"About Grace" by Anthony Doerr

This book was recommended to me recently by a really good friend, Hannah. Then the week after she recommended it to me I found a secondhand copy at the Mockingbird Lounge in Glenelg South and quickly snapped it up. I have previously read "All the light we cannot see" by Anthony Doerr and loved it (I scored it a 10/10), but hadn't realised he had written other books.

Started reading: 11th February 2019
Finished: 11th March 2019
My score:8-9/10 Beautiful writing, sad character and story.

“All the light we cannot see” by Anthony Doerr

Recommended by my Mum :-) I bought this book at least 2 years ago but only now prioritising more time to read novels again (mostly on the bus) as I really miss it.

Such an excellent book! It's an historic novel set in the Second World War, very moving and beautifully written, with such lovely moments of love and compassion and bravery shining strongly through that makes you have faith in the goodness of most humans even when surrounded by so much violence and horror inflicted by others. Also makes me wonder why we humans don't seem to learn from the horrific wars of the past and keep repeating them over and over in different places and different contexts.

Started reading: 7th Nov 2017

Finished: November 2017

My score: 10/10

"The Bean Trees" by Barbara Kingsolver

This is the 3rd book by Barbara Kingsolver that I have read, and I have enjoyed them all. This one is a lot shorter than the others I have read so far. I really enjoyed the writing style, I felt I was there observing everything and hearing the characters voices and accents rather than just reading about them. The story follows Missy who buys a dodgy old car and sets out to drive until it breaks down then start a new life there, where ever that might be. It's like escaping from this small town in Kentucky is the only way to prevent becoming just another pregnant teenager with nothing much exciting to look forward to. She changes her name and becomes Taylor, and almost ironically given she's running away from the idea of becoming pregnant, she is given an Indian child at a roadhouse along the way. It seems a bit far fetched at this point but later it becomes apparent she is helping to rescue the child from an abusive environment. Her car ends up needing new tyres in Arizona which she can't afford, and while stopping to earn enough money to replace them she ends up starting a new life, with new friends and 'Turtle' her little Indian child. The second half of the book focuses on the relationships she forms with her new friends and neighbours, issues with bringing up Turtle without being her legal parent or guardian, and touches on illegal immigration issues, with one of her new friends sheltering a Mexican couple. While the writing is great and I kept turning the pages, things seemed a bit more superficial/cliched and predicable for the last part of the book. I read somewhere that the author also grew up in Kentucky and moved to Arizona, and the way she describes the country and the people probably draws on her own experiences as they are so realistic (particularly in the first half of the book I thought).

Started reading: 29th January 2016
 Finished: 4th February 2016
My score: 7.5/10

"The catcher in the rye" by J.D. Salinger

I started reading this book on my kindle on a long haul flight from Sydney - Dallas, USA. I chose to read it 1) because it is set in New York and I was going to be lucky enough to spend a few days in New York later that month and wanted to read a novel set in that beautiful city, and 2) because it's a classic. Even though this book is a "classic" and is often studied at school, in my personal opinion it is poorly written and boring. The main character is unlikable, the plot goes nowhere really, the language used is repetitive...when I posted on Facebook that I was reading this book, all the comments my friends made were about how much they had disliked this book too, so I definitely would not recommend anyone waste time reading it.

However, if you are also looking to read a good book set in New York, I did stop off at one of my favourite shops in New York: The Housing Works Bookstore Cafe,  and asked the staff for some recommendations. They were very helpful and friendly as always and suggested the following authors and books:

- O.Henry
- Joseph Mitchell
- Edith Wharton 'New York Stories'
- Colm Toibin "Brooklyn"

I found a copy of Colm Toibin's "Brooklyn" and bought that, but haven't read it yet. The staff told me it was coming out as a film soon too. Does anyone else have any recommendations of good novels set in New York that they would like to share?



