Hello all!
So today WordPress told me it’s my one year anniversary since I registered the blog and started it up! Time has flown by, so thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this blog! I don’t always get as much time to post as I’d like to – real life often gets in the way!- but it really means so much that people have subscribed! 🙂
As always, I’ve got a ‘To-Read’ longer than I can even comprehend, but here’s what I am currently reading, and what I will soon be making my way through.
Currently reading:
The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton (released in the UK on 2nd July)
Synopsis:
On 24th November Yasmin and her deaf daughter Ruby arrived in Alaska.
Within hours they were driving alone across a frozen wilderness
Where nothing grows
Where no one lives
Where tears freeze
And night will last for another 54 days.
They are looking for Ruby’s father.
Travelling deeper into a silent land.
They still cannot find him.
And someone is watching them in the dark.
To read:
The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides (available now)
Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn’t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn’t lived up to expectations.
But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course “to see what all the fuss is about,” and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten–charismatic loner, college Darwinist and lost Oregon boy–who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus–devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton–resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
The Bones of You – Debbie Howell (released in hardback on 30 June)
Synopsis:
I have a gardener’s inherent belief in the natural order of things. Soft‑petalled flowers that go to seed. The resolute passage of the seasons. Swallows that fly thousands of miles to follow the eternal summer.
Children who don’t die before their parents.
When Kate receives a phone call with news that Rosie Anderson is missing, she’s stunned and disturbed. Rosie is eighteen, the same age as Kate’s daughter, and a beautiful, quiet, and kind young woman. Though the locals are optimistic—girls like Rosie don’t get into real trouble—Kate’s sense of foreboding is confirmed when Rosie is found fatally beaten and stabbed.
Who would kill the perfect daughter, from the perfect family? Yet the more Kate entwines herself with the Andersons—graceful mother Jo, renowned journalist father Neal, watchful younger sister Delphine—the more she is convinced that not everything is as it seems. Anonymous notes arrive, urging Kate to unravel the tangled threads of Rosie’s life and death, though she has no idea where they will lead.
Weaving flashbacks from Rosie’s perspective into a tautly plotted narrative, The Bones of You is a gripping, haunting novel of sacrifices and lies, desperation and love.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ – Philip Pullman (out now)
Synopsis:
This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told.
Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned.
For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories.
What have you been reading recently?