I’m really not very good at following my own reading lists!
This month I might read these boks… or I might read an entirely different selection, who knows?
My Book(s):
The New Vampires Handbook (I started this last month but didn’t finish it)
Must Love Dragons by Stephanie Rowe
The Order Of The Scales by Stephen Deas
Review Book(s):
Angel on the Ropes by Jill Schult (this is also my Self-Pub Book for this month)
Borrowed Book(s):
Fade To Black by Francis Knight
This month I read the following books (click on the links to see my reviews):
Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Diary Of An Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster
Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz
Hacker by Liberty Gilmore (this is still a baby in book terms – I read it so I can help Liberty with her editing and preparing it for sharing with the wider world. But it’s still a book, so it counts!)
Blood Work – An Original Hollows Graphic Novel by Kim Harrison
A Conspiracy Of Alchemists by Leisel Schwarz
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Total books read in 2013 so far: 14/75
Diary Of An Ordinary Woman, A Novel by Margaret Forster
Published: Chatto and Windus, April 2003
Length: 403 pages (Hardback edition)
Where Did I Get It?: Purchased second-hand after a recommendation.
Summary (from the book cover):
Margaret Forster presents the ‘edited’ diary of a woman, born 1901, died in 1995. From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journal in a series of exercise books. With a touching clearsightedness she vividly records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary family toughed by war, tragedy, and money troubles in the early decades of the century. She struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism. But then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.
Opening Line:
Father said if I want to keep a diary I must begin it on New Years Day.
~
My Review:
I started reading this book in July 2012. I finished it mid-February 2013. This probably tells you a lot about my relationship with it.
In any normal circumstance I would never have picked Diary Of An Ordinary Woman up, I only chose to read it as part of my Day Zero challenge to read 5 books recommended to me by other people. To me, the title sounds dull and there is nothing I enjoy less than reading about people. Real people, I mean, with real lives. They’re insufferably boring, even when what’s going on around them might not be.
That, though, is one of the first triumphs of this novel – the realism of the story. It is a novel, it’s made up, a fantasy based on reality – but an awful lot of people think (or thought) that it is a real-life true story. And I can see why.
I have read a few reviews where people have discovered that it is not a real diary and stopped reading, insulted at the deception cleverly laid out through the book. The ‘Introduction’ where Forster claims she is re-editing the diaries of Millicent King is fictional but very convincing and probably my favourite thing about the book. It is the perfect lie – I was taken in, too, until I properly studied the cover of the book and saw the words ‘A Novel’ printed small on the front. Incredibly clever and masterfully pulled off.
The rest of the novel, the diary itself, is one of the most beautiful things I have seen crafted out of imagination, even though I detested reading it. The very reason I detested it was because of its brilliance – it read like the diary of a real person. A real, boring, obnoxious thirteen year old girl who grows up to be a flighty teenager, a stubborn twenty-something, a survivor of wars etc etc. It was incredibly true to the style of a diary and therefore, to me, incredibly boring, awkward and unpleasant to read.
If I were an avid lover of memoirs and biographies and the like, I would probably have loved it. But I’m not, so instead, I forced myself to read two diary entries every time I wanted to pick up another book to read. Just two. Many of them are only half a page long and still felt like a chore.
I didn’t enjoy the book until just over half way through when the Second World War broke out and everything got more exciting. Millicent was just as ‘ordinary’ as before but the world she was in was more interesting and I found myself reading 20 pages a sitting without noticing. Then the war ended and I got bored again.
As a historical novel it was reasonably interesting and it did make me think about how life was during the Great Wars and through the 1980s but it is simply not something I would read by choice.
I can see why it would be someone else’s favourite book of all time and I acknowledge and appreciate the skill of the writing involved. It just wasn’t for me.
