Now It's Your Turn
This is me, going on my travels very soon. I'm doing a lot of reading so that I am all ready to go to my book club when I get back. For our next meeting we are reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It's a somewhat gothic tale about a young man who lives and works in a used bookshop with his father in Barcelona. He is given his choice of any book from a warehouse called The Cemetary of Old Books, and is sucked into the mystery of the disappearance of his book's author. I'm not into it very far yet, but the book has elements of magical realism that would appeal to fans of Chocolat by Joanne Harris. The local Barcelona color is also very well done, and there are lots of strange and gutsy characters as in Harris' books. The writing is not bad too - lots of passages I feel like putting sticky notes on.I have also just completed A Poisoned Season by Tasha Alexander. This is a mystery, Ms. Alexander's second, set in late Victorian London. A young wealthy widow, determined to be independent becomes embroiled in an international plot to restore the Bourbon heir to the throne of France. This is a great study of the social mores of the time, but it's not like Edith Wharton, more like Elizabeth Peters. The feisty heroine falls somewhere between Amelia Peabody and Anne Perry's Charlotte Pitt. This was a good story and fun too.
Now over to you... Leave me a comment about what you are currently reading or have on your "to be read" list.
Labels: Barcelona, book comments, booksellers, London, magical realism, Poisoned Season, Shadow of the Wind, Victorian
posted by Elizabeth @ 12:38 PM
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3 Comments:
I just finished reading a very unusual book called Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa Tiong'o. It's a long book--7 hundred and some-odd pages--but well worth the experience. It takes place in a fictional African country; you'd recognize its type: poverty, corruption, and an absolute ruler who governs with arbitrariness, violence, greed, etc. The hero is a young man who has received an excellent college education in India, only to return to a land that has more need for ditch-diggers than intellectuals. Nobody can appreciate his skills and potential. Nobody, that is, but a woman similarly educated, a strong-willed woman involved in one of the country's dissident groups.
If all this sounds like one of those serious, poetic paeans to the salt of the earth, then you're on the wrong track, because this story is full of humor, heroism, magic, goofy but dangerous villains, misunderstandings, superstition, and slapstick. You feel that you've been taken in hand by a wizened village story teller who knows how to keep you listening.
On top of all this, the reader gets a pretty good idea, with perhaps (?) only slight exaggeration, of what it is like to actually have to live in one of these African hells.
It was time for me to reserve copies of the next discussion book, but, alas, the title chosen looked to be a poor choice for intense discussion. In desperation, I searched our shelves for a substitute, and happened to pick up Half Broken Things by Morag Joss. This was an unknown author of a book not yet read, but the jacket looked promising. An elderly house-sitter has just received word that at the end of her contract with the abode she is currently caring for, she will be forcibly retired with few resources available to her. Her response to this bit of disastrous news is create a fantasy wherein she is the owner of the secluded country home (Walden Manor)and therefore entitled to invite Michael (a thief) and Steph (a pregnant loner) to live there with her. Together, the three construct a life of relative happiness until their seclusion is interrupted by an unwanted visitor.
This book generated some of the best discussion we have ever had. The character development is superb, and the plot development cries out for many "what if they had done...". We discussed this book several months ago and the plot and characters still stick in my mind as totally unforgetable. I strongly recommend it as a discussion title.
Reading Book Glutton's comment about Half Broken Things, I was reminded of another book I have read which deals with a community of "broken" people living together - Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos. Some of the imagery is very beautiful. You come to realize there are lots of different ways to love. The premise is that an old woman, living alone in a mansion with a very valuable collection of porcelains, discovers she is terminally ill and finds ways to share with others and to expiate an old wrong.
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