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Vodkafan's 2019 reading blog


vodkafan

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Quick update. Had to give up on the Atlan saga, it was getting a bit stale for me. I read Holes by Louis Sacher instead in one day, that was very good, and have now started Oryx And Crake.

Will catch up on my reviews tomorrow.

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Holes             4/5

Louis Sacher

 

Holes was great!  A quick read and a joy to read. It was very much a fairy tale book, with just enough elements of reality in it to make you think you are reading a plausible story, so long as you don't stop to wonder at all the miraculous coincidences of destiny.  But surely only a complete Grinch would want to.

The simple plot just sweeps the reader along, and every little detail is important in the end, even the onions....I was glad I never got to watch the film.

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I wanted to get the book Holes years ago and your review has just reminded me of it! I have seen the film but it was a very long time ago, I don't remember much about it, so I don't think it would ruin the book. 

 

I hope you're enjoying Oryx and Crake!

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Half way through Oryx and Crake. It is  one of those stories where the reasons for the situation at the start are only revealed piecemeal through the novel one little nugget of information at a time. Also, not a happy story! But worth sticking with I think.

At the same time I have also started reading  a YA book, Truth or Dare by Celia Rees. It has an autistic character in it, Uncle Patrick, who died long ago , and there seems to be a mystery about him.

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I imaged Oryx and Crake would probably be quite an intense, emotional, book, considering the subject. Were you considering not finishing it?

 

Truth or Dare sounds good. I loved Witch Child by Celia Rees so interested to see what you think, I might have to add it to my to-read list! 

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I finished My Brothers Keeper by Donna Malane.  This is the second book in a crime series set in Wellington, NZ,  It's been good to read something with places I recognise.  I haven't read a lot of NZ books and I should really read more.  

 

I'm currently reading The Girl in the Woods by Camilla Lackberg but I'm not sure if I'll continue.  I've found this series got a bit samey as it went on.

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On ‎04‎/‎06‎/‎2019 at 7:21 AM, Athena said:

Truth or Dare sounds interesting, I look forward to hear/read your thoughts when you have finished it :).

 

Thanks Athena, I left Truth or Dare temporarily and read another whole book yesterday,  but I will certainly have finished it before the weekend and will review it Saturday.

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Hot Milk          5/5

Deborah Levy

 

This was an impulse purchase from a charity shop.  The cover photograph was just a very far away shot of a girl on a beach and it looked like nothing I would be interested in.  But I bought it because the blurb on the back gave absolutely no clue  as to what it was about: which is surely the opposite way a blurb is supposed to work, right?

But I was hooked from the first couple of sentences. The writing is amazing. Sofia has put her life on hold for years to look after her mother and her mysterious medical problems. Her mother has sold the London flat they live in - Sofia's inheritance - in order to fund a trip to Spain to become a patient of the clinic run by the equally mysterious Dr Gomez and his beautiful daughter.  Dr Gomez's methods are unorthodox to say the least, and he may be a total charlatan . If he fails to cure her mother's condition, they have no further options (and nothing to go back to in any case).

I say again, the writing was amazing. The author uses sentences that took my breath away and hit me around the head like an unexpected blow from a baseball bat.

( "My love for my mother is like an axe; it cuts very deep.")

There are other things too that made this book a bit different,   Every few pages there are short passages written by a different voice in the first person, and it is clear that Sofia is being watched by this person. (Who and why?)

Several motifs appear again and again, for instance that of right and left hands doing different things; is it a clue that implies sleight of hand, deceit, or perhaps just of a split personality that does not know itself? Pain and feeling; Sofia actively goes out of her way to get painful stings and enjoys wearing the scars on her skin, whereas her mother insists that she herself cannot feel.

Another clue is the way Sofia views other people. She notices physical details of women more; she always describes the way their clothes encircle or touch their bodies.

Time also seems a little bit mixed up: there is a part where Sofia has a piece of glass in her skin but doesn't know how it has got there. The accident where the piece of glass gets embedded doesn't happen until a couple of chapters later. Does this mean that her whole narrative is somehow not objectively real?

The ending is left a little bit open, but you feel that Sofia has resolved her dilemmas.

