Books Read in January ‘10

January was a big book reading month for me with nine books read in total.

(not in order of reading)

The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley.

Review here.

Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris.

This is the second book in the Harper Connelly series. I enjoyed it but was a bit disappointed with the mystery’s dénouement, I’m not really sure why I guess I just wasn’t happy with it.

An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris.

An Ice Cold Grave is the third book in the series, it was darker and more violent than the first two but I felt the mystery, tension and atmosphere was better constructed. I actually couldn’t put this one down and read it until about 2am one night, which surprised me because while I liked the first two they didn’t grab me to that extent. But I was pretty annoyed with a feature article I read on Harris in my local paper a week before reading this that totally gave away a plot twist in a sensationalised and inaccurate way.

Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris. (reread)

After a particularly bad day I felt like nothing other than curling up with this book again, despite having only read it for the first time a couple of months ago. The Eric scenes cheered me up . This is one of my favourite books in the series.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr.

Review here.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.

Review here.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi.

Review here.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

Review here.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (not pictured).

I couldn’t really get into this one, I was pretty much forcing myself to read it until right before the very end. I think if it wasn’t so short I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

Teaser Tuesdays: Child of the Revolution: Growing Up in Castro’s Cuba by Luis M. Garcia

“Don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back. Because even at the last minute, even as you walk up the steps to the plane, if you look back just once – just once! – and they see you looking back, they will know you don’t want to leave Cuba and then they will bring you down those steps, chico, and they will keep you in Cuba. Your parents will go, but you will stay. You will never see them again.”

Child of the Revolution: Growing Up in Castro’s Cuba by Luis M. Garcia page one.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

I finished another book! I blame it on the 40-degree-celsius plus weather of the past couple of days, it’s been too hot to do anything but sit in the air conditioning and read. Thankfully today has been much cooler.

My friend Renee lent me her copy of Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr when we went to the movies last week, and since she introduced me to The Twilight Series before bookstores in my area were even stocking it I figured I should heed her recommendation. I’m glad I did. Wicked Lovely is a young adult novel that charts the plight of Aislinn, a teenage girl who can see faeries. But these faeries are far from nice; they’re temperamental, violent and vicious.The faeries can never discover that Aislinn’s Sighted, if they did she would be blinded or killed. She has followed three rules all her life to avoid detection:

“1. never attract the attention of faeries, 2. never speak to the faeries when they’re invisible and 3.never stare at invisible faeries.”

But when Aislinn’s stalked by two court fey; Keenan the Summer King and Donia the Winter Girl, she knows she’s in trouble. She is suspected to be the long-searched for Summer Queen, the only one who can prevent an eternal winter and restore balance to the faery courts through unbinding Keenan’s power. If she accepts the test to become the Summer Queen and she fails she will become the next Winter Girl. The life of the Winter Girl is a painful one; she is a faery but excluded by the other fey, she suffers from and gives off a painful winter chill, is bound to warn the next girl Keenan tries to put on the throne of the dangers of loving him and will not be released from this curse until the Summer Queen is found or another girl fails the test and takes her place, which rarely happens since most of Keenan’s girls refuse to take it. As Keenan tries to win Aislinn’s affections her relationship with best friend Seth is called into question and begins to blossom into something more. Aislinn’s ability to choose her own future is in jeopardy, and she must fight to keep it.

Like Twilight, Wicked Lovely is a fantastical romp filled with danger and romance. But unlike Bella Aislinn is independent, stubborn, driven and strong. She is determined to make her own choices and not be swayed by Keenan’s faery trickery. Sure at times she stumbles, but she tries her best to remain herself throughout the novel. While lots of grown ups enjoy young adult reads, they are primarily marketed at young girls so I like it when they feature strong female characters.

