christianreader | My April-July reads (Reply)

It’s been a while since I posted here, the reason being that I read very few books in the last few months. What with finishing my PhD and all the tiredness that came after that. But now it’s summer, I have two free weeks and lots of evenings to sit in the garden and read (hopefully!)

Here are my reads from April-July

Dot May Dunn – Around the village green        3/5
The memories of Mrs. Dunn about her childhood in a small Derbyshire village during WWII.

I generally really like stories about small-town life in WWII Britain, but this one fell flat somehow. Maybe the narrator was too young to tell really interesting stories; she was mainly running around the countryside with her brothers. There were some good parts, like how the family befriended a lonely German prisoner-of-war, but overall it was just a bit boring.

Sarah-Kate Lynch – The wedding bees      4,5/5
Sugar lets her life be governed by where her bees tell her to go. So she ends up on a roof terrace in East Village, New York and starts managing the life of the people in her building with her wisdom and her honey. But what about Sugar’s own life and her surprising connection with Theo who keeps crossing her path?

A sweet story, like I’ve come to expect from Sarah-Kate Lynch. There is a bunch of quirky characters, food-related magical realism and a cute romance. I liked how the bees got their own voice in this book and somehow Lynch managed to write it so it didn’t feel unrealistic. I loved reading about the dinner parties Sugar plans, they sound so good, I wouldn’t mind visiting there myself!

Bill Bryson – Notes from a small island         5/5
Now that he’s about to move back to the US, the author takes one trip around the island he has started calling his home: Great Britain, where he lived for 20 years.

I picked up this book because I got Bryson’s newest (The road to Little Dribbling) for my birthday, but I wanted to read some of his previous works first. This was a great and very funny read! Bill Bryson travels all around Great Britain, visiting the famous and the mundane and giving his own very dry commentary on it. I often had to laugh out loud at some of his descriptions and I really liked how he travelled mainly by public transport and on foot, as I also do. I loved reading about places I had visited as well through Bryson’s eyes and have some other places now on my ‘want-to-visit’ list (and some that I wouldn’t go so soon, thanks to Bryson’s very honest remarks about when a place is just plain boring).

Katarina Bivald - The readers of Broken Wheel recommend        4/5
Sara, a young Swedish woman who has just lost her job, decides to travel to Broken Wheel, a small town in Iowa to visit her penpal Amy. But just when Sara arrives, Amy has passed away. Sara is reluctantly accepted into the tight-knit community of Broken Wheel, not knowing that her presence will change their lives considerably.

I like books about books and even better, about how books can change people’s lives. This was a good example of that genre. I liked how Sara comes out of her shell and without doing much, just by being herself, manages to change a whole town. I was a bit on the fence about the main romance, it felt a bit too rushed. I also thought there were maybe too many side-stories for a book of this length. But overall, definitely a charming read!

Charles Dickens – Bleak House        4/5
One of Charles Dickens’ major novels revolves around the long-running legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce and all the people connected to this, mainly the three young wards of the case: Esther, Richard and Ada.

I listened to this one as an audio book by the amazing reader Mil Nicholson, who was born to read Charles Dickens! The story itself is more proof of how Dickens masters the art of writing very intricate stories where all the characters fit seamlessly together. Still, I felt like in this book, Dickens went a little overboard with all the side-characters and storylines, it was just too much. I really liked Esther and loved her chapters best. Yes, she does have some doormat-tendencies, but she’s also very strong, kind and loyal. I also really liked the way George was written and the ending he gets is lovely. The ending of the book confused me a bit however, it ends in the middle of a sentence and I do not really understand the significance of this.

Bill Bryson – The lost continent: travels in small-town America      3,5/5
The author travels around the United States, trying to revisit the magic of roadtrips from his childhood days.

After having enjoyed Bryson’s Notes from a small island a lot, I decided to try another of his travelogues. Unfortunately, this one I didn’t like that much. Maybe it has something to do with that I never (yet) visited the US myself, making this book less recognizable. There also was less of a balance between enjoying and complaining like in ‘Small island’, in this book, Bryson mostly seemed to complain about how empty, boring and depraved most of the places he visits are, which doesn’t make for very pleasant reading. (I still do want to visit the US though!)

Books in 2016: 15