Reading on a Rainy Day

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Showing posts from September, 2013

What's Reading this Week! (Sep 30, 2013)

Well, well, well... Looks like we only have three more months left in the year. It always bugs me how it feels like only yesterday we finished with all the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas celebrations, and what do you know, they are already just around the corner. Quite frightening, really. I had a really slow week in reading - it had to happen sometime. I think the problem was that I was reading The Silent Wife very slowly. It's a great book, really, but it's also a book I would read in a couple of sittings and not a few pages at a time. So it's back on the shelf for now, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon. In the meantime, I started rereading Maus . Last time I read it (sometime last year), I couldn't bring myself to review it. The book was so much more than I could really say anything about it. While rereading it now, I've been feeling that I may have read it too fast the first time - there are a lot of things I don't recollect reading. I'm

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Every woman wants a man who'll fall in love with her soul as well as her body. At Lincoln's workplace, it is a rule that the work email should not be used for personal purposes, and it is Lincoln's job to enforce that ruling and warn any employee found violating the rule. Some have been fired, while a few have been let off with warnings. Even Beth and Jennifer, two employees in his company know of this, but that doesn't stop them from slowly testing their boundaries by starting off with small talk and then expanding into talking about all their problems through email. Lincoln knows he should stop them, but initially they seem harmless and over time, he starts getting intrigued by these two women. He ends up liking them so much that he starts looking forward to their emails. And then he falls in love with Beth, who doesn't even know him. I won Attachments couple of years ago on someone's blog, when it first came out. At that time, even though many said

What's Reading this Week! (Sep 24, 2013)

I didn't realize I had been away from the bloglandia whole weekend. We had some things come up. We bought a new car this weekend, plus I was scrambling to finish Eleanor and Park , for no reason other than the fact that it was so darn good! Rainbow Rowell is becoming my new favorite author! I also finished David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish which, I realized belatedly, was written in verse. It didn't work for me. I could see that the poetry was beautiful and the stories profound. But I just didn't mix too well with it - I think that's probably because it was more a literary verse as opposed to being a narrative verse. So for now, it looks like my foray into the verse genre has ended even before I thought it began. Next in the list Today, I'm debating on starting A. S. A. Harrison's The Silent Wife . At this point, I'm a little leery of books that have Gone Girl yelling at me from the blurb. It's not fair to the book

By Order of the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts...

...Any student found in possession of the magazine The Quibbler will be expelled. Next week is Banned Books Week. This is probably the first year in over four years that I don't have a plan to read any banned book. Not because I don't want to, but more because I haven't yet got the time to choose a read. Maybe by this weekend, I'll decide one, maybe I will just let this year go by and celebrate the week in spirit. It's funny though, how, with the Banned Books week just around the corner, we already have a few parents clamoring to ban another popular book, Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park , and calling to discipline the librarians who chose that book . What?? I don't think I quite get the whole ban philosophy. I know I've said that repeatedly. I grew up reading whatever I wanted, even erotica, and I turned out fine, thankyouverymuch. It boggles my mind why people would want to ban books, rather than call for a discussion or fill one of tho

How to be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman

'Needs more salt,' she says. Then she turns around, picks up her gin and tonic from the sideboard, and leaves the room. When she is gone, I lift the lid of the pan. Picking up the large salt container, I hold it over the stew, watching the smooth white trail disappear. I pour until the container is empty. Marta Bjornstad decides to stop taking her meds. When her husband asks her repeatedly if she took her meds, she lies and says yes. When he pops a pill into her mouth, prompts her to swallow and then open her mouth, she pretends to swallow the pill, hides it in a corner of her mouth and opens her supposedly empty mouth. She doesn't know why she's doing this. But she's tired of eating the pills. Sadly for her, stopping the pills begins to have an adverse effect on her - she starts getting visions of a girl she doesn't recognize. Initially, she panics, but soon she starts looking forward to the visions. She feels that the girl is trying to tell her someth

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world. When he was a young child, our nameless narrator's family was pretty well-off and had a big house that he lived in with his parents and sister. But when they hit against slightly hard times, the boy had to give up his bedroom with its perfect-sized washbasin, as tall as him, so that boarders could stay there. One such boarder was an opal miner, who fatally hits the boy's cat on the day he arrives and commits suicide the next day. This death sets in motion a very strange sequence of events - his neighbors suddenly seem to receive a lot of money, leading to a lot of ill-will, a strange family at the end of the lane seems to know everything there is to know about eve