I think Marr has done a good job of creating the Wicked Lovely-verse, at no point did I have trouble picturing what was going on, which I sometimes struggle with in the fantasy genre. Also, I just loved the inclusion of old quotes from fairy folklore at the beginning of each chapter, for instance Chapter 21 features this quotation:

“The fairy then dropped three drops of precious liquid on her companion’s left eyelid, and she beheld a most delicious country… From this time she possessed the faculty of discerning the fairy people as they went about invisibly.” - The Fairy Mythology by Thomas Keightley (1870).

These quotations rooted Wicked Lovely in old folklore and fairy stories, which made the book much more interesting. Overall I enjoyed the book enough to give the next installment in this series, Ink Exchange, a try.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi held me totally transfixed, disturbed and unnerved me, impressed me as a literary achievement, but when I finished it I couldn’t decide if I actually enjoyed it. It’s hard to write a review on something you can’t decide how you felt about!

The novel focuses on Miranda Silver, who has run away, barefoot, into the night. Narrating the events leading up to her disappearance (or escape?) are her twin brother Eliot, friend Ore and the spirit of her malevolent mansion. We learn all has not been well with Miranda: her mother has died, her appetite for non-nourishing items such as chalk and plastic is wasting her away (a condition called pica) and she has a strong sense of the spirit world.

I read the first 100 pages of White is For Witching while suffering from heavy allergies and drinking two glasses of a light red wine (not a sensible combination I know). The combination of the alcohol, the allergies and the sheer atmosphere of madness the novel creates through its content and experimental structure made me feel really weird – a bit sick, and I didn’t sleep well that night.

This experience probably effected my enjoyment of the novel. I put it down for a few days but when I picked it up again I started to get into it more. I think it’s a really striking and well-crafted literary feat, but definitely something you must be in the right mood for. I was surprised to learn the author is only 24-years-old, which makes White is for Witching even more impressive. She has two prior novels; The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House, which apparently deal with similar themes to White is for Witching: family relationships, hauntings, superstition and madness.

Other reviews:

Eva at A Striped Armchair

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Flavia de Luce, the heroine in Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is an eleven-year-old chemist with a passion for deadly poisons. Her life becomes markedly more exciting when some mysterious events befall Buckshaw, the de Luce family mansion, in the summer of 1950. First a dead snipe is found on the doorstep with a Penny Black postage stamp pinned to its beak, which is puncturing Queen Victoria’s face. The next morning Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch, who breathes “Vale”, his last word, into her face. Flavia finds herself more fascinated than shaken:

“I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Flavia quickly sets to work, attempting to unravel a detailed mystery full of murder, deception and violence.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a delightful read, and what makes it so is the hilarious, cynical, conniving and incredibly precocious Flavia. Her interactions with her two older sisters make up most of my favourite moments in the novel, which opens with Flavia trying to work her way out of a gag and silk restraints to escape the cupboard her sisters have locked her in. Her maniacal revenge? She poisons the eldest one’s cosmetics.

I wish I had read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie when I wasn’t so tired, as I sometimes accidentally didn’t take in key points and got confused, but that’s just my fault. The mystery was pretty exciting and Flavia provided great comic relief. My grandma actually stole my copy and read it before I did and she loved it too. We’re both looking forward to the next Flavia book when it’s released.

I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie for the Canadian Authors Challenge 2010, hosted by Jennifer of Mrs Q: Book Addict.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

“The bird was on the doorstep, dead as Dorothy’s donkey. A snipe, it was: one of them jack snipes. God knows I’ve cooked enough of them in my day to be certain of that. Gave me a fright, it did, lyin’ there on its back with its feathers twitching in the wind, like, as if its skin was still alive when its heart was already dead.”

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley p 50.

I cheated and used more than two sentences again…

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Having gorged myself on a literary diet of predominately young adult and vampire fiction for the past few months, last week I felt it was time for another classic. Since I’ve always wanted to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and was lusting after the pictured new penguin classics hardcover edition I settled upon it. Hardy’s gorgeous writing, tragic heroine and moving story did not disappoint.

