You’ll need to lock in early to Happiness and Love, in order to get with Zoe Dubno’s style. But it is absolutely worth your initial effort.
First to the style: It is pure stream-of-consciousness. There are no paragraphs and no chapter breaks – start reading at page one and keep going until you hit the end (page 267), at which point, you are well and truly feeling all the things the novel’s narrator if feeling (annoyed, aggrieved, exhausted, amused, enlightened, relieved). Continue reading
It’s time again for my favourite meme. Based on the concept of six degrees of separation, Emma Chapman and Annabel Smith have created #6DEGREES, where bloggers share links between books in six moves. Check out the rules if you want to play along.
This month’s starting point is Gillian Flynn’s bestselling psychological thriller, Gone Girl. I only read this book a few months ago, long after hearing all the hype and having friends recommend it. Unfortunately it didn’t meet my expectations (but I didn’t hate it, either). Continue reading
I just came into possession of the most divine book – My Ideal Bookshelf, edited by Thessaly La Force and illustrated by Jane Mount. Let me stress, if you’re looking for a Christmas gift for book lovers (and they are difficult to buy for because you don’t know what they’ve already read…) this book is perfect. Continue reading
At the risk of being black-listed by The Broke and the Bookish crowd, I’m admitting that I have no real interest in books about vampires. Or witches. Or anything para-normal. Yes, I did read the Twilight series (because I like a book with hype) and I did enjoy it but it hasn’t gone further than that. So I’m likely to fail miserably at this week’s top ten topic – Top Ten Books to Get in the Halloween Spirit.
So whilst there’s nothing terribly ghoulish or fitting for Halloween on my list, here’s the ten books that scared the pants off me (for all sorts of reasons) – Continue reading
There are a million reviews of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and you’d have to be living under a rock to have avoided hearing about the movie, which is out now.
It’s the story of sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the fictional country of Panem where the countries of North America once existed. The Capitol, a highly advanced metropolis, holds absolute power over the rest of the nation, which is divided into twelve districts. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each district are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive. The ‘winner’ secures glory and food for their district.
I found The Hunger Games compelling reading but in addition, it got me thinking – not so much about the book itself but about the ‘genre’ that it has been put in. I saw the movie trailer for The Hunger Games when I was at Breaking Dawn* in November 2011 (no, I’m not a Twi-hard but I can answer the question “Are you on Team Edward or Team Jacob?”). I hadn’t heard of The Hunger Games at that point but later downloaded the book onto my Kindle (it’s always book first, movie second for me). Continue reading