"The catcher in the rye" by J.D. Salinger
Started: 3rd December 2015
Finished: 13th December 2015
My score: 1/10

"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver

Although this book took me nearly 3 months to finish reading it, I really did enjoy it. It was quite a thick book and didn't often fit into my work bag, and as most of the reading I've been getting time for is on the bus to and from work lately this meant it took a lot longer than it should have to read this book.

It is an historical novel (my favourite genre), set mostly in Mexico (and partly in USA) during the 1930s-1950s. Although the main character, Harrison Shepherd, is completely fictional, there are plenty of other interesting real life characters woven into the story - for example the famous artist Frida Kahlo and the exiled Bolshevik leader Trotsky. The story is mostly in the form of a series of diary notebooks written by Harrison depicting his life and his interpretation of life and politics surrounding him, from childhood to the 1950s. Harrison writes well, really capturing what is going on around him, and I was fascinated especially by the sections of the book set in Mexico. I didn't know a lot of Trotsky and his exile in Mexico, but I was a little bit familiar with some of Frida Kahlo's self portraits, and Mexico is definitely on my travel bucket list. I was less interested in a section in the second half of the story that dealt with the era of Communist hunting in USA, and the series of reviews and fan mail letters associated with the novels that Harrison writes while living in the USA. I really did enjoy the book overall though, and it did capture some interesting people, places and events in history that I didnt know a lot about. If I had been reading this on my kindle I'm sure I would have finished reading this book in less than a month. 

Started reading: 5th June 2015
Finished: 30th August 2015
My score: 8/10

"The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" by Ayana Mathis

Started reading: 16th April 2015 
Finished 11th May 2015
My score: 5/10

"The Virgin Blue" by Tracy Chevalier

I bought this book second-hand at the Glenelg Book Exchange. I have read other books by this author in the past, including "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Lady and the Unicorn" which I really enjoyed reading sometime in the last 5-10 years. Her books tend to be historical novels inspired by famous artworks and bringing to life the people portrayed in them or involved in the making of the art.

"The Virgin Blue" is split between two main characters in two different time periods: Ella Turner, an American woman who has moved to France (around the 1990s?) and Isabelle Tournier "La Rousse", a red haired peasant girl living in southern France in the 1500s during a time of unrest between the Catholics and the Huguenots. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that Ella believes herself to be a member of the French Tournier family that Isabelle Tournier belongs to, and starts researching into her distant ancestory following some vivid nightmares involving a particular shade of blue and some words from a bible verse.

While the historic background in which Isabelle's life is set is really interesting, neither of the main characters really connected with me, and the "connections" felt between the 2 characters in their different lives was really not convincing enough for me. Ella in particular I found fairly superficial and immature in her actions, and a lot of the dialogue and thoughts running through her head were basically stereotypes  of an arrogant American trying to fit into a small French village but rubbing everyone up the wrong way, yet somehow not realising that it was her attitudes and actions that were contributing to her reception and therefore blaming the locals. She was always jumping to conclusions that everyone was judging her and misinterpreting situations. For example, if a local French person spoke to her in English when she tried to speak in limited French to them, she would react in this way: "Damn you, I thought. I hated that sneering appraisal, the assumption that I couldn't speak French, that I looked so American"...when in reality the local person probably was trying to be helpful and could speak better English than her French and thought she would appreciate them speaking English.
Another example: "In fact French women in the city were so different from me that I often felt invisible around them, a dishevelled ghost standing aside to let them pass....As I walked around I could feel them glancing at me discreetly, scruitinizing the shoulder-length hair I'd left a little too long in cutting, the absence of make-up...I was sure I saw pity flash over their faces".

Despite this, the book was fairly quick and easy to read, the little bits about life in the 1500s was interesting. I would have preferred more details of this time period and Isabelle's life and less of the romantic and conclusion-jumping adventures of Ella. I seem to remember enjoying other books by this author a lot more, but it was a while ago that i read them now, so I don't know whether they were more complex and well-written than "The Virgin Blue" or whether they were a similar style and just appealed to me more when I read them in my 20s.

Started reading: 25th January 2015
Finished: 27th January 2015
My score: 5/10