My rating: 3/5*
Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz 
Published: Naomi Rabinowitz, 8th October 2012
Length: 278 pages (Kindle edition)
Where Did I Get It?: Purchased on Amazon for 77p
Summary (from Goodreads):
Shy, overweight Melinda Rhodes’ sophomore year of high school isn’t going so well. Her own mother mocks her weight. Her pants split in the middle of school, earning her the nickname, “Moolinda.” She then loses first chair flute in band to Kathy Meadows, her pretty and popular nemesis.
Her luck changes when she catches the eye of Josh Kowalski, a rebellious trumpet prodigy and class clown. Josh has also been hurt by Kathy and asks Melinda to help take Kathy down. Mel figures that she has nothing to lose … and Josh is adorable with gorgeous blue eyes and a winning smile. She agrees to team up with him and looks forward to finally getting back at her rival.
At first, the pair’s pranks are silly, and as they work together, Mel comes out of her shell. Even better, she finds herself falling for Josh and it appears as if he might feel the same way about her.
However, their schemes become more and more dangerous and Mel is surprised to discover her dark side. Just how far will she go to get what she wants — and is Josh really worth the risk?
Opening Line:
A light September breeze swept through Sequoia High, filling the quiet hallways with the scent of cut grass and falling leaves.
~
My Review:
I’m not going to lie, I purchased this book purely on the artistic merit of the cover. I LOVE it and had high hopes for the story itself. I should have listened to the old ‘don’t judge’ chestnut in this case though.
I didn’t come away from Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad feeling inspired or overwhelmed and I’m fairly sure that in three weeks time the only thing I’m going to remember about it is the pretty cover. In fact, I felt like I had read it (and seen it) all before because it contained every element required for a YA High School Romance novel/Teen Romance Movie and not a lot else.
There was the insecure female lead, Melinda, who had issues with her weight and self-confidence, the bouncy popular best friend, Lana, the drop-dead gorgeous but slightly bad love interest, Josh, and the beautiful arch-enemy, Kathy. She fancies him, they have a mutual enemy, they team up to get revenge, it turns into something more, there’s a teenage drama, they break up, they make up. The End.
For a beach read or an easy read, it is perfect, and if I were fifteen it would probably have been even better because I wouldn’t have read it 400 times before and I’d have still been in that High School world myself which would have made it a thing of daydreams.
There were a few issues though. First, there were the chapter headings – all was going well until chapter ten and then they went all pear-shaped. There were two chapter tens and then the titles suddenly stopped being numbers for a couple of chapters and turned into Roman numerals – this didn’t remove from the reading experience particularly, but seemed very unprofessional, even for a self-published eBook.
Then there were the typos. All the typos. There were speech marks missing all over the place (she’d open them and not close them again, or not open them but close them – that kind of thing), frequent cases of ‘I’ instead of ‘if’ or ‘it’ and the odd ‘urn’ instead of ‘um’. One or two could be forgiven but they were all over the place and all the way through - it was like it had never been proof read by anything other than Word. I know it’s expensive to get someone professional to look through your work, but most people can find five friends or randoms on-line to read it through and spot things that you miss on all your own read-throughs.
The writing was mostly good, typos aside, although there were a few examples of things that made it read like something written by a fifteen year old instead of something about a fifteen year old. Such as when the characters were drinking – instead of implying that their speech was slurred and they were stuttering and so on, it was all written out phonetically throughout the entire scene. This made it a bit hard to read and pulled you out of the scene a bit because it was, quite frankly, irritating.
Overall, Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad wasn’t a bad book, it was a stereotypically charming YA novel about coming of age and finding your first High School love. There wasn’t much wrong with it but nor was there anything particularly new and exciting about it. I enjoyed it but would have been disappointed if I had spent more than 77p on it.
