Monday, August 2, 2010

I've strayed from the path

Since I'm on maternity leave I have found myself in the glorious position of being able to lie around reading books and it's been divine. The thing is that I didn't have any books to read that I hadn't already read, seeing as I haven't been in Brisbane for a few years and I haven't yet discovered a great source for second hand books.

I read a book called Bareback by Kit Whitfield which was about an alternative world where humans are the minority and lycanthropes are in the majority. The minority humans are required to keep the majority of the population in check on the nights that they turn into wolves. It was readable but I wouldn't have read it if I had something better :) Also naming a book after a sex act is just weird.

Then I saw my friend Rhiannon and she is a great reader and she has a huge bookshelf of books that I haven't read. It's great to meet new readers because they always take you somewhere that you might not have gone yourself. There are so many authors and so many books that really what you read is just all chance and you're probably missing so many fantastic books and authors but there isn't the time to read them all. That's why the book group, although fleeting, was fantastic.

So one of you read, I think it was Penny, The Time Travellers Wife which was published in 2003, written by Audrey Niffenegger and I just only had the chance to read it. It's was such a fast fun read and with my background of obsessive science fiction reading it was great to have what was quintessentially a love story put into such an interesting time scale. So the protagonist travels back and forth in time, with no control over when it will happen or where he will go and travels to this one spot over and over again where he meets a girl when she's a child who won't meet him in real life until they're in their twenties and but the time that he goes back to meet her as a girl doesn't occur for him until his thirties, so when he meets her in his twenties he's never met her before but she has met him many many times. It's so confusing to try to explain but it was enjoyable and I would recommend it.

Then I picked up Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen which wiki tells me is was written in Nanowrimo which is national write a novel month. It's the story of Jacob Jankowski who was a bright young man on his way to his final exams to become a vet when his parents died and sent his life into a spiral, into the circus in fact. The story is written back and forth from Jacob's point of view as a young man and his memories that are being prompted by the visiting circus across the road from his old peoples home when he's in his 90s. It is again a love story predominantly but the characters are bold and warm and many of the anecdotes are based on real stories from actual travelling circuses in America.

I'm reading The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx at the moment which is so much better than the movie, which shouldn't suprise me at all because that's the way of things and I'm listening to the audiobook of Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and both of those are on the 100 best books list so I'll be back with reviews when I can.

Our baby is due in about 12 days! so it could be awhile.

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