All I’ve ever heard about the plot of Tess of the D’Urbervilles was that involves a rape, and I assumed that this was to be the crux of the story. Luckily this is nothing but the act that sets the story in motion, because I think having so little knowledge about the plot heightened my enjoyment of this classic. Tess of the D’Urbervilles opens on John Durbeyfield’s discovery that, despite his current poor state, his ancestors were the D’Urbervilles, who are descendants of one of the Knight of The Royal Oak, and that Durbeyfield is a corruption of this grand name. He informs his family and, following a tragic event further depleting the Derbeyfield’s income, his wife hatches a scheme to send his daughter Tess to a nearby rich branch of D’Urbervilles to claim kinship and hope for help in forging an advantageous marriage. In doing so Tess is put at the mercy of the abhorrently amoral Alec D’Urberville, who takes advantage of her situation and forces himself upon her, obliterating her maidenhood and perhaps any chance of happiness in conventional society she had.

Challenging conventional values is a major concern of Hardy’s and he uses Tess’ fall to call them into question, the following passage both this theme and the rich writing he utilises to convey it:

“A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief  at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. But this encompassment of her own characterisation, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’ fancy  – a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break a necessary social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.”

Years pass and eventually Tess takes a position as a milkmaid at Talbothays Diary, set in a luscious part of the country side. There she finds relative mental peace, until attraction blooms between her and Angel Clare, a pastor’s son learning the art of farming.Hardy’s descriptions of the settings in the narrative are always artful, but never more than at Talbothays Dairy, where he mingles love with milking cows, leafy green trees, vast pastures and the hum of nature.Here are two of my favourite passages from the section:

“They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily between that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a little past three… The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degrees of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of the evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse. Being so often – possibly not always by chance – the first two persons to get up in the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, going outside at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve.”

“How very loveable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s teeth and lips which forced upon his mind with such a persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filed with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no – they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

But how will Tess’ past affect Angel’s feelings? Should she tell him of her violation at the hands of D’Urberville?

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is both accessable and complex, Hardy has woven so many fascinating themes and motiffs into it that I simply can’t cover all my thoughts on Tess in this already long post. I won’t go any further but to say I absolutely loved it and it is definitely a book I will reread.

Teaser Tuesdays: Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy

“‘Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?’

‘Yes.’

‘All like ours?’

‘I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.’

‘Which do we live on – a splended or a blighted one?’

‘A blighted one.’”

Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy, p 31.

I cheated this week and used more than two sentances.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley

The Camomile Lawn is the first book I’ve finished in 2010, and a disappointing one at that. It opens in August, 1939 as five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house in Cornwall for their annual summer holiday. There is nineteen-year-old Oliver, back from the Spanish Civil War and desperately in love with the beautiful but self-centred Calypso, brother and sister Polly and Walter, twins Paul and David and Sophie, orphaned at birth and unloved by her aunt. The novel follows their lives through the war.

There is a quote from a review in The Times on my edition’s cover stating “The Camomile Lawn provides equal doses of sex and repression in war-torn Britain with panache and pace.” My question is what repression? At some stage each cousin sleeps with most of the other cousins as well as a large percentage of secondary characters. Sophie is also particularly attractive to various sexually deviant older men. The characters both think and say the harshest, coldest things about and to each other, but rarely does anyone do anything other than laugh it off and then link arms with the offender. Numerous pairs of husbands and wives openly take lovers to no complaint of their partner. The unfeeling nature of the characters is enhanced by Wesley’s sparse style, which is predominately made up of dialogue and simple statements.  The plot is structured so that it gradually becomes clear the past is being retold by characters on their way to a funeral. Other than that there is little structure to it at all; there are so many characters and no main storyline to anchor the plot to.

