A decent line up this month! Y’all I just love reading. I mean love it. I’ve always enjoyed it but setting a goal to read more this year has only made me enjoy it more!
Can we just say how big my baby is getting! He’s been sitting up lately and just wanting to be a big boy! Just love my boys so much.
Also read this verse this month and it really resonated with me, so just thought I would share it here!
Ok on to my October reads!
“A Study in Scarlet Women” wasn’t my favorite, and really took about half way to really get moving. It was an interesting spin on Sherlock Holmes though, being a women calling herself as such and putting out a newspaper ad to help others with mysterious matters. She ends up solving a murder/suicide mystery and picks up on connections that no one else would have seen. It was a cute book but just kind of slow to get through.
“The Women in the Castle” was another book in the WW2 era, but this time focused more on the post war setting. As a woman’s husband was involved in a scheme gone wrong to assassinate Hitler, she is left to care for her children and a couple of other women who become widows of the war. This is their story, the times they spent together trying to survive and recover from the war in her family’s castle and then flashed forward to where they all were modern day. I really liked this book, it was a little different than other stories I had read and kept my interest consistently from the start.
“Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” was recommended on a blog I follow, she also does a book review each month and this one she mentioned over the summer. I have been trying to decide what to say about this book…I really liked it. A few bad words in the second half but it was an eye opening read. We all know someone who may be socially awkward, or someone with a difficult past…who may not be confident in themselves or have many relationships in life and be lonely. Eleanor was one of these people, a tragic childhood including a deranged mother who tried to kill her and then passed around from foster home to foster home. This is a story about her adulthood, how she didn’t “fit” in, how she went from the time she left work Friday to when she got back on Monday without uttering a word to another soul and sadly enough saw no worth in her life. It was heart wrenching to read at times and made me really think about how I see others, whether I know them or not, you just don’t know what people have been through, and you cannot underestimate the impact of a kind word or friendly pat on the back. I loved reading Eleanor’s take on life, being socially awkward and just having a different interpretation of things, I was cracking up at her views on her daily activities, my favorite example being her thoughts on the “fish sandwich” from McDonalds haha. This really is such a good book for all of us to read, to not take our own relationships for granted and a good reminder to not overlook the lonely and different.
I was pretty excited about reading “Crazy Rich Asians”…I visited Singapore about 7 years ago with one of my best friends that I used to teach with to visit another good friend we taught with before she moved there with her husband, and since this book takes place there I was looking forward to reading the story in that setting. But here’s the thing. This book is about crazy rich people, who for the most part live extremely indulgent lifestyles, so I was a little naive when it comes to what that could mean! I enjoyed the story line and seeing what happened with the two main characters, but there was just a lot of vulgar statements and activities at different points in the book, and the second half had a lot of bad language. So I just always put that out there in case anyone is interested in reading, just to be aware that this isn’t a super conservative book and another one I contemplated not finishing. 😉
“Caraval” was my most favorite book to read this month, super clean and just kept your attention the whole way through. It is a story about two daughters, trying to escape the life they have with their abusive father. One has been writing to the mysterious “Legend”, who runs a magical carnival/city of sorts, where people are invited to play an adventurous game to claim the prize of a wish granted by him. The girl is invited to play, and her sister kidnapped by Legend, for people playing to try and find her. It’s an interesting and twisting kind of story, and really kept me guessing the whole tome how it would play out. Really looking forward to the sequel!
Another B. A. Paris book haha! “Bring Me Back” was interesting to me, I’m still on the fence as to whether I really liked this book after the story finished playing out. A story about two girls, also escaping a bad home life with their father (strange coincidence hah!) and how one disappears after a fight with her boyfriend. The sister ends up getting together with the boyfriend, so the book takes you through their conversations when the original sister turns up again. It was an interesting story to say the least, cleaner than her other two books as well, only 2-3 bad words if I remember correctly. Easy read and not too nerve racking haha!
I finished the month with “A Nantucket Wedding” by Nancy Thayer. I really have enjoyed all the books I’ve read from her so far. They are easy, chick lit kind of reads, always full of engaging characters and quickly paced story lines. I really enjoyed reading about this family, the mom was getting married later in life after her husband passed away to a multi millionaire…so this book was the story of how their two families meshed and got alone. I appreciated her respect for marriage and what vows mean in this book in concerning the two daughters and their storylines.
Hope you found something that interested you! You can check out the rest of the year below or under my book tab above!
What I’m Reading – January – June 2018