Challenge 14: A Book Set In Summer

Donna's Book: "One Summer: America 1927" by Bill Bryson (Transworld, 2013)

I love Bill Bryson and I've been using this reading challenge to make myself catch up with all of his books that I haven't read yet.  This, obviously, fits nicely in this category!

Comments: 

Once again, Bill Byrson did not disappoint!  This is a gentle but at the same time fascinating stroll through the main events of the summer of 1927 in the United States.  The main focus is on Charles Lindburgh, and his record-breaking flight from New York to Paris, but other chapters focus on baseball stars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover (with a really excellent section on the great Mississippi flood), and the notorious criminals of the age, including Al Capone.  Bryson described both the lead-up to the 'key moment' in 1927 and its aftermath, and thus provides a real insight into the development of the United States in the inter-war years.  This is very different to Bryson's travel books, and so, if you're not interested in history too, this might not be for you.  But Bryson's style never fails to entertain!  I loved it!

Challenge 15: A Book Of Poems

Ida's book: "Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis" by Wendy Cope (Faber Faber, 2001)

I've been waiting for this one to come up, and I've had a name down for this challenge basically since beginning the whole reading challenge: Wendy Cope. I can't remember why or when I first read her poem The Orange, but I absolutely loved it, and since then I've read a few of her love poems; they are quirky and to the point, but embody so much feeling as well (I can heartily recommend 'Differences of Opinion' just because it's so on the point on mansplaining).

Anyway, I've chosen to read Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, mostly because my Danish library had it, and so the choice was sort of made for me. We shall see whether it lives up to the poems I already know.

Comments:

For new-comers to Wendy Cope I would recommend her love poems, as most of them are quite straightforward and deliciously unprententious. This collection requires slightly more thought, or maybe I just feel like that because, despite having lived in England for 5 years, there are still a lot of (cultural) references I don't get and my reading of this collection suffers slightly from it. However! There are brilliant poems in this collection. The 'All-Purpose Poem For State Occasions' is wonderfully to the point and a true comment on the role of the royals in British society. 'From June To December' and 'Rondeau Redoublé' are, I suppose, love poems, but not the soppy ones. They are more bitter or bitter-sweet, but all the better for it, I think. And the concluding poem, 'Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis' is possibly the star of the collection, what with it's position at very back of the book, in it's own section, and the way it completely does away with any kind of implied depth from the title of it. I won't spoil it (can you spoil a poem?), but read the collection and make sure you save it for last.

Challenge 14: A Book Set In Summer

Ida's book: "The Yellow Wallpaper" (and other stories) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Dover Publications, 1997)

So! It's been quite a while since I've given any thought to this reading challenge, and I am only slightly cross with myself about it. I moved back to my home country, became unemployed, then employed again, and all the while I re-read some of my favourite books. Probably a bit of a coping mechanism: if life is chaos, it's nice to return to a familiar place and familiar characters, to not be surprised by anything.

But life has calmed down a bit now, and the reading challenge has been nagging for at least a month. Yesterday I read a short story, sort of by accident, and then realised that it was set in summer, and that it would therefore fulfil challenge number 14: A book set in summer! So I am now back in the game, with The Yellow Wallpaper.

The book (if you can call it that) is short. But my God is it well-written! The story is about a woman confined to a room by her doctor-husband, because of her nervous breakdown, but of course it only makes it worse, and of course, her confinement should be read metaphorically (after all this is a feminist text!).
The woman's descend into madness is gradual, and you can't help but follow her, it's not until the end that you realise you've been sucked in and that's what makes it so good.

It's part of a collection of some of her other stories, which I will now promptly go read!

Challenge 13: A Book With A Female Heroine

Donna's Book: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (Transworld Digital, 2016)

Carrie Fisher died just as I came to this challenge, and she is definitely a heroine, both in real life and in her movies.  I was greatly saddened by her loss and reading this seemed like a way to keep a part of her alive.

Comments: 

After reading this, I was even more sad that Carrie Fisher had died.  Her humour, her courage, her dignity and her honesty shine through every single page.  This was the first of her books that I'd read, but I'll definitely be reading the others.  Carrie Fisher was an amazing woman and the world is poorer without her.  At least, though, we still have her books.

Challenge 13: A Book With A Female Heroine

Ida's book: "Swamplandia!" By Karen Russel (Knopf, 2011)

For me, this reading challenge is about reading new books, broadening my horizons. It can be rather tricky finding books, as you ideally want an amazing reading experience every time, but obviously that's not going to be the case. When I'm stumped for what to chose for a challenge, I go to my "to-read" list on Goodreads, it's VERY long and this time I found this odd title; I can't even remember why I put it on the list. Probably because it sounds absolutely mad. It does, however, use the word "heroine" so I reckon it'll be good for this challenge. We shall see.

Here's the abstract, if anyone would like to read it: 

"The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline--think Buddenbrooks set in the Florida Everglades--and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the "World of Darkness." 

Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve-year-old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!’s legendary headliner, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her brother has secretly defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their sinking family afloat; and her father, Chief Bigtree, is AWOL. To save her family, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the "Underworld," a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine."

Comments:

So this books was quite a bit different from what I expected! The alligator swamp setting was suitably weird, as were all the characters in the book. It did however get too dark for me, and I feel like I have to put a trigger warning (and SPOLIER ALERT! ---- Get ready!) for rape and pedophilia, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have read the book if I had known that. I'm unconvinced that Ava, the main character, ends up a 'true heroine' but her plight and her dedication to both Swamplandia and her family was very convincing. All in all a book that sounded better than it turned out, although it stayed with me for quite some time after I had finished it.

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

Ida's book: "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness (Penguin Books, 2011)

I've always loved stories about witches, I find them absolutely fascinating. Although I've read this one before, I decided it was time to revisit it, and seeing as it's October and Halloween it seemed to fit the season 

Comments:

I absolutely love this book, despite it's sometimes frustrating treatment of it's heroine and her sudden frailty when she falls in love. The book does manage to treat the whole witches, vampires and demons with a authenticity that ultimately makes this book such a great read.

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.