My Thoughts: The Bonesetter's Daughter

Synopsis: Ruth is struggling in America with her life, her ungrateful step kids and boyfriend, a busy life and her mothers constant put downs. Gradually Ruth realises that her mother is becoming more and more forgetful, and a doctor diagnoses Altzimers. Whilst searching her mother's house she discovers a manuscript her mother had written in Chinese about her childhood, the husband and mother her own daughter had never known she had.

What I liked: I prefered the section in China, discovering how mothers of illegitimate children were treated and the simple tone of this section of the novel.

What I didn't like: The rushed simplistic ending, felt like everything suddenly was fixed and perfect which seemed unrealistic in the situation.

Challenges:
Orbis Terrarum
999 (tbr)

My Thoughts: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

With just 5 days to go till the end of the Once Upon a Time Challenge I still have 2 books to read!!!! Life has been chaotic and I haven't been getting in my normal amount of reads, last week we had an open door week at school - any teacher can go and walk in and observe another teachers lesson (stressful), I had to organise and take 200 kids on a trip and write 26 reports on pupils in my form group (I see them for 15 mins a day and only teach 2 of them). Plus I uped the amount of time I'm spending at the gym.

I have the biggest book pile to tackle, the 6 weeks summer holiday is going to be a book a day mission to try and control the ever growing stack of books.

Over the weekend I finished Inkheart, and boy it was great.
Synopsis: Meggie is wokeon one night to find a strange man standing outside her bedroom window. Awakening her day he invites the man in and they go off for a private chat.
After that night Meggie's life makes a massive change, her and bookloving bookbinding father go off to an book obsessed aunt in the country. Meggie discovers her father can read characters out of a book, and he is hunted down and kidnapped by the very creatures he once read out of a book. And then the adventure begins...

What I liked: The fairy tale style, made me feel like a kid again. It also has a really positive approach to reading.

What I didn't like: It made my mental tbr pile grow, each chapter starts with a quote from another novel, it made me want to read Peter Pan again, The Princess Bride, and The Jungle Book. Seriously, I enjoyed it all.

Challenges:
Once Upon a Time
YA 2009
A-Z (Title)
999 (YA)

Orbis Terrarum Short Story Mini Challenge: Poland

visited 3 states (1.33%)
Create your own visited map of The World or jurisdische veraling duits?
So far I journeyed from France to Germany and now I'm setting foot in Poland. As the last two stories have been classics I thought I'd mix things up a little and read a modern story I found here at the wonderful Words Without Borders

The Knight by Olga Tokarczuk
This is a strange story, its about being in a relationship and both knowing that everything isn't working, that your out of synch, both alone and yet neither person is able to break the relationship up.
The couple go away to a cold cottage beside the sea, a fairly good description of their relationship, cold but locked tight trying to keep out the truth that is battering them every second they are together.
Its a simple story but worth reading for the detail, the small things that manypeople will be able to empathise with having been at that point too.

The Sunday Salon: Short Story review and other related stuff

It's been a strange old day weather wise here in England, this morning was raining so hard and cold I put the heating on, then I popped to the supermarket and boiled, the sun had dried all the puddles in a matter of hours and now the sky looks just about ready to burst again.
In terms of reading I seem to be falling really behind again, I joined a new gym and have been spending more time there than at the last one, I had a reading funk for a while and I have so many reading commitments I'm reading 4 or 5 books at one and have a massive pile that needs tackling.
This week I'll hopefully finish: an audiobook The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian (fantastic), Inkheart (fantastic), The Lost Dog (mmm haven't got into it yet and its a bookring so need to speed up), The Hard Facts of the Grimm Fairy Tales (due back to the library next weekend) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (a bookcrossing read-a-long that finishes Saturday).
I also didn't realise that Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge finished in June, I was convinced it was July so I have to finish Inkheart plus 2 other books for that in the next 2 weeks!


visited 2 states (0.88%)
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The Orbis Terratum Short Story Mini Challenge as some of you may have read I'm hosting this mini challenge for Bethany's Orbis Terrarum challenge. Participants need to read 10 short stories from 10 different countries, between June 1st and Sept 1st. Prizes will be avaliable at the end of the challenge.
As I like to test myself I'm trying to see how far around the world I can get. Today I'm visiting Germany the second country on my travels.

How Old Timofei Died with a Song by Rainer Maria Rilke
Opening line: "What a real joy it is to tell stories to a paralyzed person."
The narrator in this tale reguarly tells stories to a local paralysed man. In this story she tells him how in the past stories where alive, they were kept alive by being passed orally from person to person, commited to memory and passed along to the next generation. The narrator claims that once a story is no longer remembered and can only be told through reading it in a book it is no longer alive.
Timofei was the villages storyteller, he remembered all the oldest stories and went through the town passing on stories to everyone in hearing distance, when Timofei had children only oe of them had the gift of storytelling, the others like the others in the village forgot what they had been told. Timofei saw it as his sole responsilbilty to pass on each and every story to his son so the community's stories could still live on.