My rating: 3/5*
Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Published: Orion Children’s Books, 7 February 2013
Length: 228 pages (paperback)
Where Did I Get It?: Borrowed Liberty‘s ARC for review, pre-publication
Summary (from Goodreads):
Cosmo’s brother Brian died when he was ten years old. His mum hides her grief by working all the hours God sends and Cosmo lives with his grandparents. They’ve been carefree days as Granddad buys him a horse called John and teaches him all he knows about horses. But the good times have to come to an end and although he doesn’t want to admit it, Cosmo knows his Granddad is losing his mind. So on one of the rare occasions when Granddad seems to recognise him, Cosmo is bemused that he gives him a key to Blackbrick Abbey and urges him to go there. Cosmo shrugs it off, but gradually Blackbrick draws him in…
Cosmo arrives there, scared and lonely, and is dropped off at the crumbling gates of a huge house. As he goes in, the gates close, and when he turns to look, they’re rusty and padlocked as if they haven’t been opened in years. Cosmo finds himself face to face with his grandfather as a young man, and questions begin to form in his mind: can Cosmo change the course of his family’s future?
Opening Line:
My graddad was pretty much the cleverest person I ever met so it was strange in the end to see the way people treated him – as if he was a complete moron.
~
My Review:
Back to Blackbrick is a magnificently clever book that was both heart warming and heart breaking in the same breath, and the cover is beautiful.
Alzheimer’s disease is something that affects an awful lot of people and is difficult for the people around them to deal with and Blackbrick handles this with a sensitive touch and a twist of fantasy.
Cosmo, the narrator of the story, hasn’t had the easiest of starts in life – his brother died when he was ten and his mother has vanished to another country to ‘work’, leaving him to live with his grandparents. The development of his Grandfather’s Alzheimer’s is the final straw and Cosmo refuses to accept it. At first he does what any young teenager would do when faced with a problem he doesn’t know how to fix – he asks the internet and believes every word he reads.
It is touchingly funny as Cosmo does his best to follow the instructions on a ‘Memory Cure’ website and you can’t help but chuckle at the outcomes of his endeavours (such as sticking post-it notes to everything so his Grandfather won’t forget what they are called).
Then the book takes an almost fantastical turn as Cosmo follows a bizarre instruction from his Grandfather – to take an old key and visit Blackbrick Abbey, via the South Gates. Doing as he’s told leads Cosmo into a place he’d never dreamed of – his Grandfather’s childhood.
I loved the magic of this story, the relationship between Cosmo and his young Grandfather in Blackbrick was brilliantly funny as Cosmo struggled to try and shape the future without letting on everything he knew and making himself look like a lunatic.
Sensitively handling everything from Alzheimer’s through to death and childbirth, Back to Blackbrick manages to balance comedy and tragedy perfectly and had me crying and laughing in equal measure.
The only problem I had with this book was that for the first few chapters I managed to convince myself that Cosmo was a girl. I’m not sure what triggered this but I was really confused when I realised I was wrong and it threw me for a few pages. By half way through though I had completely forgotten my previous confusion and it didn’t detract from the story at all.
My rating: 5/5*
For February my choices of book are:
My Book(s)
Doomwyte by Brian Jaques
Diary Of An Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster
Borrowed Book(s)
Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Self-Published Book(s)
Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz
Invisible by Lorena McCourtney
Review Book(s)
The Holders by Julianna Scott
A Conspiracy Of Alchemists by Leisel Schwartz
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So, what are you reading this month?
I have accidentally upped my aim to read 52 books to trying to read 75. I feel like I should try to top last year instead of equal it. Towards that aim, this month I have read:
Days Of Blood And Starlight by Laini Taylor
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Can’t Live Without by Joanne Phillips
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Trash by Andy Mulligan (Hardback, David Fickling Books, 2010) Length: 211 pages. My copy borrowed from Liberty.
Opening Line:
My name is Raphael Fernández and I am a dumpsite boy.
~
Set in a world where poverty is extreme and depressingly common, Trash forces you to listen to the voices of people you would normally turn away from in the street.
The main narrators, Rat, Raphael and Gardo, are children of the dumpsite who live in the filth thrown out by the rest of the city, sorting through it looking for anything that can be salvaged, cleaned and sold for a pittance that will buy them another day’s worth of food.
