I read The Christmas Sweater while home in Canada for my parnets’ 40th Anniversary. I was in need of something to read & my sister suggested that I might like this. It was an easy read, but laced throughout with religious undercurrents. I grew up in a fairly religious family – church every sunday, sunday school, Church youth groups, church youth choir (briefly), CGIT (http://www.cgit.ca/ – sorry, by hyperlink thingie isn’t working), but have since moved away from the church & religion. Never-the-less, I did enjoy this story.
The Christmas Sweater is about a young boy named Eddie whose father passed away 3 years previously. Since his Dad died the family (Eddie & his Mom) have fallen on very hard times financially, with Eddie’s Mom working all the shifts she can get her hands on just to make ends meet. Christmas is coming and all that Eddie wants in a new bicycle. Not just any bicycle, though, he wants a brand new, shiny red Huffy bicycle, which even he knows is well outside his mother’s financial capabilities. So, Eddie beings a regiment of prayers to God, promising everything within his power if God will just send him that new Huffy bike for Christmas.
Christmas morning dawns & of course the bike isn’t anywhere to be seen & the only thing that Eddie does get is his Christmas Sweater which his Mom knit for him, in-between the work shifts, cooking, cleaning & caring for Eddie. The rest of the story is based around Eddie learning valuable “life” lessons about himself, the value of family & God – especially the lesson that God does not give us more that we can handle & that God is always there for us, even when it doesn’t seem like it…….which is where the preachy bit comes in.
Take away the religious aspects of this book & it’s a brilliant little story. I just think that it was unnecessary to make this so “God” oriented, as it is full of valuable non-secular lessons, so there’s no need for God. (My sister is going to kill me!) I just think it would appeal to a much broader audience without the religion-in-a-book aspect.
I read the Time Traveller’s Wife (now to be known as TTTW) a while ago (around the time that the movie was just coming out into the cinemas) & I loved it. Such a brilliant premise for a book & Audrey Niffenegger wrote it so well…………until the end. I was soooooo angry about how she ended this book. It’s like once she got to that climactic point (which I can’t talk about without giving the book away), she got bored & someone else finished the book for her. Either that or her Editor called her just after she’d finished writing that climax & told her he’d got the deadline wrong, that the book absolutely HAD to be sent for publication that very afternoon, so the ending is the best thing she could come up with during the taxi ride to the publishing house?
For those of you who are thinking about it, but as yet have not read TTTW, I say “Read it, you will enjoy it immensely, but be prepared to be hacked off about the ending!” For those of you who have no idea what TTTW is, or is about, should I say, then let me tell you a little bit – without giving too much of the story away.
Henry DeTamble is a mild mannered Librarian by day and a Time Traveller………no wait, that’s not quite right. Henry is a Time Traveller. His DNA is messed up, so he spends his spare time travelling through time & through his past. During one of Henry’s travels he meets Clare Abshire, who at the time is a small, but opinionated child. Henry & Clare bond & the majority of the book is around Henry travelling back to various points of Clare’s childhood/young womanhood, which is how we learn about the two characters. Eventually Henry & Clare’s paths cross when they are both in the same day/month/year & the two meet for the first time in the here & now.
The rest of the book is based around the concequences of Henry & Clare meeting in the present & how their futures have been shaped by Henry’s popping in & out of Clare’s past. Lost yet? Trust me, it will all make much better sense once you have read this wonderful book for yourself. (Unless the ending makes you hate the whole thing, that is. 
lol)
TTTW really was a brilliant book & I thoroughly enjoyed reading it (until I got to the end – have I mentioned that bit yet?), so I thought best to avoid the movie, even though I know quite a few people who have read the book & seen the movie & loved the movie. Flash forward a few months & I am a captive audience hurtling through the air at a million miles an hour, on my way home to Canada for my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary & TTTW was one of the choices of movies to watch. So, I decided to watch it. I’m glad I did! It was a very honest representation of the book, unlike some other book-to-movie adaptations I (& I am sure you) have seen. The ending wasn’t the same as the book & for that I would like to say “THANK YOU” to whoever the screenplay writer/s was/were! Still not a great ending, but miles better than the book!
Just a reminder – I’m reading books by authors born in the country I am using for the challenge, which explains how a book about Tibet, became my choice for China. Sun Shuyun is from China, but the book is about the year she spent in Tibet, following a village Shaman & his family, a hotel owner, a rickshaw driver, a party worker, some Monks & a doctor, learing about the Tibetan way of life.