I'm looking for more participants, so if you'd like to join a challenge that you could complete in a day or use to take you on your travels this summer see here for further details


See what I read when I 'visited' France here

My Thoughts: Blindness by Jose Saramago

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This is the first novel that I have read by this Nobel winning author and I'll definately be keeping my eye out for more.
As Blindness opens we are on a busy main road witing for the lights to change from red to green. As soon as the lights flicker to green all the lanes start moving except one. The car at the front of the lane is stopped still, as people go to find out why they notice the man inside screaming. Someone opens the door and the sound of his screams, 'I'm blind' echo around the streets.
Gradually as the days pass more and more people become blind, first only those who came into contact with the first blind man and then those who come into contact with them.
As a method of controlling the spreading of the blindness, those who have gone blind and those who are known to have had contact with them are entered into an empty mental asylum. No one exchanges names, as more people enter the institution they announce their proffession but all instinctively keep their names, and thus their try identities hidden.
Unbeknown to anyone except her husband a woman who hasn't lost her sight is living amongst the blind. She keeps an eye out for people, helps the sick and injured. As the days pass less and less food or sanitation is provided, inevitably things in the wards go from bad to worse and the situation spirals out of control.

This novel is so full and degfinately worth the read, clearly allegorical, looking at the 'blindness' of society, the selfish and helpless people we have become.
My only hangup with this book was the layout. There is no punctuation for speech, when someone speaks there was just a comma followed by a capital letter. And when another person replied this was simply shown by the capitalisation of their forst word. As a result the paragraphs are extremely long, after a few pages I got used to the layout and it didn't bother me so much, but made this book hard to read when I was tired.
Challenges:
A-Z (Author)
999 (Award Winners)
Lost in Translation

Book Awards III


Book Awards II finished on June 1st and I failed miserably reading only 5 books when I needed to read 10. I read:
1. The Gathering by Anne Enright - Booker (2007)
2. The Famished Road by Ben Okri - Booker (1991)
3. The Hours, Cunningham
4. Fugitive Pieces, Michaels
5. Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan

My favourite would definately be Fugitive Pieces with The Gathering being runner up.
Despite, or probably because of my failure I'm going to be giving this challenge another go.I still have many books on my original list that I'd like to read.
This 3rd version starts on July 1st and runs untill December 1st and requires 5 books to be read. This is my pool which I will chose from (and hopefully complete this time).

The Sea by John Banville - Booker (2005)
Wild Swans - Chang - British Book Award (1994)
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy - Commonwealth Writers' Prize (1994)
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang -Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2001)
Andrea Levy, Small Island -Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2005) Costa (2004)
Charles Frazier Cold Mountain - National Book Award (1997)
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson - Pulitzer (2005)
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami - World Fantasy Award (2006)
Alice Munro — Runaway -Giller Prize (2004)
Mal Peet, Tamar -Carnegie 2005
Mary Norton, The Borrowers - Carnegie 1952
Spell of Winter - Dunmore -Orange 1996
Sunshine, Robin McKinley (Mythopoeic)
The Fair Folk, Marvin Kaye, World Fantasy

The 5 books have to come from 5 different awards, for more details go to the challenges blog here

SS: 'The Necklace' by Guy de Maupassant

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I'm starting in France and seeing if I can jump from one country to the next to see how far around the world I can get.

'The Necklace' written in 1884 is a tale with a moral.
It starts with the introduction of a pretty young woman, "born as through an error of destiny" into a poor family. She has no hopes of becoming rich, of marrying a wealthy man or having all the things she wished for. Knowing this she marries a poor man and settles unhappily into life.
Life changes when her husband brings home an invite for a ball, they scrape together enough money for her to have a suitable dress, and she borrows a diamond necklace from a friend as she is desperate not to appear poor to the other women.
Arriving home after being declared the most beautiful woman at the ball she realises the necklace is missing. With no hope of finding the necklace a replacement must be brought at great cost and debt to the couple. They hand over the replacement necklace hoping the friend will never know the difference.
Now they really know what a life of poverty and drudgery is.

My first short story read for the Orbis Terrarum Short Story Mini Challenge (which I happen to be holding right here)

My Thoughts: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Shaffer and Annie Barrows

My second audiobook finished this week (can you tell its the holidays and I've had lots of spare time!), this one was as great as Sabriel although very different.
You've probably read and seen hundreds of posts for this book so I'll keep it short and sweet.
I loved it. I fell in love with the characters and place. I would happinly go live in that book.

A quick synopsis: Juliette, a war-time writer starts a correspondence with a reader in Guernsey, a small island. The correspondence develops and she form a friendship with many of the members of the reading society. It doesn't sound exciting but it is.

The audiobook was read by a single woman who gave each character a different voice which enhanced their personality.

Read it if: Your looking for something quaint and English

Challenges:
999 (New Fiction)
War through the Generations: WWII
Notable Books