Monday, August 19, 2013

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

 Book summary(via Goodreads):

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.


This insomniac's opinion:

Every time that I read the blurb on this book cover I was turned off by the sci-fi element. I placed this back on the library shelf multiple times after briefly considering it. However, my fellow bibliophile friends kept recommending it to me and they rarely lead me astray. So, into the library bag it went!

This was a very quick, enjoyable read. There were several twists and turns in the plot that I did not see coming(and a few that I did). I read this novel in a single sitting on my deck as my kids played in the backyard and will definitely be reading the next novel in the series. Certainly not high-brow literature, but a fascinating read.

Worth staying up all night to read?

Sure, if you don't take your literature too seriously.

Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars for Goodreads.

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna Van Praag

 
Book Summary(via Goodreads):
 
Distraught that her academic career has stalled, Alba is walking through her hometown of Cambridge, England, when she finds herself in front of a house she’s never seen before, 11 Hope Street. A beautiful older woman named Peggy greets her and invites her to stay, on the house’s usual conditions: she has ninety-nine nights to turn her life around. With nothing left to lose, Alba takes a chance and moves in.

She soon discovers that this is no ordinary house. Past residents have included George Eliot and Beatrix Potter, who, after receiving the assistance they needed, hung around to help newcomers—literally, in talking portraits on the wall. As she escapes into this new world, Alba begins a journey that will heal her wounds—and maybe even save her life.
 
This insomniac's opinion:
 
Bit o' truth here. I picked this novel to read because I liked the cover. I don't even know that I read the blurb before adding it to my TBR list.  Whew! Glad I got that off my chest!
 
I really enjoyed this novel. It was well-written and the story of Alba unfolded slowly. The novel had elements of magic, which may turn some readers off, but I enjoy a bit of non-reality here and there(reality is overrated!). I loved all of the women living in Hope house and appreciated how different each character was. This was a great, light read for summer!
 
Worth staying up all night to read?
 
Yes.
 
Rating: 4 stars
 


Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala


Book Summary(via Goodreads):


On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.

This insomniac's opinion:


This is, by far, the most intense memoir that I have ever read. The reader barely has a chance to acclimate himself to the people in the book when the wave comes and destroys everything in its path, including Sonali's family. This memoir was gripping, searingly honest and brings the reader along on Sonali's desperate, despairing journey of grief.

This memoir made me face my deepest fear-losing my children. I almost gave up on the book several times because it was simply too painful. The writing is achingly beautiful in its honesty. Sonali and her story will stay with me forever.

Worth staying up all night to read?


Yes, but stock up on tissues first and bring your family to your bed because you are gonna want to check on the health and safety of your children every minute.


Rating: 


4.5 stars





Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Monkey Mind by Daniel Smith

 
Book Summary(via Goodreads):
 
Anxiety once paralyzed Daniel Smith over a roast beef sandwich, convincing him that a choice between ketchup and barbeque sauce was as dire as that between life and death. It has caused him to chew his cuticles until they bled, wear sweat pads in his armpits, and confess his sexual problems to his psychotherapist mother. It has dogged his days, threatened his sanity, and ruined his relationships. In Monkey Mind, Smith articulates what it is like to live with anxiety, defanging the disease with humor, traveling through its demonic layers, and evocatively expressing its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. With honesty and wit, he exposes anxiety as a pudgy, weak-willed wizard behind a curtain of dread and tames what has always seemed to him, and to the tens of millions of others who suffer from anxiety, a terrible affliction.

Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity. . . . I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.” Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.
 
This insomniac's opinion:
 
This was a really, really uncomfortable read for me. As you may know, I am a registered nurse. As this book unfolded, I found myself realizing that the writing of this book did not at all seem therapeutic or healing for the author(this is my perception as a reader only). In fact, Mr. Smith talks about celebrities that have dealt with anxiety and other such facts in such a way that you begin to wonder if he wants to be applauded for his illness. It was desperately sad. I had hoped that near the end of the book, the author would have conquered his anxiety or at least come to some sort of resolution where he was coping better. That simply did not happen and it deeply saddened me. I felt as though reading was akin to watching bad reality television- at first it is terribly interesting but soon becomes deeply sad and leaves you with a 'reality hangover'.
 
As someone who suffers from intense anxiety at times and anxiety attacks, I applaud the author for his honesty. After all, mental illness is still deeply stigmatized in this country. However, the book was a wild mesh of clinical facts and dramatized sections and had no resolution, whatsoever. I do wish the author the best in his continuing struggles.
 
Worth staying up all night to read?
 
Not in my opinion.
 
Rating: 2 stars


ARC review: The First Affair by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus


Thank you to Atria books and Net Galley for giving me a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review!

Book summary(via Goodreads):

Jamie McAlister has resigned herself to the fact that in this job market, her painfully expensive degree might only get her a position at Starbucks, when she suddenly lands a prestigious internship at the White House. Although she doesn’t hit it off with the other interns—lockjaws who come from so much money that ten weeks without a paycheck doesn’t faze them—she is eager to work hard and make the best of the opportunity while it lasts.

An unexpected encounter late one evening with the charismatic President Gregory Rutland seems like just a fleeting flirtation, but when he orchestrates clandestine meetings and late-night phone calls, their relationship quickly escalates. Jamie knows what she is doing is wrong: he’s married, he has kids, he’s the President. Yet each time she tries to extricate herself, Greg pulls her back in.

With the conflicted desires of the most powerful man in the world driving her to her breaking point, Jamie can’t help but divulge intimate details to those closest to her. But she must have confided in the wrong person, because she soon finds herself, and everyone she cares about, facing calculated public destruction at the hands of Greg’s political enemies, and—perhaps no matter how much he cares about her—at the hands of Greg himself.


This insomniac's opinion:

Okay, Okay. I absolutely read the blurb before reading this novel. And, I knew it was mindless reading, at best. But, still- it was almost intolerable. It was one of those novels that you sweep through quickly so that you can move on to bigger and better things. Ugh. It didn't help that this was the third in a string of novels that I didn't enjoy or that the protagonist in this novel had the personality of  a 15-year-old-girl. Ugh.

Worth staying up all night to read?

No. NO. NOOOOOO.

Rating: 2 stars



The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

 
Book Summary(via Goodreads):
 
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.
 
This insomniac's opinion:
 
Huh. Funny thing about the group of young people in this novel that decide to name themselves 'The Interestings'. They are not, even a little, interesting. Sigh.
 
I am quite unsure how this novel is getting so much buzz. The writing is perfectly lovely but there is not a single character that stands out and makes the novel fascinating. Add in the fact that the plot is slow-moving and almost non-existent and you have yourself a painfully tedious read. Blah.
 
Worth staying up all night to read?
 
Nope.
 
Rating: 2 1/2 stars rounded up for Goodreads
 


The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

 
Book Summary(via Goodreads):
 
 
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

 
This insomniac's opinion:
 
This was a delightful read! I was thrilled when my friend Krissy(aka The Book Fairy) gifted me this novel as it has been scoring rave reviews from my fellow Goodreads bibliophiles.
 
This novel was very different from anything else that I have ever read. It had strong elements of dark magic, almost akin to YA novels such as the Harry Potter books. However, it is written in an adult manner and doesn't have the simplicity of many YA novels. The mystery unraveled beautifully and slowly and I loved it beginning to end!
 
Worth staying up all night to read?
 
It sure is!
 
Rating: 4 stars