Category: Book Talk

Recent Reads: I’ve been holding out on you!

Lauren4 Comments

On Tuesday, I finished up a book during my lunch break, decided I should write a post about it, then realized I’d finished five other books since the last time I did a book review post!  I don’t know how or when that happened by I’m simultaneously feeling pleased (for reading lots!) and disappointed in myself.  Let’s fix that today!*

*Today, as in the Rockies Home Opener!!!  If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know Joey and I look forward to this day ALL YEAR LONG.  As is tradition, we will be lunching at Biker Jim’s, drinking beer in the sunshine, breathing in that Coors Field air, taking note of everyone’s walk up song and rooting for our dear Rockies to be less bad than last year.  Happiest of Fridays!

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

All the Light

Okay, don’t get me wrong I really liked this book, but I had heard SUCH good things about it that I think I expected to like it a lot more.  I’m even having a hard time pinpointing what I didn’t love about the book.  I just can’t really put my finger on it.  I guess I should just focus on what I did like, which was the effortless back-and-forth interweaving aspect of how the story was told, a totally new perspective of what it was like to be a young boy in Nazi Germany, the indisputable love a father had for his blind daughter, the fact that Marie-Laure was never painted as helpless and the language.  It read like poetry and there’s nothing better than literature written like that.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane

Wait, you don’t re-read Victorian lit for fun?  Me neither…  In all honesty, I started this in December and though I flew through the first half, Part II took me FOREVER to get through.  Partly because I was reading other things and partly because Jane’s life without Rochester is boring as can be.  Come on, we knew it and she knew it too.  I did finally make it through (and gave myself a pat on the back), but I think it’s safe to say I probably won’t be reading that again any time soon.  I swear I liked it the first time around!

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

Grownup

This was our March book group pick and it was all of 60 pages long.  I read it in less than an hour, then made Joey read it so we could discuss.  It made a few mentions of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and it did have that same eerie appeal to it in the beginning, but then Gillian Flynn fell into her pattern of writing a book with three twists and it felt all too predictable.  The feminist in me wants to love a successful female author, but the English major in me says her writing is formulaic and far too concerned with shock appeal.Read More »

A Book Review: The Paying Guests

Lauren2 Comments

“My wife, the rare library card holder.”  This is how Joey described me as we drove to the Denver Public Library a few weeks ago.  That’s right, I DO go to the library still and I kind of LOVE it.  As soon as I walk in, I feel such a sense of inner peace.  This is my place and these are my people.  But being a library goer also means waiting for the books you want to read, having to return books when you haven’t finished them yet, and the worst… waiting weeks then getting slammed with three books at the same time.  Book time management is the name of the game.

I was lucky enough to be able to check The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters out with plenty of time to spare before January Book Club and actually finished it weeks ahead of time.  Gold star for me!  I also made it through this one pretty quickly, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I liked it.

paying-guests-sarah-waters

I’ll spare you the recap and just say that my biggest issue with this book was that it seemed to have a split-personality plot disorder.  Meaning, it was headed one direction for the first half of the book, then BAM! took a turn in the middle and went a different path entirely.  Our meeting was really interesting because it was pretty divided between those who were really into the first half of the book and not so into the second half and those who felt the exact opposite.  (Or those who just straight hated the whole thing, start to finish…).

As for me, I’m choosing to focus on the redeeming factors.  The historical fiction aspect — it takes place in post-WWII England — and the actual writing, which I thought was well done and especially descriptive.  Sarah Waters was such an expert in the way she described the house that most of the plot took place in.  You could just picture it so clearly and it wasn’t until after our meeting that I realized how big of a roll that house played.  If only the plot had been a little more focused and the ending hadn’t wrapped up a little too cleanly to be realistic.

Have you read The Paying Guests?

What are you reading right now?

Do you have a library card?