Beth Ann's 2009 Reading Challenge: May 2009

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Read in May
406 pages

Margaret Lea works in her father's antiquarian bookshop where her fascination for the biographies of the long-dead has led her to write them herself. She gets a letter from one of the most famous authors of the day, the mysterious Vida Winter, whose popularity as a writer has been in no way diminished by her reclusiveness. Until now, Vida has toyed with journalists who interview her, creating outlandish life histories for herself - all of them invention. Now she is old and ailing, and at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to Margaret is a summons.

I had never heard of this book until my good friend Kathryn sent me a box of books that just so happened to arrive on my birthday, though I don't think she actually planned that. Thanks so much Kat for the books!!! I picked this book out because it was the only hardback in the box and I was strangly drawn to this book. Once I started it I was hooked. The book is rather British, which was fine with me. I LOVED every part of this book. I loved the twists and turns and what I like to the the WTF twist towards the end. Bravo Diane Setterfield for writting this wonderful story! I am actually sad to have finished the book and not hear any more about the Angelfield family. I found the relationships in the story to be very dark and twisted and rather disturbing, but I loved them all, no matter how dark and twisty they were. It's a ghost story, mystery, a sisters story. Everyone should read this book, it's a GOOD story!

Links:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Thirteenth-Tale/Diane-Setterfield/e/9780743298032/?itm=1

http://multiples.about.com/od/twintoddlers/a/twintalk.htm

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I am currently reading trying to figure out what I am going to read next. We are going on a vacation so I'm sure I'll have something by the time we leave tomorrow. I can't just sit in the car for the next 12 hours without anything to read!

Just a few books my To Be Read List:
March by Geraldine Brooks
~From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction.

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez
~Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills–as doctors, nurses, and therapists–seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a gift for befriending Afghans, and once her profession became known she was eagerly sought out by Westerners desperate for a good haircut and by Afghan women, who have a long and proud tradition of running their own beauty salons. Thus an idea was born.

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
~Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
~Barcelona, 1945-A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax's other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author's identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

A Thousan Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
~A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years — from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding — that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives — the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness — are inextricable from the history playing out around them.