As you can probably tell, I did not enjoy The Camomile Lawn and had to push myself to finish it. Wesley’s story highlights the reckless, fast-lived lives, societal attitudes and loosening moral standards of pre-WWII and WWII, while bringing none of the glamour, romance, hardship or immense loss I have come to expect from books with such a time setting. Of course the characters experience loss, people go off to war and die, or just die in general, but I cared so little about the characters and Wesley’s writing is so blunt that the events hardly impacted on me.

2009 Reading Stats, Favourite Books of 2009, Best New Books of 2009

Total Books Read: 53 (click for list).

Total Books Read Last Year: 28

Rereads: 0

Books Published in 2009: 7

Books by Male Authors: 15

Books by Female Authors: 38

Fiction: 45

Classics: 9 (I think, I have trouble working out what’s considered a “classic”. In this I included Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh but maybe these are more modern classics? Also I wasn’t sure if The Triffids by John Wyndham counted or not, but I included it since it was published in the 50s.)

Young Adult: 9

Books in a Series: 18

Short Story Collections: 1

Non-Fiction: 8

Travel memoir: 4

Biography: 1

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Top Ten Books Read in 2009 (in no particular order):

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende:

I read this in March and didn’t review it so I’m a bit fuzzy about it now. But I do remember loving it and being in awe of Allende’s prose. The House of Spirits chronicles the lives of the Trueba family, spanning generations. As their lives unfold eventually so does the 1973 Chilean coup, in which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president and Isabel Allende’s uncle, was killed by Pinochet. Allende’s expression of history, harsh violence, conflict and cruelty in a magical realism style of writing makes this novel moving and enthralling.

Read if you enjoyed: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Follow up required: I’m looking forward to reading Eva Luna by Isabel Allende next and have it sitting on my shelf ready for the mood to strike me.

Other awards: This is also my favourite non-Western author read of 2009.

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Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Review here.

Brideshead Revisited is told from the perspective of Charles Ryder, an army Captain who reminisces about his friendship with Sebastian Flyte and his involvement with the Flyte family when his battalion commanders the Flyte family’s house Brideshead during World War II. I enjoyed the romantic, nostalgic style of the novel as well as its themes of religion, family loyalty, homosexuality and ambition, as well as Waugh’s writing which is a joy to read.

“‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been here before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadow sweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many mood, it was to that first visit that my heart returned to on this, my latest.”

Follow up required: I’d like to read A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh now.

Other awards: My favourite classic of 2009.

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The Help by Kathryn Stockett:

Review here.

The Help examines the relationships between white and black people in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, through the narration of three female characters: two black maids and a white, 20-something writer looking to compose a book detailing the experiences of black maids in Jackson. The Help is heartwarming, confronting, hilarious, disturbing and thought provoking. It made me chortle with glee, it made me cry more than once. Please read it.

“I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain’t a colour, disease ain’t a Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming – and it come in every child’s life – when they start to think that coloured folks ain’t as good as whites.”

Read if you enjoyed: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Follow up required: As this is Stockett’s debut novel I will be looking out for her next release.

Other awards: My favourite book published in 2009.

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Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates:

Review here.

The story revolves around the Wheelers’ tragic marriage in 1950s American suburbia. From the outside everything seems perfect; Frank is known for his cleverness, April is a beautiful housewife and together they have two young children; a boy and a girl. But they’ve both always assumed they were destined for great things and are bitter at the turns their lives have taken. They plot an escape to Paris to save themselves from a life of mediocrity, and from there things start to crumble for the Wheelers. An oppressive, upsetting, but beautifully crafted novel.

“Oh for a month or two, just for fun, it might be alright to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what they other one most wanted to hear – until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way!”

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Coraline by Neil Gaiman:

Creepy, genius and incredibly imaginative. Lonely Coraline, unable to get the attention of her parents, explores her new house. She finds a locked door which she unlocks only to find it has been bricked up. The next day she opens it and finds an entry to an apartment identical to her own, where her other mother and other father live, who both have buttons for eyes and lavish Coraline with attention and treats. But are they too good to be true?