As my first 5/5 book of this year (and I seem to be hard to please this year) I would say that I give most of the points for the quality of the writing and the way the words and sentences poke my emotions, surprise me with a jolt . I will look for some more books by this author.

 

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Her Fearful Symmetry          4/5

Audrey Niffeneger

 

If I had read this first before Hot Milk  I might have given it 5/5 , but although it was a very good book the writing itself didn't entrance me in the way that the other book's did, so I had to mark it a bit less.

The plot was most interesting, I thought it was going to be about relationships, (which it was) but then it added a ghost story, (which reminded me at first a lot of The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry) and then added something else again.  A satisfying read.

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On 6/9/2019 at 8:45 PM, Hayley said:

It's so nice when a book bought completely at random turns out to be great isn't it? Glad you enjoyed your last two books!

 

Yes and the odd thing is that the last 3 books- Holes, Hot Milk and Her Fearful Symmetry all came from the same small shelf in the same charity shop, bought singly on different days....

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18 hours ago, vodkafan said:

 

Yes and the odd thing is that the last 3 books- Holes, Hot Milk and Her Fearful Symmetry all came from the same small shelf in the same charity shop, bought singly on different days....

 

It is clearly a lucky shelf! 

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Truth Or Dare         2/5

Celia Rees

 

What can I say about this book? Not to denigrate YA books at all (some are excellent) this one fizzled out for me quite quickly and it took an effort to finish it.  The central message was that we should be more understanding and nicer to autistic people (and yes of course we should) It spent too much time talking at me and explaining and got a bit preachy.

If I had read it when I was twelve I probably would have thought it was fantastic.

 

 

 

 

 

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I tried to go back to Oryx And Crake  but the story is a tad depressing at the moment. Instead I am 150 pages into London The Novel by Edward Rutherford. My eldest son and his girlfriend found this for me in a charity shop. It is amazing! Right up my street.

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17 hours ago, Hayley said:

I've never heard of Rutherford but I just looked up London The Novel and it sounds great! What an interesting concept! I image it's quite a long book, being set over a 2000 year period?

 

Oh yeah...it's a doorstop. About 800 pages. The author has made up several fictional families and it follows them through the generations (not every generation, sometimes it skips a couple of hundred years) but London itself is the real character .  And it has some maps! I have already found out so much I didn't know. It is so exciting to a London geek! (In a way that an ordinary novel cannot be).

For instance The Strand and Oxford Street are the two original ancient thoroughfares into the western wall of the old City, (passing through Ludgate and Newgate respectively). I didn't appreciate just how ancient they are and how wonderful it is that they still follow their original routes, unlike some other European cities that have been periodically replanned and rebuilt on more logical lines, so that evidence of their history is destroyed for ever. 

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Normal People                               2/5

Sally Rooney

 

I was conflicted reading this one , and even now a month later I find it hard to know how to explain my feelings about it. I guess the most honest thing to say is it left me uneasy and unsatisfied. And yet, there are some things about the book I like, so I don't want to trash it completely.

On the plus side, the early awkward teenage interactions of Connell and Marianne are quite charming and believable, I believe we could all easily put ourselves into their shoes.

The flip that happens to Connell when they move away to university  is the most interesting. We see that Connell is actually just as much  "not normal" as Marianne, in fact he may be the weaker of the two.  He was just able to disguise it in his familiar home surroundings. That kept me reading.

 The reasons for Marianne's treatment by her family wasn't really explained, so although that is sort of dangled as a reason for why she is like she is it is a bit clunky and left it up in the air for me.

Maybe the author wanted it that way, because in real life it is hard to untangle and unpack a person so easily; so I give Sally Rooney that one.

Although there is a sort of resolution for them both, I was unhappy for Marianne even at the end of the book.

 

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If I Stay                           1/5

Gayle Foreman

 

 A YA book I picked up from the daughter's bookshelf. I skim-read this, because the flashback parts were too sickly and twee for me to stomach to be honest, and I just concentrated on the parts where she was a disembodied spirit stuck in the hospital near her body. The ending was what I expected. I give the author credit for staying away from any religious content though.

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