I have to admit that I know almost nothing about Tibet & Buddhism & even less about the Chinese rule of Tibet, which is what made me want to read this book so much. I realise that I could have watched the tv show – I’m sure I could have found it somewhere, but I find you often get more out of books than you do out of watching a tv show or movie on the same subject.
Sun Shuyun predominately follows the Rikzin family, Tseten (the village Shaman) his brothers Loga & Dondan & Yangdron, their shared wife. We also follow their children & Mila, the brothers’ father. Through Sun Shuyun we learn of Tibetan culture, the rituals of the monks (both male & female), the incredible poverty which grips the country & a bit about the impact that China has had on this desolate country. The Tibet portrayed in Sun Shuyun’s book is one of centuries old customs (some of them now illegal under Chinese rule), being pushed pulled & brushed aside by communist China. But also of how these customs flourish in many places in spite of this. We learn of how the Monks were banished from the monestaries, how they were tortured by the Chinese government until they became informants & turned on each other. We learnof the rampant alcholism, the illiteracy (& how students are not legally allowed to learn Tibetan at school, they must learn in Chinese & speak Chinese), the high infant mortality rates & the practically non-exsistant healthcare.
While it may seem that this is all negative, it is really far from that. The Tibetan customs are fascinating, the funeral rituals, the Sky Burial (the body of the dead is cut into small pieces & fed to vultures), the wedding ceremonies (where the bride doesn’t know she is getting married, is kidnapped, locked in a room for days & married against her will, wailing all the while – for show), the resilliance of the Monks, the acceptance that while medicine may be able to fix things, the Shaman comes first. The Tibet presented in A Year in Tibet is a country caught between two worlds – modern & not. After reading A Year in Tibet, I feel I know a little more, have more respect for the Tibetan people & what they have gone through & foremost, have discovered a country I would dearly like to visit!
I chose to read Q & A, by Vikas Swarup as my selection for India & I was not disappointed. Even though there was a lot of publicity surrounding the book because of the movie & the subsequent awards it won, this was not what made me want to read this book, if anything, all that hype sort of put me off.
I have to admit that I went into reading this expecting to come out of it feeling really let down & wondering what all the hype had been about, but that is so not what happened! Q & A is a very easy book to read, it flows well & the text is well written, so it makes it easy to get lost in the book itself, allowing you to suspend reality long enough to really enjoy what you are reading. It is most definitely a fantastical book & you do need to suspend your sense of reality (or at least I felt that I had to), otherwise it all just seemed too much. Don’t get me wrong, this was a great book & I am really glad that I read it, but it was definitely a case of “seriously, how could all of that happen to one person?”.
I Haven’t really met anyone else who has read this, but I do know a lot of people on a forum who have read it & they all loved it, too. Sometimes I find that books that everyone hypes up are just that – hype which makes me reluctant to read them. This was definitely not the case with Q&A. If there are any of you out there in cyberland who have no idea what this book is about, it is about this:
Ram Mohammed Thomas is an Indian living in the slums of Mumbai when he enters & is chosen to be on a tv show : W3B – Who Will Win a Billion? (like Who wants to be a millionaire?). Ram wins the show & then is arrested for winning, for cheating. The story follows the order of the questions that Ram was asked in order to win the Billion Rupees & it is through the “stories” attached to these questions that we see just how a Slumdog becomes a Billionaire.
**Up to this point all of the book covers on my blogs have matched the books I own, but I can not seem to find a picture which matches the book I own. This may change & if it does, the above picture will change. Just thought I’d let y’all know.
I read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas while on the train, travelling from Bedford to Nottingham, on the day I was travelling there to start my new job three months ago. The train journey is only an hour & a half, but luckily, this isn’t a very thick book (it’s only 214 pages long), so I had read most of it before I arrived at my destination. This is such a great book, that upon arriving, because I was sooo close to finishing, I had all I could do to not just sit on the train & finish this book. I really wouldn’t have cared if the train had left the station with me on it still – I needed to finish reading this book!
Luckily, sense prevailed & I waited until I got to my hotel room to finish devouring The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I was not disappointed!
