Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Eleanor and Park

By Rainbow Rowell

Okay, it's official. I love Young Adult books. This one was really good. It actually made me cry at times, but not like some cheap tear jerker. And I loved it even though there were things I couldn't understand, at least not until the end. And the ending was just perfect. On the surface it looks like just a teenage love story. Or you could look at it as a broken-house story. But it's actually so much more than that. [YA/328pp.]

Link to book.

Watership Down

By Richard Adams

I loved the book. At times it was a bit too intense for me. But it's about bunnies! I love bunnies. Not so much when they become fascist. But still, they're bunnies.
The book felt so authentic. It made me think of The White Bone. It really warms my heart to read books about animals, where the authors made it clear that they did their research, they're not just making stuff up, or anthropomorphizing the animals. Even thought some of the characters are based on people the author knows. I liked that, too. [476 pp.]

Link to book.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

By Sherman Alexie

This is such a beautiful, well-written story. It indeed reads like a diary, and it is so refreshing to see the point of view of a teenage reservation boy. It took me to a completely different world. It is a very sad world, to be sure, and yet full of humor and hope. [YA/ 240 pp.]

Link to book.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The Custom of the Country

By Edith Wharton

This is a tale of a young lady whose driven by chronic ambition to have anything she currently doesn't possess. She will stop at nearly nothing to get what she wants, with hardly any regard - though without maliciousness, either - to other people's wellbeing.
This book took me a while to finish because it is fairly long (don't remember how many pages exactly, as I returned the book to the library and cannot find the edition I read online) and the language deserves full attention. I really enjoyed some paragraphs. [300-400 pp. (?)]

Link to book