I feel like one the last people on earth to read this book.  I remember when it came out a few years back and it was everywhere.  It seemed to be almost an instant best seller the moment it was published, and now I can see why, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I received Eat, Pray, Love as a Christmas gift from my sister.  Books, or gift cards for books, are always, always, forever and always, a gift that I will love.  I received the book and February and didn’t get around to picking it up for good until this summer — which is actually quite quick.  The length of time a book stays on my To Be Read shelf (and I do have a very literal shelf like this) is ususally much longer than that.  Sometimes it’s just the physical act of acquiring a book that brings me joy.  Finding the time to read it thereafter can be…difficult.

So I started the book this past summer, and it took many months to finish.  Work, life, sleep all these things got in my way, yes, but I think it was also helped along by the structure of the book.  Eat, Pray Love, is at it’s heart, the story of Liz Gilbert’s time spent travelling in Italy, India and Indonesia (purposefully all “I” countries?)  So, automatically, the book is divided into 3 parts.  Each part then divided into 36 sub-parts, so 36 vognettes for Italy, 36 for India and 36 for Indonesia.  Gilbert explains to us that this is done to model japa malas, a string of pray beads that are apparently quite common in India.  Each set has 108 beads on it.  Thus, 108 mini stories in Eat, Pray Love.  This makes it very easy to consume the book in bite sized pieces.  I’ll have a piece of Eat, Pray, Love, today please.

So why do I think this book was such a great best seller?  Well, the most obvious answer is that it’s a good book, which is very true.  But I also suspect envy had a whole lot to do with it.

Think about it.  Despite the fact that what prompted Gilbert’s journey was divorce, depression and despair, what she describes in Eat, Pray, Love, is the ultimate in wish fullfillment.  30-something women, leaves behind her life of sadness and takes a year long journey around the world.  Not only that, but she gets paid by her publisher to do so.  Yep, gets paid to write for a living — well enough to get generous advances on her books –, experiences these fabulous countries, and at the end of it all, well, I won’t spoil it for you.

But man was there ever a few moments I wanted to fling the book across the room in jealousy.  It seemed rather incongruous, really.  Here I was piggy-backing on this woman’s journey for self, for peace, and I’m overcome by jealousy just reading it.  Eventually I had to tell myself that if her life was one that I truly wanted for myself, well, it was up to me to create it.  That for every risk taking, travel by the seat of their pants, need to actually move to go on a journey, there are those of us who crave stability, who work our unexciting jobs that keep the world moving.  Those of us who journeys take place inside ourselves, rather than the external world.  And we’re equally a valuable asset.  The ying to their yang, after all.

And it helps that Gilbert is remarkably frank about how lucky she is.  Acknowledgement goes a long way.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed the book, despite my pettiness.  While it didn’t grip me in the way of my super-loved favourite books (non-fiction rarely does), it asserted itself quietly and made a place on my mental shelf of Books I Will Read Again.

So what was my favourite part?  I thought it would be Italy.  I was there this spring, so I imagined that it would be easy to picture and relate to.  In fact it may have been too easy to picture and relate to.  It wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t as good at drawing me in as India and Indonesia.  Perhaps there was a small sense of “Been there, done that.”

India was my absolute favourite.  The India portion of her book takes on the spirituality portion of her journey.  Gilbert spends 3 months in an ashram learning meditation and yogi spirituality.  It was wonderful.  While I can’t see myself ever doing the same thing, there are so many parts of her spiritual journey that I can relate to.  I learned so much in this part of the book, from chants to mantras to meditation techniques.

And India brought to my attention a very simple idea that Gilbert quotes in her book.  I actually had to put the book down after I read it, because it so simple, so obvious, but I had never seen or heard it articulated before.  And it is this:

If praying is the act of talking to god, than meditation is the act of *listening* to him.

Wow.

If that is the one idea I take from this book, the read will have been worth it.  I know that thought, that idea, will stay with me for a lifetime.

I wasn’t expecting much from this book, first because I received it from a friend who gave me her copy because she just couldn’t get into it.  Plus, I had heard the movie was absolutely terrible, so really, what does that say about the source material?

Apparently not much.  I really, really, enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl.  I didn’t love the fact that the copy I had was the paperback movie-tie in (seeing Scarlett Johaansen as the worst casted Mary Boleyn ever was distracting), but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, right?

Yet another in the historical-fiction-cum-chicklit, The Other Boleyn Girl actually focuses quite well on Mary, while painting the story of Anne only via her sister.  Gregory certainly makes it clear with whom we’re supposed to sympathize; the depictions of Anne versus Mary are very black and white.  Anne is the bitchy ambitious wanna-be queen, while Mary is the simple, innocent girl who is just following the orders of her family.

If you realize that such dichotomies are there to simplify the story, if you can take The Other Boleyn Girl for what it is (an airplane book, rather than high art) than it’s a very enjoyable read.

