Atkinson's Life After Life just now - am hoping to get it finished over the weekend. Loving it though, and will definitely be buying her new sequel.

The last book haul for May. I think.......

Seeing as it is my birthday on Monday, I decided to treat myself to some shiny new books, each of which I have bought on recommendation from others on Goodreads or Booktube.  I had to restrain myself to three (which was very hard work!) but these are the ones I settled for:

Evening is the Whole Day was a recommendation on Goodreads. It is set in Malaysia and follows the wealthy Rajasekharan family "as its closely guarded secrets are slowly peeled away" (so says the blurb on Goodreads). It has got a heap of five star ratings, with many readers saying it is their favourite novel of all time, so I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in to this one. Love reading about India - M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions got me into my fascination with it, and having recently finished Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children I feel in the mood for another trip to the east whilst sitting on my sofa. 

I have never read anything by Wilbur Smith before, but - and I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover - I just love Egypt and myth, etc. It's his brand new historical fiction/adventure novel, two of my favourite genres, but has had mixed reviews so I am excited to find out for myself what this is like. 

The Enchanted April was a Booktube recommendation - it's a feelgood novel set in 1920s England/Italy, an era I absolutely love. From the blurb I can tell you that it's about four women who wish to escape the measly English weather by renting a villa in Italy for a month's sojourn, during which time each character undergoes "a heartening realisation about herself". Sounds right up my street!

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Kate Atkinson's Life After Life right now - am aiming to get it finished by Monday. Then it is the decision as to which one to read next.......

I didn't mean this to happen......honest.

So, I'm at my Uni tutorial last Saturday, when my tutor tips me off about a book sale that is occurring in a church along the road from the Uni, the proceeds from which are going to the charity Christian Aid. As my tutor proudly shows me the nine books he picked up for under £10, I am willing the following two hours to fly in so that I can go along. Just for a look, mind. I have enough books at home that need reading and besides, I don't have room on my bookshelves for any more tomes (seeing as a large number of my books are beginning a conquest of the floors).

Tutorial finishes, I grab a Starbucks and head along to the aforementioned church. I felt like a child in a sweetie shop.

There are literally stacks upon stacks of lovely literature, all yelling out at me to buy them. There weren't quite scuffles, but I dived in and rescued one or two titles that I had been wanting to get for ages, plus a couple of novels I haven't read since I was a teenager.

To cut a long story short, 1 hour and 2 full boxes later, this is what I left the church with......

Look what has just arrived......again!

I have been AWOL from my blog mainly due to Uni commitments (an essay and now a tonne of reading for the next one) but I still can't kick my addiction. I have spent a bit TOO much money on books over the past few months; these ones have just arrived today.

Oooh! Squee! New friends!!

My hot day reading list.

I am more than a little excited about this! Will do reviews on each one when I read them (I am still reading my way through the Terry Pratchett 'Discworld' series - on book 12 now - yes, I still need to do reviews for them too) and will do a proper April Book Haul and Wrap-Up in a few days.

It's a gorgeous hot day, so I'm off out into the back garden with a book. Shame it's literary criticism on Robinson Crusoe!

March Wrap-Up

March was a busy month reading-wise, where Uni texts fought big time with my reading-for-pleasure. With an essay due mid-April, I had to cut down a bit, but yet I still managed to read eleven books, which I am chuffed about.

Following the death of Sir Terry Pratchett, I decided to give his Discworld series another go; I had read Wyrd Sisters years ago, but didn't quite '"get" the book at all. This month, I have managed to read the first six, including Wyrd Sisters, which I absolutely loved on second reading. It's amazing how reading tastes change in a decade! I'm just about to start book 7, Pyramids, but - as per usual - essay guilt has prevented me from doing so today. I am also conscious that I haven't put my reviews up for the first few Discworlds, I am slacking! Will do that as soon as possible.

Other than Pratchett, four of the other books I read were from the Waterstone's Book Club, my favourite being Nora Webster of the four, with the creepy Her in second place. All are very good books though, and I have reviewed each on this blog.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan was for Uni research - my essay includes writing about the 'body-politic' in Shakespeare's Coriolanus so I have been reading that text to fill myself in on what a healthy republic is, and how it becomes 'diseased'. Like many philosophy books, it is quite tricky to read at times but I *think* I got the argument!

So, on to April. Holidays are approaching, as is an even longer essay (on Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee's Foe), but I am hoping to get ten books read if I can. I'm feeling so smug that I am 17 books ahead of where I should be on my Goodreads 2015 Reading Challenge, need to try and top the fifty books that I thought I would read this year. So far so good.

Oh, and I have more books arriving from Waterstone's tomorrow........

My weekend book haul (yes, another one!).

Have had an unintentional absence from my blog, mainly due to a Uni essay being due within the next few weeks and the fact that I needed to do a lot of research for it. I have been busy reading my way through Terry Pratchett's Discworld  series of novels, in the wake of his death (so sad!); reviews for the ones I have completed will be posted very soon. Needless to say, I am a huge fan of Pratchett now - it's just a shame it took his death for me to start reading my hubby's collection of his books!

Anyhow.....

I've been a bit naughty recently, and had a bit of a book-buying-binge. As well as picking up Plato's Republic, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, (studied this in one of my English undergrad modules and loved it so bought my own copy), and Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from a small independent local bookshop, I made the mistake (well - it wasn't really a mistake but to the rest of my family it appeared thus) of wandering into Waterstone's on Saturday, where I picked up this little lot. I'm so excited to have the sequel to Ransom Riggs's Mrs Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children; I bought the first novel as an ebook and loved it so much that I bought it again in paper format, as well as the sequel. There are also a couple of Discworld novels that were missing from our collection, the Margaret Kennedy novel The Ladies of Lyndon (haven't read anything by her yet), and The Beautiful and the Damned by F.Scott Fitzgerald. And do you like my bag?

So many new books, so much Uni work - there is a battle royal going on about which to do first! Gah!

Book Review: 'Her', by Harriet Lane

I picked up this novel, as it was one that the Waterstone's Book Club were reading, and the title just grabbed me. I know books shouldn't be judged from the title but this one seemed so menacing, and a nice easy diversion from the 'heavy' Shakespeare play that I am studying at Uni just now. I'm not a fan of chick-lit but the tag 'psychological thriller' eventually sold it to me so, always glad of a scary suspense novel, I decided to give it a go.

This is a freakishly chilling novel whose clever construction through the mirroring of the events of each chapter from one woman's viewpoint reflected in the following chapter from that of the other woman, allows the reader to fully experience the almost over-friendly 'two-facedness' of Nina, and the trusting naivete of Emma. Now in their early forties, these two women have met in the past; it isn't until the very end of the novel that the reader discovers the reason for Nina's obsessive, grudging and stalking attitude to the oblivious Emma, and the devastating and nightmarish consequences of these emotions. 

The characters were very well written - I got so frustrated with Emma and Ben and kept shouting at her to get him to do more to help her, while Nina just gave me the creeps, even before her darker side became evident. I got so engrossed in the characters and the spiralling events that I ended up reading this novel in just four hours! 

Really enjoyed it, so it gets four stars out of five from me.