For those of you who might not have read this book yet, I suggest that you do so. When I had bought this the movie had already come out, so there was lots of hype surrounding it. I have yet to see the movie & I’m not sure that I ever will. I really don’t see how any Hollywood celluloid facsimile could ever live up to the printed version of this story. It is heart-wrenching, thought-provoking and generally a brilliant read. If you do choose to read this, please try to avoid reading any reviews about it. (& try to avoid the soft cover versions of the book as they give the plot away, which the hard cover doesn’t. The hardcover lets you read this book as it’s intended – innocently, like a child.) You will be taken in by it. You will love it (which may seem odd, given the subject matter), you may well cry (I did) & you sure will be left both thinking & talking about this very poignant book. That’s no bad thing!
My understanding is that this book has been marketed as a children’s book. Well, I think that the subject matter would be lost on anyone under 10, I would recommend it for older children, though. I can easily see this becoming a book that is read in classrooms, much like when we read “To Kill A Mockingbird” when I was at school. I can easily see this becoming the kind of book that parents & teens read & discuss together, which, I think, is as it should be!
From the Dust jacket on the hard cover version:
In each soul, a secret…
Philadelphia homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano’s first assignment from the Cold Case files is the brutal murder of a young runaway. The lifeless body of Caitlin O’Riordan was found carefully posed in a glass display case in the desolate Philadelphia Badlands but, as Byrne and Balzano rapidly discover, she was just the first pawn in the killer’s twisted game…
A mysterious phone call leads them on a scavenger hunt for a second victim. This time a young girl has been dismembered, her body parts left in three boxes in the basement of a deserted house. More clues lead to other victims and, as the body count rises, it becomes clear that there is a serial killer on the loose, hell-bent on completing the ‘performance’ of a lifetime.
As more runaways vanish, Byrne and Balzano come to realize that the homicidal mastermind plans to complete seven depraved tricks in his dark and dangerous magic act. With Balzano increasingly obsessed by a case that haunts her, and Byrne struggling with a loss of his own, the stakes are mounting. But this is one game they can’t afford to lose…
Play Dead is the latest installment (that I have read, anyway) in the Jessica Balzano & Kevin Byrne series of books. Again, this one was sent to me by Charm, of the Book Club Forum (one more to go, Charm?), so to her I say “Thank You!”. I like Play Dead better than I did the last one in the series, not that The Skin Gods was bad in any way, mind, I just liked Play Dead better!
There are certain murder/mystery novels that I can sit down to start reading & not get back up again until I have finished – they are rare & only a few authors have had the ability to draw me in like that. Jeffery Deaver is a prime example – I never want to put his books down until they are completely read. Well, this is what Play Dead was like. I sat down to read it one weekend when I was home from work & practically didn’t move; I had to finish reading it before anything else could be done that day. This book had me gripped from start to finish & while I did eventually figure out who done it (managed to not read the ending first with this one), I only figured it out just before the killer was revealed! Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book & would say that it was the best Monanari I’ve read so far!
So, Charm, when are you sending me the last one in the series? lol!
What would you do if you discovered that the family who were your closest neighbours had been murdered? What about if you subsequently begun to suspect that they had been murdered in error, that it had been your family who were supposed to have been the victims of this supposed random killing?
These are the questions asked in Too Close to Home, by Linwood Barclay. To me, it’s a pretty scary proposition. Not one I would like to think about too much, thank you. Unfortunately, this is exactly the scenario in Linwood Barclay’s Too Close to Home.
Though this is the first book I have read by Barclay I have heard a lot of good things about his other book, No Time for Goodbye. I was in Waterstones one day & ran across Too Close to Home, so I picked it up & after reading the back, just knew that I wanted to read this book! Other than the ending, which I thought was a bit of a cop-out, I really loved this book.
Linwood Barclay wrote very believable characters – especially Jim & Ellen & their relationship with each other. Jim was by far my favourite of the characters in the book – he had a kind of sarcastic wit which I love in a person. The story flies, but by the time the killer is revealed the story starts to lose its way, which was a shame. Luckily, this didn’t ruin the story completely, but it did dampen the enjoyment of it & won’t stop me from reading Barclay’s 1st book & any others that may come.