I finally managed to finish this series!  I was initially inspired to read it after I went to see the film with my two ten year old nephews this past winter.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, being a lover of kid and teen lit and general and having a soft spot for Freddie Highmore. So I ordered the series as one book back in the spring.  It’s sat on my coffee table since then, and I would pick it up every now and again and read a bit and then forget it for weeks and then pick it up again.

However I had made a promise to my nephew that he could have my spiderwick books the next time I saw him, which will be the end of July, so I had to finally buckle down and finish it (plus I have another nephew visiting me right now, and he has comendeered the computer to play Rollercoaster Tycoon, so I was left with nothing to do!)

What struck me about the books, particularly from book 3 on after the kids meet Lucinda, is the amount of differences between the books and the movie.  It doesn’t particularly bother me, mostly because it was completely necessary to fit the books into one film.  I suppose it was just that I was surprised to be surprised — I had thought after seeing the film I would know what happened in the books, but clearly, clearly not.  I am curious now how kids who read and loved the books before they saw the movie reacted to those changes.

Spiderwick was a fun read.  It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, even for a kids book (it’s no Potter, or Narnia or His Dark Materials), but it was good fun that will have you rooting for the Grace kids and wondering what became of them.

Yesterday was Canada Day, and I spent about 8 hours sitting on Parliament Hill.  While I was sitting there getting sunburnt, I read The Kite Runner.  I hadn’t planned on reading this book, and in fact left the Hill to go to Chapters and buy a book.  To go even further, I had actively avoided reading this book for several years because I knew of one of its major plotlines and didn’t think I could handle it.

I should have trusted my first instinct, because this was an incredibly sad book.  Quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read.  For sheer amount of bad things that happen to central characters it still doesn’t quite match the horror of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, but with Khaled Hosseini’s work I actually really cared about the characters.  I was quite invested in them, and there were several times I made the cliched move of gasping outloud or setting the book down for a time because I had to take an emotional break.

And I’ve learned never to tempt the literary fates with the words “It can’t possibly get any worse!” HA!

All that aside, it was a very good book.  It always feels weird to say I liked a book that is so dark, but it certainly touched me, raised some questions and probably would have made me cry if I hadn’t been in public.  I’m not sure I could ever see the movie (but who knows, maybe I’m a bigger masochist than I thought).  But if you’re prepared to feel an incredibly wide range of emotions, I highly, highly reccommend this book.

Apparently this book was quite a departure for Mr. Follett, and I admit that when I hear his name I think low-brow mass market crime or mystery novels.  Yes, I am a book snob.  The worst kind of book snob, seeing as I’ve never read one of books before this one.

The Pillars of the Earth tracks the building of a cathedral, the story of the man who wants to build it, as well as the stories of those with whom he has entwined his life in various ways.  It is, like so many books I seem to be reading these days, historical fiction.

Pillars starts off slow, which is not fun when the book is 800+ pages or so.  If you’re going to be reading seemingly forever, it’s good to be pulled in from the start.  I wasn’t, but thankfully this was my only reading material on a 9 hour flight, so I kept with it.  In the end I truly enjoyed it, and am curious about the sequel.

While there are many characters in this book, Follett fleshes out most of them to a satisfying degree.   Jack, Tom the Builder, Ellen and even Aliena are all people with at least two layers.  Characters like William however, are much less developed, and it becomes clear that he is meant only to be an evil rapist who gets off (quite literally) on women’s fear, or Alfred, who gets even less development and exists mainly to be an annoyance to Jack.

But then again, it’s easier to hate the less developed characters, and you get the feeling that that’s what Follett wants you to do.  Except for Martha.  Folliett raises the question of why she sticks with Jack, but he never answers it, which is very annoying.

It was interesting reading this book on a flight back from Italy, where basilicas and cathedrals abound.  It leaves you wanting to see the Kingsbridge cathedral, much like the ones I’ve just seen, and wondering what the builders of *those* cathedrals were thinking and dealing with in the years it took them to build.

Overall, a good, long read, and despite it’s rather abrupt end, will leave you wanting more.

I’ve read some depressing books in my time, but my god is this one hard to take sometimes.

For lack of a better (less depressing) summary, The Road is about a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where they are constantly in fear of roving gangs of cannibals.  Yep, cannibals.  It sounds so totally over the top, but it’s not really.  McCarthy doesn’t jump right into this idea, he leads you there slowly by letting you know there is a nameless danger.

I read one review somewhere where they found the boy too breathy and less sympathetic than his father.  I disagree, rather heavily.  The boy is just that, a boy, and I try to dig back into memories of childhood — memories of having childish thoughts and feelings — and try to imagine being a child in such a circumstance and I can’t.  I’m not sure if it’s because it’s too horrifying to contemplate or if it’s because I’m too old, but regardless I cannot help but feel strongly for the boy, especially in the latter half of the book.

