I have had a run of books full of tragedy and death, and looking at the books on the top of my reading pile it looks like I have more to come. Can anyone recommend something that won’t be added to my list of depressing books read in 2009?
Thanks in advance!
This is the first week of the Blog Improvement Project. This week’s task is to set goals for our blog, and by focusing on what we want to achieve we will hopefully become better bloggers.
The main reason I set up this blog was to try to find people with similar reading tastes to me, in the hope that I could find great books to read that I otherwise would not have come across.
I also enjoy writing book reviews, as I have found that in writing them I appreciate the book more, and often realise things that I didn’t when originally reading the book.
With these fairly modest objectives in mind (after-all there are only so many books I can read/review each week) I set off to read the guide for reviewing your blog at problogger. Many of the questions are difficult for me to answer, as I have only been blogging for a few months. Some of the others generated more questions than answers. For example:
What do I want people to do once they’ve read my blog?
Go and buy the book I’ve just recommended? Leave a comment, to let me know their opinion? Tell all their friends about how wonderful my blog is? All of the above?!
The main thing I’ve learnt, is that there is a lot more to blogging than I first thought. If I want to increase the visibilty of my site then I need to be more active in the blogging community, learn more about the technical side to blogging, and write about more things that other people are interested in. Hopefully this blog improvement challenge will encourage me to find the answers to these questions, and by the end of 2009 this blog will be a much more interesting place to visit!
The book revolves around two very different families who, unable to have children of their own, adopt Korean baby girls. The families meet at the airport when the new babies arrive in America.
It is an interesting premise for a book, as the two families are very different, both in background, and their attitudes to bringing up children. The Iranian family immediately dress their new baby in jeans, while the American family acquire traditional Korean costumes and read her Korean folk stories. The book revolves around the ‘arrival day’ parties that the families throw each year to commemorate the day they were united with their babies.
There were lots of interesting subjects raised in the book, from national identity, and customs, to adoption and methods of childcare, but unfortunately they were not investigated in any depth. The characters were too numerous for us to generate any real feelings for them, and the plot failed to develop beyond the repetition of the party each year. By the end of the book I was very bored with it, and had lost count of the number of ‘arrival day’ parties that had occurred. The characters were well observed, but they were too ordinary, and nothing exciting happens to them during the course of the book. This could have been overcome by having an emotional insight into their lives, but unfortunately this failed to happen.
Overall, I was very disappointed in this book, and won’t be rushing out to read her others.
‘What Was Lost’ was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2007, and won the 2007 Guardian First Book award.
The story begins in 1984, and is seen through the eyes of Kate Meaney, a ten year old girl who has set herself up as a detective agency with her pet monkey, Mickey. It continues 20 years later, when we discover that Kate went missing, and her disappearance is re-investigated by the few people who were close to her.
Kate’s section was completely absorbing. It took me right back to my childhood. I can remember being a ten year old girl, having the same sort of thoughts as her, and being obsessed with stationery too! It was amusing, well observed and quite moving in places.
The rest of the book wasn’t as good. The characters were flat, formulaic and not as accurately observed. The plot moved along at a fair pace, but I was craving the return of Kate for all the sections based in 2004. I was rewarded with a brief glimpse of her at the end, and was quite satisfied with the way it finished, but wish that Catherine O’Flynn had based the whole book on Kate’s life, as she was such an interesting character.
I look forward to reading more books by the author in the future, but hope the characters are as realistic as Kate’s.
I was then confronted with several chapters of poetry. It wasjust weird, unnecessary, and felt as though the author was just trying to be too clever.
It didn’t improve. The plot disappeared, the characters became more annoying, and the stream of conscious thought became monotonous and dull.
Not for me.
