The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch
The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Books I Read:
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
True Grit by Charles Portis
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
After the book-buying spree of last month, I am thrilled that I only acquired 3 more books this month. And Hangman's Daughter was a birthday gift, so I only spent money on 2 of them. Night Circus is a book I've been wanting to read for about a year, and Prisoner of Heaven is another sequel to a book I LOVE called Shadow of the Wind, so I had to buy that one...right?
As for books I read, I actually started with 1Q84, but finished that one third. This book came out last year and is almost 1200 pages long, so the paperback version is split into three smaller books. Since I had 2 books to read for book clubs this month, I read one of those books in between each section of 1Q84. This book is hard to describe. It's about 2 people who find themselves in a parallel world dealing with a cult and some mystical beings. For the most part, I enjoyed it, but it was occasionally (and unexpectedly) too smutty, for lack of a better word. That makes it hard to recommend, though I did enjoy the non-smutty parts.
For my book club with Hines ladies (what we call Read Between the Hines), my cousin Erin gave us 4 Agatha Christie books to choose from. I believe we chose Murder on the Orient Express because there's a movie starring Sean Connery we can watch after we discuss it at dinner. I've found that I always enjoy Agatha Christie books. I especially liked this one because the murder takes place in an enclosed environment, so the murderer must be among them, but it's still hard to figure out who did it. In that way, it's similar to other Christie books I've enjoyed - And Then There Were None and Death on the Nile.
This was actually my second time to read True Grit. After reading it last year, I recommended it to Jen and she has been enjoying it and chose it for our book club. It was still pretty fresh in my mind, but I decided to go ahead and read it again because I just like it so much. The narrator is a young girl (Mattie Ross) who hires a marshal to help her find the man who killed her father. Mattie has definite potential to end up on my list of favorite characters in fiction. She's witty, spunky, and theologically sound. One of my favorite things about the novel is how she speaks the truth no matter who's around and she's not intimidated by anyone.
After finishing the last part of the sci-fi epic1Q84, I decided it was time for some straight up fiction. Rachel Clary recently told me one of her favorite books is Fall on Your Knees. I'd never heard of it before, and it had the Oprah's Book Club seal on it, so I was kind of skeptical. But Rach and I love a lot of the same books, and the story sounded intriguing. It's the story of a couple generations of a family and how certain sins and secrets affect all of them. It reminded me a lot of East of Eden in that way. The writing is beautiful and the story is so sad, and somehow the whole thing is really amazing.
As far as literature goes, August was pretty great! 4 books in 2,222 pages that I really liked!
Are you reading anything good?
I want to be you.
ReplyDelete