The ending is a little too convenient, but it has to be.  If it hadn’t ended the way it had I would have had to send a strongly worded letter to Cormac McCarthy.   I can’t say I ”enjoyed” the book (anything this sad and dark in never something you enjoy but rather something else entirely), as The Road certainly gives A Fine Balance (by Rohinton Mistry) a run for its money as The Most Depressing Book Ever, but McCarthy does at least give us a wee tiny sliver of light in the darkness, and the story held me the entire time.

Or: The Longest Book Ever.

Okay, I may be exaggerating a touch, but it really feels like I’ve been reading this book forever.  I started it over Christmas — it seemed the ideal situation, with lots of time spent in airports.  At 779 pages (not that I uh….) you would have thought I’d have finished it a lot faster than I did.  The Princes of Ireland is one of those books that you read in bunches or spurts, not really all at once.  And it’s perfectly structured for this type of reading.

The book follows the stories of various families and their descendants over hundreds of years, specifically 430 – 1533.  Each section of the book covers roughly a generation.  It’s wonderfully set up that way, as you can read the stories of one generation and leave the book for a while, not really needing to remember the exact plot lines because you’re starting over with the next generation.

It also keeps your attention.  You go into just enough depth in each section to care about the  characters and really want to know what happens to them, but the story never gets bogged down in the tiny details.  Rutherford paints the stories of each family with broad brush strokes, and I am grateful for that.  Some authors really don’t know where the strength of their story lies.

And with The Princes of Ireland (also known as Dublin: Foundation) the strength is in the history.  A stagger work of historical fiction, this book explores not just families over generations, but the changes over time in the city of Dublin itself.  I’m not normally a big fan of historical fiction — ironic considering how much of it I’ve been reading lately — but this captured me because of my trip to Ireland two years ago.  It’s incredibly cool to be able to follow the story and know exactly where the author is talking about.  It helps, of course, that while the characters are generally fictional, Rutherford’s picture of Dublin over the centuries is based on much historical research.

Highly reccommended if you enjoy historical fiction, or even just irish history.  Just know that there’s no rushing this book, it takes its time.  And actually, the story isn’t even finished.  There’s book two in the saga “The Rebels of Ireland”.  It’s sitting on my to-be-read shelf right now.  There is, after all, almost 6 centuries more of Irish history to cover.

A fluffy book I read in the space of three hours much too late at night, as usual.  I picked it up because the movie trailer looked good.  If you’re not expecting much this book is quite good.  It opens with the death of the main character’s husband and follows her through most of her first year after his death.

I didn’t like that this book was so predictable.  You pin the main character’s love interest down instantly, for example.  So it’s cheesy and predictable and it’s total goo, but it’s fun goo.

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I know it’s been getting a buzz.  Khaled Hossieni is also the author of The Kite Runner, a highly and widely acclaimed novel also about Afghanastan.

I have not read The Kite Runner, so I had no idea what to expect from A Thousand Splendid Suns — assuming of course that there’s some sort of pattern to an author’s writing.  What I found was an incredibly engaging story about two Afghani women as they live through the various political changes in their country.

For an average length novel (I think — it’s hard to tell, as I read the large print version) Hossieni never loses his pace.  While he does tend to skip entire years and chunks of life for his characters (particularly Miriam’s which I actually missed once I was done the book) it’s necessary to the plot.

ATSS is a sad book with a hopeful light at the end of the tunnel.  You not only feel badly for the two main characters, you feel badly for the country as a whole as you “watch” it change.  It’s a timely book that’s changed the way I look at the country.

I read this one for my bookclub next month.  It’s not normally the type of book I would pick up and read, although I can’t put my finger on why exactly.  It looks like it would be similar to those mass market John Grisham novels, which, while not bad, aren’t my thing either.  I think perhaps I’m a literary snob.  Oh well.

Regardless, I enjoyed this book.  It was a fairly quick read, as these things go, and of course the mystery spurs you on.  I was particularly eager to see what would happen at the Swiss Bank.  Although I do question what the point of that piece of plot was.  They find something in the vault, which plays next to no part in the story and certainly has no significance to the case/mystery.

Fatherland takes place in a post-WWII victory Germany, where Hitler is about to celebrate his 75th birthday.  The Nazi party is strong and in power.  It’s an interesting idea, though frankly rather difficult for me to image, given how things actually ended.  This leads to the case, where several high ranking Nazi-party members have been murdered for knowledge they are trying to bring to light.

In the end, we find out what they were hiding, although I admit to finding it rather anti-climactic.  I won’t say what it is, but it’s significantly less shocking than I’d hoped.

On a final note, I don’t think it’s healthy to hate a fictional ten year old boy as much as I do right now, ohmygod.