Read if you enjoyed: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

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The Giver by Lois Lowry:

Review here.

A dystopian tale set in a community that at first seems almost perfect; its citizens are polite to a tee, are required to talk openly about their feelings to promote emotional wellbeing and seem to be without a care in the world. Gradually more disturbing aspects of the society become apparent; citizens have very little choice over the direction their lives will take, at twelve they are assigned careers and later in life spouses. When Jonas is chosen as the community’s new Receiver of Memory he learns all about pain, love and the ups and downs of life before his community. As the costs of the society’s harmony become clear Jonas becomes increasingly agitated.

Read if you enjoyed: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Follow up required: I aim to read Gathering Blue by Lowry in 2010.

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Shanghai Girls by Lisa See:

Review here.

Lisa See contrasts sprawling filth, decadence, poverty and glamour against each other in the early chapters of Shanghai Girls , creating an often shocking picture of Shanghai in the late 30s. The novel follows the lives of sisters Pearl and May, and in doing so spans so many interesting aspects of World history, from Japan’s attack on China, to the evolving place of Chinese in American society, rise of communism in China, the Korean War and the Red Scare in America. Shanghai Girls provided me with not only a captivating story but a further understanding of historical events and an insight into the lives of Chinese women during the mid 20th century.

Read if you enjoyed: Peony in Love by Lisa See or The Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.

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The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

Review here.

In The Day of the Triffids a supposed comet causes a spectacular light show, only to plummet the world into darkness; the intense light has left the majority of the population blind. The sightless stumble the streets in hysterics, desperate for food. At first many die in the ensuing violence, are killed in tragic accidents, like mistaking windows for doors, others, not willing to live in perpetual darkness, suicide. The seers and the blind that survive the first few days find themselves in perpetual danger from a new and unusual threat. Without the power of sight mankind is left at the mercy of the triffids, plants that were created via genetic engineering in Russia and prior to the disaster were harvested commercially across the globe for their oils. The triffids are not your average plants, they are about six-feet tall, able to hobble along on their roots, and are equipped with poisonous, whip-like stingers that lash out at high speeds and reach several feet. Once a triffid has stung it will sit by its victim for days as the body decays, digesting bits of rotting flesh. The novel follows Bill Masen, one of the few whose sight remains intact, and his struggle to survive. The Day of the Triffids is fast-paced, full of suspense and held me enthralled to the end.

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The Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris:

Ok I know it’s more than one book, but it brought me so much happiness this year and I couldn’t pick just one because it stands better as a series than it does book by book somehow. I found Sookie’s adventures addictive and highly readable, despite my early misgivings (due in part to a certain unlikeable vampire’s role early on). My trashy, guilty pleasure of the year.

Follow up Required: I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the next installment Dead in the Family, due out in May 2010, and also the next season of True Blood which has yet to commence filming.

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The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins:

Review of The Hunger Games here.

The Hunger Games series books are gripping, tear-jerking and next to impossible to put down. I gave The Hunger Games and Catching Fire to both of my book reading friends for Christmas this year in the hopes that they will enjoy them as much as I did. The series is set in Panem, a nation that arose out of the ruins of North America. Panem is made up of The Capitol and twelve districts subservient to The Capitol’s tight control. Originally there were thirteen districts, but when the they revolted against The Capitol District 13 was destroyed. As punishment for the revolution every year each district must send a boy and a girl to The Capitol’s annual Hunger Games; a fight to the death aired on national television.

Follow up required: Book three, rumoured to be entitled The Victors, is due out in 2010.

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Top Five Best Books Published in 2009:

1. Favourite: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (see above).

In no particular order:

2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (see above).

3. Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris. Another Sookie Stackhouse installment, enjoyable though a little darker than its predecessors.

4. Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (see above).

5. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory. The first book in an exciting new series set in The War of the Roses. I’m glad she’s moved on to another royal period, I’m over Henry the XIII. Review in December wrap up here.