Surprisingly September has not been too bad; the weather has been rather nice – beach weather at times – and the British team finished up 3rd in the Paralympics medal table for golds. Additionally, E L James was finally knocked off the top spot on both sides of the pond, and what is awesome for us Brits is that it was the Hairy Bikers that did it here, their cookery book of good food beating the extravagance of Christian Grey’s meals. Downton Abbey is on again, and I’m watching it for the first time, and Parade’s End was apparently a success. The clocks are due to go back, but for now I’m enjoying the chilly but sunny early mornings.

The Books

Non-Fiction

Robin Shulman: Eat The City – Detailing home food production by the residents of New York City. Very interesting insight and information.

Fiction

David Eddings: King Of The Murgos – Garion and co. continue their journey to find his son and beat the Child of Dark. Pretty good, though the humour can become wearing and the battles, which you know will never end in tears, boring.

Hélène Grémillon: The Confidant – In the piles of letters Camille receives after her mother’s death, there is what appears to be a manuscript from a client, but as Camille starts to realise, there is a possibility that everything written is, in fact, to do with her and that everything she knew about her background is wrong. The characters are awful and the events at times disgusting, but it would be difficult to say that it is not a good book.

J R Crook: Sleeping Patterns – Annelie presents us the writings of Crook, in which she is a character, but Crook is not really dead. Stunning unique fiction.

K Hollan Van Zandt: Written In The Ashes – A Jewish girl is taken as a slave but finds that her destiny is far from servitude, leading her instead in search of a way to save her society. Good in places, bad in others.

Quotation Report

None this time.

Dear October, if you could be as sunny as you were last year, that would be fabulous.

Well, what little summer we had in the United Kingdom is over, but we had a very good Olympics experience to make it better and the Paralympics is proving to be excellent. It was awesome to see a Brit win at Wimbledon, even if it wasn’t Wimbledon. And whilst our wheelchair basketball teams have had trouble, they’ve also won games, and are particularly exciting to watch. Yet despite the fact that for two and a bit weeks of August I was watching a lot of television (isn’t it ironic that we become couch potatoes whilst watching others running around?) I got a good lot of reading done. Is there a Reading Olympics?

The Books

Non-Fiction

Joanna Denny: Anne Boleyn – Denny presents us with a Boleyn-positive biography. It would have been good it if wasn’t so malicious towards Catherine of Aragon and the Catholic church; Denny has some interesting things to say but her unnecessary hate is too potent and makes the book incredibly biased.

Fiction

Dodie Smith: I Capture The Castle – Cassandra writes about her quirky family who live in the remains of a castle in poverty and seclusion, that is until the Cottons come along. Funny, poignant, and influenced by the Victorians.

EL James: Fifty Shades Of Grey – I reckon even the oldest people on earth know what this book is about, but here goes: a Twilight fan-fiction, Ana meets Christian who is rich and proposes a BDSM relationship to her. She doesn’t actually say yes, but they have lots of sex anyway. My review will likely conform to the more critical opinion.

Kate Morton: The House At Riverton – Grace, 98, creates a collection of cassette tapes for her grandson which reveal the secrets of the family she worked for in the early 20th century, including the real reason a famous poet died. Okay, but would have been a lot better if the bulk of it had been edited out.

Sarah Pekkanen: Skipping A Beat – Julia’s husband died and was resuscitated, and now he’s changed. The millionaire owner of the company and product he created, the newly alive Michael now wants to give it all away and start again with the wife who had come second to his business. But Julia has become used to the money and does not understand how Michael has changed, and while Michael desperately wants to get back to how their relationship used to be, Julia’s not so sure. The ending is rather easy and convenient but otherwise this is a strong book.

Thomas More: Utopia – A philosophical discussion and debate about the fictional land of Utopia. Very good and lots to talk about, especially as Utopia, the country, isn’t as utopian as our usage of the phrase.

Quotation Report

If you listen to Rose of I Capture The Castle you may find the man you wish to be in a relationship with spurning your advances. Well, behaving like a bona fide Victorian woman in the 20th century is a bit much, don’t you think? However, if your father is refusing to write and you know that he has another book in him, and if you have a castle tower to spare, you can always lock him up until he’s written something. Or at least you can if you’re a fictional character, doing it in real life might be pushing it a bit far.

I’m not at all a fan, but hello northern hemisphere’s September.

It’s funny in a way, the fact that at the start of the month I was reading faster than ever because I wanted to make the most of July and bring my reading count up. I may have ended up reading only my average amount of books but the fact is if I hadn’t made that initial decision to read lots, I would have a grand total of zero books to bring you this time round. I suppose it’s possible that my subconscious recognised that I needed to use my time reading whilst I still could.

Regarding my situation by some miracle I am in the clear, so to speak. I am changed, definitely, but not completely, and in fact I know that I will have to compel myself to remember and to change because I could, feasibly ignore it, and that would be very wrong. I do intend to write about it – give me a few weeks because it is likely to be a very long post, I want to get it right.

