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Showing posts from May, 2015

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Infinite Country by Patricia Engel | Thoughts

   Published : 2021   ||    Format : print   ||    Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆   What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the story of her family through the other protagonist, El

The Sunday Salon: On being glad that May is over

I'm glad May is over, or almost over, once this day is out. It hasn't been my most prolific reading month, which is a bummer because this month could have been better. The books I did finish were both readalong books, and both were wonderful reads. I've noticed that I seem to read almost nothing every other month and then make up for it in the following month. If that trend keeps up, maybe June may work out to be better. The week thus far... Anyone else liking the heat outside? It's been in the 80s all week and I am sick of it. I feel like every summer and winter, I complain about the weather. It's worse when you're pregnant because your wardrobe is already severely limited, plus I hate that maternity clothes cost double compared to regular clothes and have no utility after the delivery. Last evening, we had our possibly last gathering with some friends before the baby arrived. We went to play a game of putt putt - 36 holes and 2.5 hours later, we were

On my Nightstand #4

I am so glad that this is a short work-week (well, a 4-day week as opposed to a 5-day week). Work has been more insane, if that's possible. I almost feel like I need to put in more hours this week just to be on top of things. This weekend cannot come soon enough, and I can only hope that I won't be bringing work into my weekend. The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows: I picked this book solely on the merit of this author's co-authorship in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society . I'm only four chapters in, but I can say with plenty of confidence that this book is going to be a favorite. It has the same charming voice as Guernsey, the characters are very likable and the writing is quirky and fun to read. I'm not too sure yet what the book is supposed to be about but it doesn't matter - the book is fun and the writing is easy to get lost in. Evoking the same small town charm with the same great eye for character, the co-author of Guernsey Lit

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

People keep telling me to do yoga. I tried it once at the place down the street. The only part I liked was the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for ten minutes. Dept. of Speculation was on my wishlist on the merit of the many positive reviews I read about it. This wasn't a much hyped book, just a book that seemed to silently win many fans. If you had asked me what I knew about the book before I started reading it, I could tell you nothing. So it wasn't a surprise when I started reading it that I was more shocked than enamored by the format of the book. The book is full of mostly 3-4 line long paragraphs, each dealing with distinct ideas, thoughts, facts, or experiences. This book is what your Twitter feed could look like if you made a book containing all your tweets. Context is limited to each passage and it will be a while before you get a feel for the person behind the passage. This is also a difficult b

The Sunday Salon: Memorial Day reads

Happy Memorial Day in advance to my US readers! Hope you are having a good long weekend. This week (and weekend)... I spent much of this week waiting for the weekend. Not that we (or rather I) had any major plans for the weekend. The husband's friend is visiting us right now and the two of them have plenty of plans lined up - they visited the Natural Bridge, Caverns, and Zoo yesterday and came home super tired and happy. I did nothing but read, but I promise I felt more tired than they did. Today they are planning to visit Shenandoah National Park and Luray Caverns, and tomorrow, take part in an archery session at Wintergreen resort, which I plan to do as well. Three days back, I stretched my legs when I woke up in the morning and instantly cramped both my calves. I have no idea where that came from and I've been mostly penguin-limping since then. The cramps have reduced a LOT today so I hope they're on the way out. At this point (33 weeks), I am pretty close to b

From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess by Meg Cabot

"The first thing you'll have to learn, Olivia, if you're going to get this princess thing right, is how to take a compliment. When someone says something nice to you, don't put yourself down. Just say 'thank you.' Try it." I am a big fan of the Princess Diaries series. I haven't read all the books yet but I did watch both the movies and loved them. I am not much of a girly girl or someone who loves princesses but I do enjoy reading about rags to riches stories, especially when they involve some kind of royalty. Yep, I am a sucker for such stories. So I was delighted to see this book arrive at my doorstep sometime last month. This is the first (and currently only) book in this Middle School Princess series , but it ties up very closely with the original Princess Diaries storyline. Olivia was brought up by her aunt's family after her mother died. Her father still sent her letters but she hadn't met him so she didn't really remembe

Flowers for Algernon (Halfway thoughts) #MayFFA

There's very little I knew about Flowers for Algernon before I started it. I had heard about this book a lot without really registering what it was about. And then, when I was browsing through a bookstore, I saw this book on the science fiction shelves, decided it will be a good read for the husband, decided further that it will be a good read for me as well, then (and only then) did a quick glance of the synopsis to make sure it wasn't scifi erotica before buying it. It probably would have stayed in my bookshelves for a long time, if Care didn't suggest doing a readalong (thank you, Care!). This past weekend, I just stopped at the halfway point in the book and decided I need to type up this post before I continued reading it. I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone. What I thought the book was about... I thought this book was about some kind of experiment gone wrong, in

The Sunday Salon: Thank God it's the weekend!