So, recently my world has been a bit topsy turvy. In February I quit my job & was unemployed by the end of April, only to have a fantastic opportunity fall into my lap when I needed it the most. Suddenly I found my self over 190km from my boyfriend & living in a hotel, something I haven’t done in 3 years. What was supposed to be a 3 month job turned into a permanent job in a new location, but another 2 months living in a hotel, with sporadic internet access. Luckily all of that has come to an end & my OH & I are now moved into our new house in Nottingham & we (read: me) finally have internet available any time I want it.
This is great, but I am sooooooooo far behind on my book postings & I have 2 posts sitting on here that have been waiting for my attention since the 1st of September! Right, time to get posting!
I would like to start by saying that I have been struggling with writing this review since the 7th of August. It isn’t that I didn’t like A Lifetime Burning, I am just not sure that I can put into words the emotions this book aroused in me. It is a brilliantly written book about some very sensitive subjects & to borrow from a review I read by Michelle Moore on Amazon.co.uk
A Lifetime Burning is the third of Linda Gillard’s books which I have read & while I loved it, I am so glad that it is not the first one I read. The subject matter is, well, difficult & somewhat controversial, but do not let that put you off reading this book. I am pretty certain that this is one I will not be passing on to my Mom to read, though.
A Lifetime Burning follows the lives of the Dunbar Family, specifically the relationship of twins Rory & Flora & the impact their relationship has on the other members of their family & the people around them. Flora and Rory start out life with an amazing connection that only twins could have & they seem to be the yin to the others yang, something each of the other must have for their world, their life to be complete. Early into their lives it is demonstrated to us that theirs is no simple sibling relationship. Flora is the beauty & Rory the brains, Flora is the bad one & Rory is the good. Flora is the extrovert, Rory the introvert. But, even these are not 100% accurate. Yes, Rory is an introvert, but he is also egomaniacal, demanding, & destructive (especially where his sister is concerned). Flora may be the beauty, who also has a brain in her head, but because of Rory’s musical prowess, her intellect seems to take a distant back seat when it comes to the family’s recollecting on the twins’ attributes/abilities.
Flora grew up thinking that she was a bad person, that everyone knew she was good for nothing & managed to do everything in her power to live up to that estimation. Rory grew up knowing that he was the “chosen” child, that he had the world in the palm of his hand & grew up with the attitude to accompany that knowledge.
I honestly think that Rory being sent away for school was the beginning of the end for both he & Flora. They needed to be a constant presence in each other’s lives & I think that them being seperated from each other is what inevitably lead to their relationship becoming what it did & their lives becoming what they did, ultimately leading to Flora’s death & her funeral, which is where the book begins.
A Lifetime Burning was an emotionally charged read for me, but one that I am so glad I read!
My favourite genre of books is the Thriller, or “Murder Mystery Mayhem”, as I like to call it. This is what I read the most & I have my definite favourites, including Jeffery Deaver (the man is a genius!), Kathy Reichs & Linda Fairstein, to name but a few. Now, the reason I ask the above question is this:
I would say that 90 % of the time when I read a thriller, I start at the beginning (always a good place to start ) & read until I really get into the book, then this irresistible force seems to take me over & I have this undeniable need to read the final few chapters to see what happens! It’s an unstoppable force & when the urge surfaces, I always give in! Resistance, as they say, is futile!
I know, I know – this is sooooooooo wrong. Or, at least that is what everyone tells me (the rare few I have been brave enough to reveal my hideous secret to , at least!). They insist that I am ruining the book, that OBVIOUSLY the idea of this particular genre especially, is to keep you in suspense, keep you guessing what is going to happen, to as close to the end of the book as possible. So, by skipping forward & reading the ending before I have read the middle, I am destroying what the author has created. But am I really?
I know that I am far from alone in this despicable habit, but I have to be honest & tell you that it is not a habit I intend to break. I love reading the beginning & the end first, then tucking into the middle (hmmmm, Mom, if you’re reading this does this remind you of anything from my childhood? Maybe my teachers were right!). To me at least, the middle of the book is the best bit. The beginning & the end are just (to compare a book to a sandwich) the bread & the middle is the lovely chicken salad filling. The beginning & the end are almost irrelevant & to me, there is no greater feeling than knowing who the killer is, a few chapters into a book (not by figuring it out, but by reading it), then spending the rest of the book trying to guess how in heaven’s name the author is going to get you there. That’s what I love!
So, while I may be strange, I have no intention of changing & besides, who says that you lot who read a book cover to cover aren’t the strange ones? lmao!
