Challenge 11: A Book You Started But Never Finished

Ida's book: "The Historian" by Elizabeth Korstova (Little, Brown and Company, 2005)

So this book has been a long way underway. I saw it in a charity shop ages ago and thought it sounded interesting, but given a very slow start, it is continually abandoned in favour of other books. It therefore seemed the obvious choice for this challenge!

Comments:

Good Lord, this took me ages to read! The story itself was okay, I'm a sucker for vampire stuff (no pun intended), but some of the choices the author made just seemed weird. It's almost 3 or 4 different stories interwoven, and sometimes it can be hard to keep track of which year we're supposed to be in. If it wasn't for this challenge I doubt I ever would have finished it, although the final 200 pages or so were pretty good.

Challenge 12: A Book with a Lion, a Witch or a Wardrobe

Donna's Book: "Our Zoo" by June Mottershead (Headline, 2014)

I wanted to avoid the obvious choice for this challenge (although I did read the complete Narnia chronicles when I was young) and this is yet another of the books on my bookshelves that I've never got around to reading.  And there is a lion in it!

I love Chester Zoo, and the hour that I spent listening to June Mottershead talk about this book and her childhood memories was one of the best hours of my life!  Sadly, she is no longer with us but as long as there is this book, a part of her will go on and on!

Comments:

Although this ended rather abruptly, when June got married, I may have felt like that because I wanted the book to go on and on.  It was full of June's wonderful memories of Chester Zoo, how it started and grew and prospered.  The tone was often very matter-of-fact, like growing up in a zoo is something that everyone does!  But that just made the book more wonderful.  It makes you wonder why there was never another series of Our Zoo on TV, because there is a wealth of unused material in the book.  That alone makes this worth reading!

Challenge 11: A Book You Started but Never Finished

Donna's Book: "Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy: A True Story of Discovery, Acting, Health, Illness, Recovery, and Life" by Dirk Benedict (Square One Publishers, 1987)

As with the book I chose for the previous challenge, I bought this because I was going to a signing event with Dirk Benedict and wanted a signed copy.  I meant to read it all before I went to the event, but got slightly distracted by Page 13.  It took me quite a while to get passed page 13!!  And so I never finished it.  I will do so for this challenge!

Comments:

I loved this! The overall message seems to be that there's no point trying to search for the meaning of life or of living your life according to some code or another. There is no code; it's just about you. But it's also about consequences. However you choose to live your life will have consequences for you and for the world around you. Accept those, and you've pretty much got it.

The other reason I liked this is because it shows Dirk's intelligence, depth and insight. He's not the cardboard cutout, two-dimensional characters that you sometimes see him portray on the screen, but much more than that. Someone that I'd like to get to know for HIM!


Oh, and page 13. Definitely worth reading for page 13!!

Challenge 10: A Book Set Somewhere You've Always Wanted To Visit

Donna's book: "And Then We Went Fishing: A Story of Fatherhood, Fate and Forgiveness" by Dirk Benedict (Square One Publishers 1995)

I bought this ages ago because I was going to an event where Dirk Benedict would be signing and I wanted a signed copy, but I never got round to reading it.  Half if it is set in Montana, which is one of the states in the US that I have yet to visit.  I've got a 'bucket list' goal to visit every American state (33 down, 17 to go) and so I thought this would fit nicely into Challenge 10.  Besides that, I'm going to another signing event with Dirk, and I wanted to be able to tell him that I had actually read his book this time!

Comments:

This is a truly beautiful book. I can't remember the last time that I read a book from start to finish in one sitting, but I couldn't put this down. Without giving anything away, the intertwining and juxtaposition of two momentous events in Dirk Benedict's life, builds to a climax that is breathtaking, and both heartbreaking and heart warming. Think you now Dirk Benedict? Unless you read this book, you don't, and you never can.  It's now nearly two weeks since I finished reading this, and it is still touching my soul.  I think that it always will.

Challenge 10: A Book Set Somewhere You've Always Wanted To Visit

Ida's book: "The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the last Tzar" by Robert Alexander (Penguin Books, 2004)

Originally I had wanted to read 'The Romanovs' by Simon Seberg but seeing as that book is incredibly long I decided to pick something a little lighter, given that I am supposed to be writing my MA thesis at the moment. Anyway, I've been interested in the Romanov family since I was around 10 years old, when the film Anastasia  came out: it was the first film I saw more than once in the cinema and I remember renting it on VHS so many times, before I finally got my own copy. So clearly this book had to take me pack to the Russian empire and why not do it with a murder mystery - or rather, a survival mystery. I am familiar with the narrative idea of a kitchen boy (because it was also used in the film) but other than that I didn't know much of those last few weeks; a fiction book is probably not the best informative tool, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless.

Comments:

It was incredibly slow at first, and given that I'm going on a 2 week holiday to Canada later this month, I wanted, if possible, to finish this book before then. I therefore decided to get the boring bits over with and then read one chapter each night of the (hopefully) good ones. Well, suddenly I couldn't put the book down and I just had to finish it so I did... 5 hours later I was done. I have no idea how accurate the book is with regards to the family's life in that little house, but seeing as two corpses were never found, it's always interesting to see what a writer does with that kind of set up and I was not disappointed! I thought I had it sussed, but the final twist was very good and actually quite believable. So even though the book is a bit slow, the ending more than makes up for it!

Challenge 9: A Book With A Colour In The Title

Donna's book: "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House: Humor, Blunders, and Other Oddities from the Presidential Campaign Trail" by Charles Osgood (Hachette Books, 2008)

OK, I admit that I might have cheated slightly with the theme for this challenge, but white is definitely a colour!  Given the upcoming presidential election, and all the hatred that it seems to have generated, I thought that something that put the humour back into American elections might be just the tonic!

Comments:

This was such a disappointment.  It felt like Osgood got bored half way through writing this and lost interest.  There are some funny quotes but many of them needed more context or explanation to show why they'd been included.  There was a very basic summary of the themes for each election that provided a reasonably good overview but, as I often say to students, this reads more like a final draft than the finished product.

Challenge 9: A Book With A Colour In The Title

Ida's book: "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf, 2006)

Since reading Adichie's "We Should All Be Feminist" for a reading group at my university, I wanted to read more of her writing and this book fit the bill perfectly. It's not what I would normally go for, but that's quite exiting and I can't wait to see what world the book (and author) will show me.

Comments:

Having never read anything about Nigeria or Biafra, this was an eye-opening reading experience for me! Sometimes I felt the book proceeded too slowly, but still I couldn't leave it for too long I simply had to know what would happen to the characters. It's such an amazing book I can't really do it justice, but I will definitely read more from Adichie.