They are honest narrators and you can’t help but fall in love with them as they work their way through an adventure that is much bigger than they are after finding something in the trash that turns their world upside down.
They uncover the secret of a stranger who wants to change the way their lives are led. A secret that the government wants to stamp into the ground before anyone can find it out, even if they have to crush a handful of street boys to do it.
The rich are merciless, the poor are desperate. Trash shows you the importance of love and friendship in the darkest of places and brings to light just how one person’s greed can affect a whole country of people if they are high enough in power and wear the right smile. And also just how precarious the life of greed is when you make too many people too desperate.
I loved the pace of the story and the use of various narrators, all speaking as if they are telling you a story face-to-face, was very clever. It showed just how many people were involved and how it affected them personally making the story more believable and striking more nerves than perhaps it would have were it told in a more impersonal way.
Unlike anything else I have ever read, Trash really made me think about the inequality of our world, especially in countries where dump-sites really are the lifelong home of people and blind eyes are turned.
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Oddities And Entities by Roland Allnach
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Welsh Fairy Tales by William Elliot Griffis (Kindle Edition, First Published 1921) My copy ‘bought’ for free on Kindle
Opening Line:
Long, long, ago, there was a good saint named David, who taught the early Cymric or Welsh people better manners and many good things to eat and ways of enjoying themselves.
I usually enjoy traditional Fairy tales, even when they’re a bit weird and stilted but this collection was dire.
I know it was written a long time ago but the language was dull and the random ‘modern’ comparisons Griffis used were jarring and out of place.
I struggled my way through stubbornly but there was very little enjoyment to be had – I knew several of the stories from living near to Wales all of my life and these retellings were far from the best I’ve heard.
I certainly won’t be rushing to recommend it to anyone, luckily it was free.
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Her Best Friend’s Dad by Rachel Boleyn (Kindle Edition, July 2011) My copy ‘bought’ for free on Amazon.
Opening Line:
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Free porn. More of a short story than a novel, not too much substance or character development but plenty of sex and foreplay.
If you are into the whole ‘girl fancies her best friend’s randomly attractive father’ or just ‘older guy with younger girl’ thing then it’s probably right up your street. Made me cringe a bit because I find the idea of sleeping with any of my friends fathers distinctly weird.
Fairly well written, not gratuitous or over-detailed and is a perfectly good twenty minute racy read if you like that sort of thing.
*
Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon
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Books read this year: 7/75
Having taken up the 52 Book Challenge again this year I need to average 1 book a week (obviously), which translates to 4 a month: in line with my other resolution, at least one of those books needs to be a self published one. Another thing I want to do is return some of the million books I have borrowed off other people and not read yet, so at least one book each month will be someone else’s. I may well sometimes tailor my reading to echo what I’m writing – call it getting to know the market (and competition) and also research. So don’t be surprised if I seem to be reading lots of myths, legends and fairy tales when I’m writing my short stories etc.
This month my choices are:
My Books
Days Of Blood And Starlight by Laini Taylor
Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon
Welsh Fairy Tales by William Elliot Griffiths
Borrowed Book
Trash by Andy Mulligan
Self-Published Book
Can’t Live Without by Joanne Phillips
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So, what are you reading this month?
Having just looked up that we are in week 44 of this year and that I have only read 40 books since January 1st, I am starting to fear that I will fail at my target to read 52 books in the 52 weeks of 2012. I need to get a wriggle on!
With that in mind I am going to continue my (seemingly everlasting) struggle with Diary Of An Ordinary Woman in tandem with reading other books instead of ploughing through it alone. I will finish it. One day.
The books I am going to read this month are (hopefully):
Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater
Witch Baby And Me by Debi Gliori
A Perfect Blood by Kim Harrison
and if by some miracle they all vanish before the end of the month I will start Checkmate by Malorie Blackman (again, because I read the first 80 pages then stopped and now have no idea what was happening at all…)
Of course, all of this is on top of me trying to complete NaNoWriMo too. I am doomed.
