April Reading List

Hello reading fans.  This has been a busy month for me!  I put the quilting and sewing on the back burner in favor of reading and ballet class.  The result is this lengthy list and dance routines that are getting ready for performance.

1. Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood-- This novel is WONDERFUL.  As a fan of Oryx and Crake, another of her novels, this was a real joy with overlapping plot lines and shared characters.  Get it and read it!

2-4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling-- As I finished re-reading the entire series of Harry Potter this year, I was reminded how wonderful they are.  I also cherished the fact that I was not reading each in a single night, as I did the first time, DYING of curiosity and NEEDING to see what happened now.  I will continue to recommend this series to all adults.

5. Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey-- This book was recommended to me by my cousin Etta.  It is truly of the fantasy genre with an entire parallel race of people decedent from fallen angels.  The main character's life made me uncomfortable with all of the sex and violence and the violent sex, so this book is not for everyone.

6. God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant-- This is a book of poetry by a most beloved children's author.  The poetry is wonderfully accessible and deals with the divine head on with the earthly.  "God went to beauty school. / He went there to learn how / to give a good perm. / But what He was really there for / was the hands."  Go and get it today.

7. The Van Allen Legacy by Melissa De La Cruz-- This is the fourth book in the Blue Bloods series.  It was fun at first, but now it is falling apart.  Like most series, this feels like the author was rushed to get a book to press and the plot and character development were the casualties.  Not that the characters or plot ever had much to offer, but what they did have is gone.

8. How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson-- This was a book I picked up on a whim from the "new release" shelves at the library.  As the first book of a new author, I liked it.  As an English teacher, I liked it.  In the end, it has little to do with loving reading and everything to do with becoming a person separate from your parents.  Evidently, this is a very hard thing for many of the uber rich children of the Eastern Sea Board.  The story, ironically if you can remember much of the plot of "The Great Gatsby", takes place in East Egg.

9. Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin-- "You don't need a cake if you are sad" says Angel.  This book is a collection of vignettes capturing Rwanda, and how people seek to come to terms with it's sins, through "Angel", the grand-mother turned small-business maven.  Sometimes the lens between the reader/author/narrator becomes too dense and I was questioning whose view I was getting, the author (a white South African woman) or the narrator (a black Rwandan woman).  Each of the chapters reveals one more hardship that the Rwandans must overcome, or acknowledge at all, for the country to heal and move forward.  Thought provoking, but not preachy.

Well, that's the list for April.  May will be packed to the gills with travel, Spokane, Arizona, and Spokane again, so I don't know what kind of list I'll have this month.  I hope you all can make time to do some of your own reading this month!

Comments

  1. Thank you for reading my novel and writing about it on your blog, Ciara. I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

    On another note, I really enjoyed the first two Blue Bloods books and was hoping to get back into the series (and hoping it wasn't falling apart). Bummed to read that it's doing just that. :-( (I have such a weak enough spot for vampire fiction, though, that I have a feeling I'm going to have to experience the disappointment for myself, even though I'm now forewarned.)

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