Abcinthia

I'm about halfway through The Princes In The Tower by Alison Weir but I'm not really enjoying it as much as her other books I'm about to start Call The Midwife by Jennifer Worth. Been looking forward to reading it for ages.

28. The Paris Wife - Paula McLain The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemmingway's first wife Hadley and the eventual breakdown of their marriage. Set in 1920s Paris and featuring many of the eras influential writers (eg Ezra Pound), it is a wonderful story. I really felt for Hadley and couldn't help but feel she was better off without Ernest. The writing is beautiful and really transports you there. My only problem was that it was a little bit slow in places. 4/5

I started The Paris Wife last night and I'm really enjoying it so far.

I've read The Rules of Civility. I really enjoyed it.

No I haven't. I didn't even know there was a movie lol!

Hello and welcome!

27. Rules Of Civility - Amor Towles In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn't afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew: the location of every old church in Manhattan how to sneak into the cinema how to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine million a year and that if you can still lose yourself in a Dickens novel then everything is going to be fine. By the end of the year she'd learned: how to live like a redhead and insist upon the very best; that riches can turn to rags in the trip of a heartbeat, chance encounters can be fated, and the word 'yes' can be a poison. That's how quickly New York City comes about, like a weathervane, or the head of a cobra. Time tells which. I really enjoyed this book but I can't really say why. It's glitzy, witty and just fun to read. At times, it doesn't feel like you are reading it but standing in the middle of an over the top 1930s film, listening to Jazz, drinking Martinis and watching the action unfold. My only criticism, and why I only gave it 4/5, is the lack of quotation marks. It's a real pet hate of mine and I have yet to see a book written where it works. At times in Rules Of Civility the speech and the description merged together and I had to re-read to work out where the speech stopped. 4/5

I'm about to finish Rules of Civility and am currently reading The Princes In The Tower.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards It was alright but very predictable and clichéd. The kind of tearjerker that you've read a million times - full of betrayals, family secrets, breakdown in relationships but ultimately everything and everyone is forgiven and the family bonds are stronger than ever. 2/5

I've only read two Koontz books. Lightning which I loved and Breathless (I think that's what it was called) which I HATED. I keep seeing his books in the library so maybe I'll read another one at some point.

I won a copy of The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. It's really made my morning

Just plain water.

I have not really been in the mood for reading the past couple of days. Been worried about something (though got good news regarding it today, a weight has been lifted off my shoulders) and just generally feeling under the weather (like I am about to get a really bad cold). So I ordered some books from amazon to cheer myself up. I ordered the book on Anglo-Saxon history I was reading (the copy I was reading was from the library but I think it's good enough to own), Call The Midwife and The Great Gatsby. I'm going to go to the library tomorrow, return my books and get some more out.

A cup of tea.

Currently reading Anglo-Saxon England - Sir Frank Stenton About to start: The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

25. The Darkest Room - Johan Theorin On the idyllic island of Öland, off the coast of northern Sweden, a young couple from Stockholm tries to start life afresh. For Joakim and Katrine Westin, reclaiming a long-neglected family manor will be a labor of love, as they slowly bring the sprawling home back to life and introduce their two children to the island’s woodlands, glens, and beaches. But in the Westins’ new home, there are things that cannot be repaired, lives that have gone wrong, and secrets that have followed them. When the family is struck by tragedy, it’s up to grief-stricken Joakim to put together a puzzle of inexplicable loss, unbearable suspicion, and tangled lives. In this powerhouse of suspense–at once a crime novel and a searing family drama–a home built as a shelter from the sea becomes a human storm of murder This book was fantastic. It was a ghost story really, woven inbetween a crime story and a story of family life in the face of tragedy. A good ghost story should turn the ordinary into something extraordinarily creepy. The ghosts should be realistic so despite thinking that ghosts just cannot be real, you just can't help but think that this could happen. It should leave you wanting to read on but being petrified to turn the page. And I really think this book delivers. What makes the ghost story just seem so realistic is the juxtaposition of the family life and the police dealing with burglaries. The writing is both beautiful but also at times really difficult. As it's a translation from Swedish, some things were bound to get lost. Some of the metaphors and similies to describe what is going on are just beathtakingly beautiful. But sometimes I found sentences jumbled and there was one case where a whole paragraph had full stops in what appears to be mid-sentence as the clauses made no sense by themselves and it was difficult to read and understand. However, I think that was more of a translation issue, rather than the author's problem. 5/5

