More books!

Thanks to Lorraine for lending me Alan Bennett's Uncommon Reader, and to Somi for Albert Camus' Fall, Yasmin Crowther's Saffron Kitchen and Marilyn Manson's Long Road out of Hell.

Well, I said my tastes were eclectic!

Special delivery!

Thanks to my friend Jo I am now gloating over the following:

Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came by M C Beaton
Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

So many books, so little time!

The Boy who Loved Anne Frank by Ellen Feldman

I put off reading this because if there's one thing I can't cope with, it's harrowing. However it has turned out to be a really interesting idea: what if Peter, the boy who also lived in Anne Frank's secret apartment, had survived? Peter manages to make his way to America and lives there, denying his Jewishness. What I wasn't prepared for was the amount of anti-Semitism prevalent in America after the war. That was shocking. I've got about a chapter to go, and wonder whether Peter will acknowledge his past and whether this will bring him peace.

Read Alexander McCall Smith every day for free

Every day, the Daily Telegraph is publishing another chapter of Alexander McCall Smith's online novel Corduroy Mansions. You can find it here. It started in September but links are provided to take you back to the start, so in fact you can read loads of chapters at once until you get up to date!

I'm afraid I haven't found out how to make links open in a new window, so A Book a Day will disappear *sob* but you can always open it up again, and if you know how to make a link in Blogger that opens up in another window then please let me know!

Just noticed that if you right click on the link, it gives you the option to open it in a new window. That's still not ideal, oh loyal readers, but it's getting there ...

Misery memoirs

I was in a bookshop at the weekend and was horrified to spot a whole bay of books labelled "Tragic Life Stories". Who on earth would make a bee-line for this section? Catharsis is one thing, but surely this is verging on voyeurism. Of course you might find one of these books interesting and might even want to bear witness to the author's suffering by reading it. It's the fact that there seems to be a whole industry based on people's harrowing childhood experiences that is disturbing.

Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult came as quite a revelation to me. I had heard of her but had always put off reading her books, simply because the covers made me think of those misery memoir books and I thought that was what they would be like inside. Shallow, moi? But of course!

However on Sunday I was at home looking for something to read and came across Jodi Picoult's Vanishing Acts. (It must have belonged to my daughter, aka the Rock Chick). Well thank goodness the Rock Chick had left it there. It really was involving, and beautifully written too. There were upsetting scenes but they were important to the story. It wasn't just a "woman's book" either. I can't say too much without giving away the story, but I do recommend this. Worth reading, and worth going to buy as well!

Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts has been recommended to me as an author, so I bought her novel Angel Falls on Saturday. It started off excellently, gradually revealing what had brought the heroine to this point in her life. I thought it could have been wound up a bit earlier though, because I started to lose interest in her predicament. I would read some more Nora Roberts but I wouldn't go out of my way to get the books. Johnson thought that a particular sight was "Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see". In a similar vein I feel that Nora Roberts is "worth reading"... of course her next novel may well prove me wrong. I'm very willing to be convinced!