I would like to thank everyone who responded to my very open and despairing posts, I had never planned to be quite so open here and I had been trying to decide whether to be so open about my life for years – suddenly it seemed very important to be so with you. Your comments and words helped to calm me down and I don’t mind saying that I came to the site a few times over the course of these weeks when I felt alone.

In addition I would like to let you know that I have unpublished and set to draft the 3 posts that went up automatically whilst I was away. This is because I want to give myself a bit of leeway as I come back to blogging, I feel that going slowly would be a good idea. I know I will get back to being the blogger part of me quicker if I republish them as though new, giving myself the opportunity to talk about content which I am very familiar with. Feel free to ignore them, I am not doing it to increase comments. If you would like a heads up, these posts are my review of Nichole Bernier’s book, my review of Ella Drake’s book, and a thoughts post.

Here are the books I read in July. All books are fiction.

The Books

Malinda Lo: Ash – After her father dies, Ash moves to the city with her step-family where she meets the king’s huntress. The prince is looking for a wife, and Ash is eligible to apply, but will she want to? Based on the Cinderella story but woven rather out of the tale’s reach, pretty good though a little lacking in pace.

Nichole Bernier: The Unfinished Work Of Elizabeth D. – Kate receives the journals of her best friend and finds help for her problems and an answer as to what happened to Elizabeth, even if Kate hadn’t known anything was wrong before. Good but could’ve done with more of a change in Kate.

Hello August, there is a lot to catch up on. See you on Monday.

Half a year gone already, can you believe it? I can’t, but then the horrible weather made it incredibly difficult to appreciate June. We had a couple of weeks where the weather was basically good (though I was on holiday during that time so maybe I just got lucky with the area we’d chosen to be in) but other than that it’s been raining by the bucketful. Wales has been flooded, and who knows when we’ll get any proper summer weather, if there is such a thing as proper summer weather in Britain. Well the sun’s gone away again, but the good news is my exam period is over and I’ve had some great books to read. If the sun refuses to shine, trust a good book to make summer happen.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Ella Drake: Desert Blade – A doctor and her ex-patient find each other after the apocalypse. Could have been longer, otherwise good fare from Drake once again.

Pia Juul: The Murder Of Halland – Bess doesn’t know who murdered her husband but does she actually care or is there something else in her life that is worse? Yet another feather for Peirene Press’s cap and a solid introduction to Juul’s work for the reader.

Samantha Sotto: Before Ever After – Shelley’s younger-than-middle-aged husband died and a few years later a boy claiming to be his grandson turns up at her door. Brilliant story combining a mass of different genres.

Shannon Stacey: Slow Summer Kisses – When Anna arrives back at the camp, after years away and having been made unemployed, Cam remembers how annoying she was when they were children, until he notices how much she’s changed. A good if short addition to Stacey’s contemporary romance back-list.

June has been a good month for books. It would be difficult to say that any other than Before Ever After was my favourite, that book simply rocked (in fact that may have been the problem for the character, you’ll see what I mean if you read it).

Quotation Report

In Slow Summer Kisses Cam has a problem – how can he avoid Anna, and thus avoid kissing her, if she continually puts herself in dangerous situations? Whilst in Before Ever After, Shelley’s problem is that she’s finding it very difficult to eat breakfast while her elderly friend is discussing her great sex life.

Dear summer, as the infamous Carly Rae says, I miss you so bad.

The sudden appearance of the sun has somewhat halted proceedings, and even though it was my intention to get a lot of reading done on holiday, the weather meant that I wanted to be outside exploring and taking photographs. Nevertheless I can’t say I scrimped on pages read, as this month wasn’t full of novellas, unlike a few months past.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Cat Clarke: Torn – What do you do when your old friend is dead, and you played a part in her accidental death? Clarke adeptly introduces us to Alice and drills both the character and her readers on why it can be difficult to do the right thing, but why it’s important. A very good book.

Elizabeth Chadwick: The Greatest Knight – Following the first half of William Marshal’s career, from teenage “slug-a-bed” to middle-aged military diplomat. Takes a long while to get going but the promise for the sequel, The Scarlet Lion is huge.

L M Montgomery: The Blue Castle – When Valancy learns she only has a year to live, she decides she is no longer going to live in the negative, prejudiced, home she has lived in all her life, and throws caution to the wind meeting all the people her family do not like. Comic, melodramatic, brilliance.

So not a bad month, especially in terms of enjoyment. My favourite would have to be The Blue Castle for its humour and randomness and also the way Montgomery brought the future into her ideas.

Quotation Report

In Torn, Alice finds love amongst dead lizards, compared with Valancy from The Blue Castle who finds it in a much more appropriate beautiful forest on a tiny island. That said, I doubt Alice would wish, as Valancy does, that she could borrow a pair of legs from a cat, so perhaps finding love amongst lizards ensures your mind is kept in reality.

An exam to go and then I’m free from studying until October. Whether I’ll read more books in the summer, however, remains to be seen.