Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

I am probably the last person to have read Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Even my mom read it before me. But read it I have, and you may be shocked to find out that I was disappointed by it. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but it failed to live up to the hype.

Cover Wars: Hausfrau

I thought the cover I’d seen for Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum (review) was pretty iconic. Bold and unique. Flowery, but in a really inviting way. But here is a sample of the covers that could have been courtesy of RandomHouse.

Readathon – Better Late Than Never!

I wasn’t going to participate in Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon but the peer pressure (and bad weather) have gotten to me. I’m going to do it, and I’m not alone. For the first time ever, my daughter will participating as well. And we will be reading to raise money for a new playground at her school.

Sophia will be focusing on a tome of a book, Opal Plumstead by Jacqueline Wilson (520 pages!!).

My list of potential books includes:

As we are reading for charity, we will raise 10p per page, to a maximum of £20 to go to Sciennes Primary School Playground Improvement.

In Montmartre by Sue Roe

Sometimes I wish I had studied Art History in university. That’s why I picked up In Montmartre by Sue Roe. It looks at the rise of Modernism in early 20th Century Paris by focusing on Picasso and Matisse. And when I say Picasso and Matisse, I mean mostly Picasso, which was a disappointment because I’m more of a Matisse kind of gal.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Authors Edition

Listing one’s favorite authors is like picking your favorite children – it just shouldn’t be done and is messy business. And yet, here I am doing it just the same thanks to The Broke and The Bookish.

To make it a little harder on myself I am only including authors who are still alive and have written at least 3 books so far. I know that excludes a lot of writers, but I had to make the list manageable somehow.

Life Made into Fiction

It seems that lately truth is stranger, or at least more intriguing, than fiction. An outstanding number of books seem to have real people and real events at their core. It seems to be a recipe for success as well. Here are some of my favorite books based on real-life people.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum seems to be the ‘it’ book being talked about right now. The media push behind it is tremendous, but reviews of it seem to be all over the place. The range from ‘best book of the decade, a must read’ to ‘huh? what’s all the hype about?’. I fall somewhere in the middle.

Adeline by Norah Vincent

And the trend of bringing writers to life through fiction continues with Adeline by Norah Vincent. In a refreshing turn, this time we have a female writer – Virginia Woolf – front and center with her husband and other members of the Bloomsbury group playing a secondary role.

Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder by Amy Butcher

I finished Visiting Hours by Amy Butcher last night, and I still don’t know exactly how i feel about it. The real-life premise is stunning: in college one of Butcher’s best friends commits a horrific and grizzly murder. Seriously. Put yourself in her shoes. How do you move on from such an event? That is what Visiting Hours is about – Butcher trying to piece together her life in the immediate aftermath of the crime and in the years following it.

The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto

I was interested in reading The Shadow of the Crescent Moon even before it was made the Long List for the Bailey’s Prize simply because it is by Fatima Bhutto. The Bhutto family is to Pakistan what the Kennedy family is to the United States; a prime political family of privilege scarred by tragedy.