Author: Jackie

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February Summary

I equaled my January total by reading 11 books this month. They were a very mixed bag. My favourite by quite a long way was The Hunger Games. I’m sure this will be in my top 5 for the year (although if I manage read lots of  books better than this I will be VERY happy!

I also recommend The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. These two books couldn’t be more different, and it just shows that it doesn’t really matter what the book is about – it is the quality of the writing that makes a good book into a great one.

     

 

I hope that you read some great books in February. Let me know what your favourite has been, as my wish list can never be too long!

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Audio Book Recommended books

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer (Audio Book)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society had been on my wish list for a while, so when I saw Sandy from You’ve Gotta Read This! raving about the audio book version, I decided to buy a copy. Unfortunately I didn’t realise that it wasn’t released as an audio book in the UK, and it seemed to be getting rarer in the rest of the world too! The benefit of my book selling business is that I can treat things like these as ‘expenses’, (well I’ll hopefully make a profit on it anyway!), so at great cost, I bought a copy. After several weeks I was hit by a large, unexpected customs bill, then finally the audio book arrived.

I’m really pleased that I did go to the effort of getting the audio book. I don’t normally like books written entirely in letter form, and I think I would have struggled to identify with the characters initially, had I read it.  The audio book is very well produced, with a whole cast of actors reading it. This brought the book to life immediately, and gave each letter it’s unique voice. This enabled me to picture each of the people straight away, without having to wait for the descriptions of them, which came much later in the book.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is set just after the Second World War. Juliet is a writer, based in London, and is looking for a new subject for her next book. She begins to correspond with a group of people in Guernsey, and as she learns about what life during the war was like under German occupation, she begins to build lasting friendships with them. Captivated by their stories, she visits her new friends and her life is changed forever.

It is a simple, heart-warming story, and although many disturbing events of the war are covered, the book never felt dark.

Recommended.

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Also reviewed by Word Lily , Fresh Ink Books and You’ve Gotta Read This

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Other

I’ve won an award!

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I’ve just been given this great award by Molly from the Cozy Book Nook! This was such a nice surprise, as I didn’t even know she’d been visiting! I only spotted her blog a few weeks ago, and since then have been a real fan. She has only been writing book reviews since January, but I’m sure she must have been practising before, as they are great! Thank you very much!

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1980s Booker Prize Recommended books

The Bone People – Keri Hulme

The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985. It is set on the South Island of New Zealand, and centres around three characters. The first, Kerewin, is a painter, who having won the lottery builds herself a tower by the sea and lives as a virtual recluse. One day, Simon, a young, mute boy turns up at her tower and they begin a strange friendship. Simon’s foster father, Joe, is then drawn towards Kerewin and the three characters begin to discover secrets lurking in each of their pasts.

The book deals with many difficult issues, but domestic violence is the most dominant. Joe beats his foster son, and the delicate line between punishment and cruelty if seen to be very hazy at times. The characters are all really well developed, deeply flawed and incredibly interesting!

The book is very well written, and the writing is almost poetic at times, but at other times it was a ‘stream of conciousness’ and, particularly in the beginning, was very confusing. I fluctuated between loving it, and being irritated by it!

The book was filled with Maori myths and symbolism, some of which went over my head. I think that this book is one which needs to be read several times, in order to appreicate it’s many layers. In many ways it is very similar to Beloved – difficult to understand at first, complex, moving and full of symbolism.

I’m not sure I’d ever recommend this book to anyone, but I’m glad that I read it.

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Other

Try Something New: A Mini Challenge

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As part of the Dewey’s Books Challenge, hosted by Chris and Robin in Dewey’s memory, I’m going to take part in the Try Something New Mini-Challenge.

Here’s how it works:

During the month of March, I’m going to step out of my comfort zone and try something new.

To make things more fun, the Mini-Challenge is going to work in pairs:  If you’re an even number, you’ll be paired with the person before you; if you’re an odd number, with the person after you , like we sometimes did for Weekly Geeks.

I’d like to try a graphic novel, or a western, as I’ve never read either before, but I won’t commit until I’ve found out who my partner is, and which sort of books they’d like to try, as it would be nice if we could try something new together!

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Blog Improvement Project Other

Blog Improvement Project Week 4: Blog Basics

This is the fourth week of the Blog Improvement Project. Our task for this week is to focus on the basics of our blog. I’ve been very busy!

I spent ages trying to improve the layout and add a ‘recent comments’ section to the sidebar. It didn’t really look very professional, and I was worried all my messing around was actually making it worse!

Then I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and everything became much easier! WordPress 2.7 is a big improvement. It is much easier to add things to the sidebar without a knowledge of html, and all the behind-the-scenes management of the blog is much more intuitive.

With WordPress 2.7 it was really easy to add the recent comments section to the sidebar. All I had to do was tick one box!

It also has an option to add a text box, so I added my ‘currently reading’ and ‘top of the TBR’ boxes, so that everyone can see which books I’m focusing on at the moment.

My next task was to try to add a tab to show all the books I have reviewed on my blog. This was a lot harder than I expected. Bloggers seem to want everything archived by date, so it took me a while to find this azindex widget to organise things alphabetically. It is a big improvement to have all my book reviews in one place, but I’d ideally like them ordered by author. I know this can be done using tags for the first letter of an author’s surname, but this would be a lot of work for me. I’ll try to do it one day when I have a bit more time.

I must have done something to improve my blog’s visibility, as I was previously getting between 5 and 10 spam comments a day. I the last 12 hours I’ve had 156!  I’m off to find a good way of getting rid of it!

I look forward to seeing what improvements everyone else has made, and hopefully I’ll get a few more good ideas!