I haven't looked forward to a weekend as much as I did over the past week, from as early as last Sunday itself. It was a super busy week at work and I had to put in plenty of overtime over the whole week. I could have left sooner on Friday but I'd rather save my absence for this coming Friday - start the Memorial Day weekend early! Memorial Day is the first holiday my company gives after the Christmas holidays. So you can imagine how much a lot of us at work are actually looking forward to it. Five months of no holidays is terrible. Luckily, from here on out, there is the Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas holidays to look forward to. But then another year ends and it's a five-month wait all over again. (The rose trees in our flower garden finally bloomed last week.  I love that they bear flowers up until  late November.  We have more rose bushes in the front of our property  and they are just as flowery.) This weekend, I mad

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag

"I love chocolate cake for breakfast," Peggy stalls, "it sets me up for the day. A little decadence is good for the soul." The House at the End of Hope Street got on my radar only recently, when Wendy mentioned the book as one of her top favorites . The premise of the book sounded fabulous and my library had a copy as well. I started reading this book shortly before leaving for my Canada trip and what I thought would be a fast read ended up taking about 2-3 weeks total. Not because the book was hard to read or boring. On the contrary, it was quite entertaining, but it was not a book I could race through. Distraught from a tragic experience, Alba was walking through her hometown when she comes across a house she had never seen before. The owner of the house, Peggy, invites her in but tells her that she can only stay for 99 days and has to turn her life around before then. Alba is glad for the offer - she didn't think she could face her family just yet.

The Sunday Salon: Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mothers Day to all the wonderful mommies and would-be-mommies out there! I like to believe that my daughter (still getting used to saying this) wished me this morning by giving me a rude wake-up call in the form of a weird twisty punch in my sides. Work Last week has been one crazy week thus far - this has been my story for a while I guess. The crazy seems to be the new normal. Work has been insane - this bothers me somewhat because within the next couple of months, I will have to figure out how to gracefully step down from my responsibilities and slowly delegate work. Last Friday, I spent a good amount of time writing some documents at work and then that night, I had a nightmare that I was in labor. The first thing I worried about at that point (in my dream) was all that work sitting on my desktop that no one was going to have access to. I know reality will be very different and work will be the last thing I think about but that was still one rude shock. Appointme

Expecting Better by Emily Oster

I'm not crazy about the implication that pregnant women are incapable of deciding for themselves- that you have to manipulate our belief so we do the right thing. That feels, again, like pregnant women are not given any more credit than children would be in making important decisions. Ever since Aarti and Nomadreader reviewed this book, I knew I had to read it too, but only after I got pregnant. Since then, it's been on my TBR and I finally listened to this book a few months back. Unlike most books about pregnancy, Expecting Better is less about what to expect while pregnant and more about how to navigate through the tons of information out there about pregnancy and make a wise decision without living to regret it. The author, Emily Oster, and her husband were economists used to looking at quantifiable data and statistics - rarely did they make a decision without looking at some supporting numbers. So when she got pregnant, Oster was disappointed that there was so mu

March and April in review (and a look at May/June)

Both March and April were somewhat slow months for me in reading. Part of it is probably because of the return of some of my TV shows, but a busier work and life is also to blame for some of that lack of reading. I spent part of March in Toronto, Quebec city, and Niagara and spent very little of that vacation reading anything at all. April ended up being a recovery month from some of that vacation, plus I have a vague feeling of decluttering something this whole month. So it isn't until the readathon at the end of April that I really got into a reading spree. These are the books I read the past two months. I loved many of these books so it makes it hard picking any kind of favorite. The Cellist of Sarajevo was very thought-provoking, The House at the End of Hope Street was quirky, Expecting Better was informative, Relish was fun, Dept. of Speculation was hard to put down. The Magicians and French Milk were sort of bummer reads - the former suffering from execution a

The Sunday Salon: A Month of Two Readalongs

You know a pregnant woman is nesting when she signs up for too many reading projects/reviews, especially when she is very close to her due date. Yep, that's just what I did. Back when I was just newly pregnant and delivery/baby was a distant idea, I decided that I wouldn't make any commitments in reading or blogging, starting from May to some unknown month. The way I saw it then, I was likely going to have a ton of things to do and it didn't make sense to add more to my plate. Now that May is here, and I was right - there is a ton of things to do - I am more desperate than ever for life and work to be more normal than it is. I don't want to pause the things that have been a constant in my life. Instead, signing up for readathons, readalongs, and book reviews seem to be just what I want to distract myself from the ongoing chaos that is preparing for a baby. If I didn't have reading as a hobby, I'd probably be fretting about trying to get things done, even th