Hiya - please can you help me with my Christmas list?!!
I love reading, and always on the look out for a good recommendation or two. What has been your favourite read of the year so far?
This year I have been enthralled by 'The Goose Girl' series by Shannon Hale. Although they are 'teen-reads', you certainly would not realise. They are a mystical series, which are beautifully written in a spell binding way. I lent the first book to my mum and mother-in-law and they both demolished them with gusto, begging to read the other books in the series. However, I did lend it to my other half, and he said, 'I don't get it, must be a girl thing!' xxx
To see you again by Betty Schimmel
Thank you Jeannie. I've just looked at the reviews on Amazon, and got a chill up my spine. Think I'll have to press the 'order' button! xx
I already did a post on this somewhere earlier this year. My topic would be the author, Hennick Mankell. Some may know of him through the Wallender series on TV done both on the BBC with Kenneth Branaugh and also in Sweden. Mankell writes fiction and maybe over half is about the detective, Wallender, but he also makes huge leaps into other areas. He's Swedish.
Mankell himelf is very active politically and morally - he spends much of his time in Africa helping fight AIDS. He is also a playwrite.
It is not much for me to hold up and say I have read him this year, as it's only fiction (or is it? he implies there are huge conspiracies to use Africans as test subjects for drugs). But I've not had time for serious reading in 2011...
Therefore I painstakingly over months (I mean lack of time) have been following the Wallender novels and now am about 20 pages from the end of what is the very last one. Wallender is now 60, the author I think a bit more than that, and beside the detective theme it is much about the theme of age and ageing. The fear of being 60, or 55, and the themes to do with that. It's a bit of a downer actually (!) as Mankell is open and honest about age philosophically, but has no spiritual viewpoint. So it's all about being "human", not divine. All the same, he is very honest and I resonate with it. And after reading - what? - 20 books including non-Wallender ones? - I am now about 20 pages from the end.
V
My favourite read this year was The Crimson Petal And The White by Michel Faber. It's set in the 1800's and is about a prositute called Sugar who has a bussiness arrangement with a wealthy man. But Sugar managers to worm her way into his life and becomes a governess to his child.
Really is a wonderful read.
x
I know it's been out a while but I really enjoyed The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal - his search into his family's history over the lat 100 years who lived in Russia, Vienna, Paris and the Far East - so well told and fascinating.
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. I love this book.