Sunday, October 24, 2010

No pictures - just books.

I just remembered that I signed up for a blogish book club a while back and have not posted on it at all. Shame! So... mostly I have been reading Spanish language books which are slow and not very interesting to anyone else but I have read a couple of novels too. I read Great Expectations by Dickens - my first Dickens. It was so much better than I thought it would be when I started it. You get used to the old worldly language quickly and then the quirk and delight of Mr Charles shines through in a big way. What a clever writer. No wonder this book is on the canon list.

I also read the latest Janet Evanovich - Wicked Appetite. Well, it is formulaic and silly. Evanovich can really write in her genre - she is one of the best in the "light-hearted" section of the book store. And there are some classic moments but it is the same old JE without much new. It only gets two and a half stars from me, I'm afraid.

Now I am in the middle of a huge committment 'Fall of Giants' by Ken Follett. Again, it is not very taxing but satisfying all the same - all 800 pages of it. And we are not talking Harry Potter sized pages - these are grown up pages. But it is one of those books that is easy to read but hard to hold therefore not the best bed-reading tome.

I am really ready to have a meaty book that I can sink my literary teeth into so I just got the 2010 Booker Prize winner 'The Finkler Question' by Howard Jacobson from the Public Library and that will be my next read. I am looking forward to it.

Another little fun thing - I won a contest on the ABC - The Books Alive Suggest a Read contest. I wrote a little review of Wolf Hall and won! I was on the radio and everything and Nettie assured me I sounded OK. Well, last week I recieved a box full of the the 50 books that were recommended by Books Alive as the 50 books you can't put down. (Some I can't even pick up!!)(oh, I know, I'm a snob but I am over 50 and I am not wasting my time on bodice ripping romances - sorry!) So now my next to the bed pile has grown considerably.

If you are interested here is the link to my review - Wolf Hall

Happy reading everyone. Rhonda