In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 40/52

11 books last week; that's from the 12th to the 18th of May.

Only five were audiobooks; Shelter, The Great Unexpected, Girls in Love, Girls Under Pressure, and A Hopscotch Summer.

I'm quite glad I listened to The Great Unexpected again; the first time I was in a hurry to get through it and get it off my unread pile, so I didn't follow the story very well.  This time was much more enjoyable.

Two of these I read for bookclubs; Hot Feminist and A Dreadful Murder.  Hot Feminist was for the Birmingham Fems bookclub, which meets this Saturday.  It was interesting, though I did find it quite annoying the way the author kept repeating that she'd never tell anyone they were doing feminism wrong, but people who cared about certain things were stupid.

A Dreadful Murder was disappointing.  It claims to use modern detective skills to solve a hundred year old murder; instead, it just describes the murder.  At least it was a 'Quick Read'.  This was for a bookclub at my local library.  Each month they choose a theme, this one being 'crime'.  I've got a few others to get through.

The bookclub is held in the Children's Library, and while we were in there I spotted The Glass Bird Girl and Doll Bones.  Doll Bones was creepy, though unnecessarily so.  They were doing exactly what the doll wanted, so there was no need for her to go about being creepy all the time.  The Glass Bird Girl was repeatedly compared to Enid Blyton's boarding school stories, on the cover and in reviews, in a kind of desperate, pathetic way.  I wouldn't compare the series to those books any more than I'd compare Harry Potter to them.  So what if they're all set in a boarding school?  That's really not the important element.

NPCs and Insomnia are both books I've read before.  NPCs is fun, about a group of NPCs who end up taking over from the player characters, when the player characters die horribly.  There's a sequel I'd quite like to look into. 

I read Insomnia as part of my Stephen King project.  I was surprised to learn how much I'd forgotten, although considering the book is over 900 pages it wasn't really that surprising.  I'll write a longer post about it later.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 13/52

Six books this week!  That's 4th to the 11th of November.

Three of these I'd read before - Animal Farm, Soldier Girl and A Hopscotch Summer.  Hopscotch Summer and Soldier Girl are parts one and two in a series set in 1930s-40s Birmingham.  The first book focuses mostly on Emma Brown, who ends up caring for her three younger siblings at the tender age of eight, when her mother develops post-natal depression.  When a spot of marital-rape and shouting at her doesn't sort it out, her husband sends her off to her sister while he has an affair.  I'm not totally sure why their getting back together is seen as a good thing.

In Soldier Girl Emma is in her late teens and gets married.  However, the book mostly focuses on her friend Molly, who appeared in A Hopscotch Summer as a side character.  Molly, who I've discussed in more detail here, was abused as a child but makes something of herself as an ack-ack girl in the army.  I quite enjoy stories about life building - see Rose Madder - and there's another link with her being a Brummie.  At first I was a little offended; the accents are very broad considering the main characters live in Nechells.  On the other hand, this was the thirties; regional accents were broader then.  Having now listened to something like twenty hours of this woman speaking (I'm midway through the third part of the series) I've gotten used to it.

Soldier Girl is my favourite one of the series, and not just because Molly is my favourite character.  It's a very odd experience walking down New Street and hearing about St Martin's church being bombed.

Both Tommyknockers and The Great Gatsby were new to me, and I wrote more about each of them in the linked post.  Perhaps I should have compared the two.

Finally, Murder in the Dark, a collection of short prose pieces by Margaret Atwood.  I like that Atwood's idea of short is one or two pages, since that's close to mine.  The best of them was one I'd read previously, Happy Endings which you can read online at Perdue.edu.