24. The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot In The Seventeenth-Century England - Antonia Fraser Synopsis (From Goodreads): Drawing from a wondrously deep well of diaries, letters, and papers from 17th-century England, the gifted historian Antonia Fraser gives the image of the "softer sex" a drubbing, plunging readers into the lives of "heiresses and dairy maids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress." Prophetess Jane Hawkins, called "a witty crafty baggage" by one angry bishop, got around the ironclad law forbidding women to preach by claiming inspiration from God, while Catholic Mary Ward risked her neck repeatedly to found a string of convents and schools for girls on the European continent. Although several good wives of London beat the Lord Mayor in 1649 for his part in trying to arrest five members of Parliament, it's certainly true that most Englishwomen of the time were hemmed in by the whims and fears of men. Wealthy girls were routinely used as chips to bolster family fortunes through marriage, and any old, poor woman unfortunate enough to have "a furred brow, a hairy lip, a squint eye, a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue" lived under suspicion of witchcraft, wrote one contemporary observer. In Fraser's sure hands and supple prose, memorable and execrable historic moments spring to life. --Francesca Coltrera I am a massive Antonia Fraser fan and I was delighted to get this book for my birthday. And it lived up to my expectations. It was wonderfully researched and shows the lives of so many 17th-Century women, written in a clear manner. I think it's an invaluable read for anyone interested in women's history or history in this period. The only negative is that sometimes it was a bit difficult to keep up when several of the women Fraser focuses on have the same name (countless Annes and Catharines) but she makes that same point in the introduction and it's not her fault that a few names were wildly popular. 5/5

1/4 of the way through The Darkest Room Only got 1 chapter left of The Weaker Vessel.

Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions - Lucy Hughes-Hallett This was a fantastic book. I wouldn't say it's a history per se but rather an analysis of Cleopatra's myth and how it has been changed depending on the time and the person writing it and how it changes in modern times. From opposing Roman and Egyptian propaganda in her own life time, to the blonde haired European, to the dark oriental foreigner Hughes-Hallet analyses it all. She's a mother, a killer, a childish bimbo, intelligent, stupid, a pacifist, a lover - one contraction after another. And that's why we love her. 5/5

I did consider giving it a 2 before deciding on 1. I did enjoy the first chapter but nothing else. The more I thought about it after finishing it, the more and more disapointed I became.

I've just started The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin. so far it's been interesting.

I've got Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep on the bookcase so I might read it soon. My boyfriend really likes it.

Hello and welcome!

I'm excatly the same. I read the book from the first page (normally praise or about the author(s)), the page about copyright/when first published etc to the last page advertising other books. I enjoy introductions. I find them highly useful, and a few times, they've been more interesting than the actual book

A Visit From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan. NATIONAL BESTSELLER National Book Critics Circle Award Winner PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist A "New York Times Book Review "Best Book One of the Best Books of the Year: "Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, NPR's On Point, O, the Oprah Magazine, People, Publishers Weekly, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Slate, Time, The Washington Post, " and "Village Voice" Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, "A Visit from the Goon Squad "is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption. I wasn't sure whether I should give this one or two stars. In the end I went with my gut feeling and gave it one. The book cover and about 5 pages at the beginning is full of praise. It won the Pulitzer Prise. It was a Tv Book Club Summer Read. It's "exceptional", "a delight", "incredibly affecting" and a "work of imaginative engergy and charm". High praise indeed and because of it, I had high expectations. Wouldn't you after reading so much praise? The book fell flat. Maybe it's my fault. I read praise and get my hopes up so high that nothing can live up to them. I thought it was boring and full of characters that are self-absorbed and well, not likable. I get that the point that the characters are meant to be like that but I just didn't care about how their stories ended. The plot is.... meh (best descriptive word for it - trust me). A lot of the praise is on the "elegant prose" and the gimmicky chapter which is a Powerpoint presentation. In fact, I'd use gimmicky to describe everything about the book (from plot to characters to writing style). The elegant prose is well... just average. If that is what passes as elegant then wow, I'm probably going to win the Pulitzer prize for this review. The powerpoint presentation was laughable. It was written by a 12 year old girl and it was laid out in a beautiful manner, full of clever ideas to convey messages. Has Egan ever seen a 12 year old's powerpoint? I'll let you know what my first Powerpoint was like (I was about 11-12). Red, tiny font - not even a decent font like Ariel or Times New Roman it was really curly and utterly unreadable to anyone in the front row, let alone the poor sods at the back. I had a purple background (which the red text just vanished into). It was cluttered. I didn't think of using cool pyramids, flow charts or thought bubbles to convey messages. I just threw all the text on and added about 100 moving clip art pictures. It was a couple of years later and sitting through hundreds of bloody awful powerpoint presentations at school before I realised - white background, black text, size 18 font, occassional picture, maybe some flowcharts or something and NOTHING ELSE. Anyway, I've sidetracked myself talking about Powerpoints that I've completely forgotten what else I was going to say about the book. 1/5