![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finished reading
The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This was one that mum and granny had both read, and so I read it in turn out of a faint sense of obligation. I…hmm. Imagining this was written by Mary Anne Spier (from the Baby Sitters' club) helped me get through it, honestly. Lampshading the fact that a series of letters or anecdotes does not make a book…still does not make a series of letters and anecdotes a book. The German occupation of Guernsey Island is a genuinely interesting idea, but man, it really felt like the author/s didn't want to write it, so wrote about someone (trying and not yet) writing about it instead. There's a couple of nice moments, and kudos for having the woman propose to the man but I'm wondering if it would have been quite so popular without the 'died before she could see it in print!' narrative attached to it.
Currently reading:
The good thief by Hannah Tinti. Holy hell. This is billed as the American answer to Oliver Twist. Which, to be fair, I've not read the original of. Ren has been raised in an orphanage, missing both his parents and one hand. He gets adopted by a smooth-talking conman, Benjamin, who sees Ren's amputation as a benefit to swindling people. The writing style was tight and wry and enjoyable enough to keep reading through the first part, and then holy hell did it get properly bleak and intense and amazing. I literally said 'what the fuck' out loud at one point, in great horrified admiration. I've got about 100 pages to go, and I'm just about holding my breath thinking about what's going to go down. This book has done zero shying away from … anything. It's been in no way gratuitous with its violence, which has made it all the more harrowing to read. The writing's done an excellent job of making me feel that no one's plot-proof, and I'm worried for all of them.
Up next
Piranesi by Susanne Clarke. Collected from the library yesterday. I'm so quietly pumped for this one.
My TBR pile is back to feeling like it's teetering, but I'm very looking forward to the reserve I have on Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is out sometime this month. Idk when it'll get to the library, per se, but I'm hoping to go in as cold as possible. You might notice this isn't actually decreasing my TBR...
The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This was one that mum and granny had both read, and so I read it in turn out of a faint sense of obligation. I…hmm. Imagining this was written by Mary Anne Spier (from the Baby Sitters' club) helped me get through it, honestly. Lampshading the fact that a series of letters or anecdotes does not make a book…still does not make a series of letters and anecdotes a book. The German occupation of Guernsey Island is a genuinely interesting idea, but man, it really felt like the author/s didn't want to write it, so wrote about someone (trying and not yet) writing about it instead. There's a couple of nice moments, and kudos for having the woman propose to the man but I'm wondering if it would have been quite so popular without the 'died before she could see it in print!' narrative attached to it.
Currently reading:
The good thief by Hannah Tinti. Holy hell. This is billed as the American answer to Oliver Twist. Which, to be fair, I've not read the original of. Ren has been raised in an orphanage, missing both his parents and one hand. He gets adopted by a smooth-talking conman, Benjamin, who sees Ren's amputation as a benefit to swindling people. The writing style was tight and wry and enjoyable enough to keep reading through the first part, and then holy hell did it get properly bleak and intense and amazing. I literally said 'what the fuck' out loud at one point, in great horrified admiration. I've got about 100 pages to go, and I'm just about holding my breath thinking about what's going to go down. This book has done zero shying away from … anything. It's been in no way gratuitous with its violence, which has made it all the more harrowing to read. The writing's done an excellent job of making me feel that no one's plot-proof, and I'm worried for all of them.
Up next
Piranesi by Susanne Clarke. Collected from the library yesterday. I'm so quietly pumped for this one.
My TBR pile is back to feeling like it's teetering, but I'm very looking forward to the reserve I have on Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is out sometime this month. Idk when it'll get to the library, per se, but I'm hoping to go in as cold as possible. You might notice this isn't actually decreasing my TBR...
From:
no subject
For The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, I wasn't aware of the hype (I read it many years ago now), and I loved it. But I do love epistolary fiction done right, and I do believe that a series of letters and anecdotes does make a book.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
:)