Top Ten Books on my Fall 2013 TBR List

I love this week's topic at Top Ten Tuesday . I used to make TBR lists quite often in the past but I stopped doing it because I don't really seem to get through my lists. But that doesn't take the fun out of the actual list making process. The Fall releases... There are so many of these books I'm excited about for so many reasons! I'm totally digging the Unwind trilogy by Neal Shusterman, and UnSouled is going to the final book in that series. I can't wait to see how he plans to wrap it all up. I'm also glad that the wait time to UnSouled is much less compared to how long we had to wait between the 1st and 2nd books. Did you hear that Bridget Jones is making a comeback this Fall? She is probably the first light women fiction book heroine I met, so I'm looking forward to reading Mad About the Boy . And then Rachel Joyce's Perfect . After loving The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , I cannot wait to read this one. And The re

What's Reading this Week! (Sep 16, 2013)

Last week was a good one in books. I finished How to be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman, which was enjoyable, but not quite as good as I hoped it would be. I also finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane and that was a very amazing read. I'm looking forward to reading more of Gaiman's books - I can now see his appeal. I spent a day not reading at all but mostly catching up on some chores, doing some shopping, catching up on Supernatural . I'm still not sure what my next read will be but this past week, I've been listening to The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It has a whopping 19 discs, which is more than my max disc count so far of 12. I know I'm curious to see how this one will go. So far, content-wise, it is very informative. I don't quite like it when the author gets a bit preachy, but that can be forgiven considering the subject she has written about. Next in the list I am waiting on two good books from the library. One of them is Rain

The Sunday Salon: Choosing the next read

One of my favorite aspects of a reading hobby, other than the reading and the book buying and the library hounding and the cataloging and the bookshelf decorating, is the part where I pick my next read. In fact, when I am close to the end of my current book, I am already deciding my next book. Sometimes, it is a straightforward choice. I usually always have a stack of library books, and I just go from one to the next. With library books, the decision is easier. The books have to go back soon, sometimes, there's already a long waiting list. Besides, I'm better about reading books I picked recently as opposed to books I picked up eons ago. But if there are no library books at home, then I pick something from the shelves. There's always something that I'm hoping to read. Unless I just got off a really awesome book. Then no book appeals to me. That's what I got myself into last night, when I spent a good four hours trying to figure out what to read. I had ju

Jon Krakauer on How McCandless died

Remember my review from six months ago about Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild ? No? Don't worry, I didn't expect you to. Although if you did, I'm super flattered. Without going into a re-review, Into the Wild is about a young man named Chris McCandless who was so enamored by living in the wild, without any of the modern conveniences that we all take for granted, that he left his family after school and went to live on his own. Within a span of a year and a half, he had been places but Alaska was always the territory he wanted to conquer. He finally got there, made his own living by hiking, hunting, reading and simply, living in the wild. He knew his botany well, but unfortunately, he ate something that disagreed horribly with him, eventually causing him to die of starvation. In my review, I whined quite a bit about how McCandless had scant regard for his own family. To me, he was one of those who gave a lot of interest in other people, but wouldn't give any respec

The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. Where's that "I finally did it" cap? I probably need to celebrate reading this book by wearing that cap for a week. I know this book was required reading for many of you (in high school? college?) but back in India, very few students had heard of Fitzgerald. So I never heard of this book until a few years ago, after I first came to the US. But it wasn't until Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as Gatsby that I really gave this book my attention. The short length and fast pacing of the book were bonus points, in my opinion. But the Jazz age isn't a period I like reading about. I prefer to stay away from books about riches and lavish lifestyles - they disgust me, irrespective of what the author's intent is. I recently st

Top Ten Books I Would Love to See as a Movie/TV Show

I stopped doing memes a long time back - primarily because I didn't want to box myself into a blogging calendar but also because, after a while, all memes seem to become work rather than fun. There's this meme however, that I've been following a lot and actually enjoy quite a bit too. I enjoy lists and this one seems to be a good one to make me build lists to my life's content. That said, I probably won't be doing this one regularly - only when I find the topic particularly fun to tackle, like this week's. I don't particularly care for books made into movies - there is not enough time to express every aspect of the book. TV shows - I heart! Except when they drag on for eons. The TV shows... I know, I know! I know what you're thinking seeing that Harry Potter set over there. Aren't the seven books, eight movies, a whole new fancy website, a few theme parks, and a big money-making industry enough? Oh yeah, I say. I do hope the industr

What's Reading this Week! (Sep 9, 2013)

I seem to have had a good couple of weeks in books. It feels good to read and know that I still enjoy it as much as I always did. Currently, I have seven books waiting to be reviewed, and I'm slowly beginning to knock those out of the backlog. This weekend, I started reading How to be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman. It's one fast book - the comparisons of this book with Gone Girl and Before I Go to Sleep is what intrigued me initially, but I hope it is less like the latter than it seems to be hinting so far. Chapman's book holds a lot of mystery and gives you the feeling that something is not quite right with this picture but you're not yet sure where to place your bets. Today, I'll begin listening to The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This is one of those nonfiction titles I've heard plenty about but never wanted to read because I don't read nonfiction well. But I've been having great success with nonfiction on audio, making books like