Update and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was pregnant and I thought I’d be able to read 24 books in 2013. That number was based on a certain number per month before baby arrived and a different number per month after baby arrived. Baby was a month early and adjusting my goal for that, it works out to 14+9=23. And I managed 23 books. So I made my goal.

January 2014 rolled around and I decided to go easy on myself. I had an infant and a kindergartener and I was going back to work, so the 2014 goal is 12 books. A book a month seems manageable, so we’ll see how it goes!  There is a lot happening in the next six months, so I might be a bit ambitious.

Also, there is a new tab for The Big Read. I have challenged myself to read 50 of those books for my most recent 101 in 1001 challenge. We’ll see how I do…

But now, while I managed to make my book target, I didn’t manage to keep the blog updated, so here, and for the next few weeks, are the books I read in 2013 and at the beginning of 2014. As well as I can remember them. Mommy brain and all.



I really liked this book. I inherited my mom’s fascination with World War II history and this book had that. I didn’t realize that Guernsey Island was occupied during the war and, while I didn’t quite get there, I thought I’d go read a bit more about it. When I was off work after I hurt my back, my mom brought me a set of DVDs to watch called Island at War. I really enjoyed them and I found myself wishing there were more episodes as I watched the last one. This book reminded me of that series. It was good and I think I want to reread it.

(January 2013)

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

This book was on my 2011 Christmas list. This is noteable because I don't know the last time I read a Christmas or birthday book so quickly. Probably Christmas 2008. Baby J gave me The Hour I First Believed and we were in Kelowna and so I read it. But I have an entire shelf in our bookcase dedicated to birthday and Christmas books, many of which I asked for, that I haven't time to read yet.

But back to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It took me a few attempts to get into the first chapter and then I was hooked. Monsters, mystery, time travel, old photographs, and it is even sort of set in World War II...what more could I ask for? Oh yeah, a great plot and awesome writing. And this book had it all. I should have written this six weeks (ish) ago when I finished the book so that my thoughts were fresh, but unfortunately life had other plans for me.

I am planning on rereading this one - it was definitely that good and I feel like I was so excited about it, I may have read it too quickly and missed something! Not bad for a book I put on my Christmas list just because it was on some "Books to Buy for Christmas" list and the old photographs intrigued me. Sometimes maybe it is okay to judge a book by its cover!

The Book Thief

Where do I start?

My mom brought this book back from Australia with her in 2008 and has been telling me I should read it ever since. It lived in the bookcase beside the bed in the room I slept in when I visited my parents. I'd see it there, but for whatever reason I'd never pick it up and start it. I finally packed it up last summer and brought it home with me. And it proceeded to sit on my bedside table, untouched, until last week.

And then I couldn't put it down. I read it in snatches while J was having a bath. I read it while dinner was cooking. I stayed up late reading it, but not too late because I didn't just want to read the story, I need to savour every word.

The Book Thief is set on a poor street in Molching, a village outside of Munich, during World War II. Yes. Another WWII novel. It is narrated by Death and it follows Liesel, a young German girl, as she adjusts to life with a poor foster family and all of the additional challenges the war brings.

The cast of characters in this book is amazing - besides Liesel and Death there is her foster mother whose language would make a sailor blush, but who loves Liesel even through all her fierceness, there's Papa, the gentle foster father with his silver eyes and his accordion, there's Rudy, the boy next door with the lemon coloured hairwho dreams of being Jesse Owens, there's Max, there's Frau Diller and Frau Holtzapfel, there are so many wonderful characters.

It's a book full of colour and full of emotion. Death associates each dead person with a colour and throughout the book colour is emphasized - hair colour, eye colour, the colour, or lack thereof, of some minor, inconsequential detail. And there are emotions. Many emotions. There's fear and anger. There's joy and sorrow. It's all there. And the reader feels it too. I had tears in my eyes a few times - just like Jessica G. in the comments on this post when Rosa held the accordion and when the eyes turned to rust and when Max left, not once, but twice and when he came back and over and over in the last 50 or so pages. I finished this book on my break at work and I'm sure they thought I was going crazy (I am temporarily helping a department that is not my own on a project that is super stressful, and don't know any of them very well, so I'm sure they thought my red-rimmed eyes were work, not book related!)

I've written before (I think over there, I thought maybe when I wrote about Suite Française, but apparently it was some other book) about being sad a book ended and wanting it to keep going, well this was one of those books. I wanted to know what happened, beyond the small snippets that Death gave us. I know why the book had to end there, Death explained it, but I want to know what happened in the years between where we leave Liesel in 1943 and where Death picks up the story again in the Epilogue. How do you think she got were she ended up? I have a bunch of theories and no answers. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be, but I want more!

Oh, and a quick quibble about the Young Adult genre. I don't get it. Apparently it's a relatively new genre. Books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women were written for adults, with teenagers caught up in that age groups. I have a hard time distinguishing between YA for older teens and adult fiction, especially if its well written. I think this book could fall into either category. I dunno...YA is a difficult genre to define!

I'd love to hear what other thought of the book...this book really makes me wish I still had a book club because I really, really, really want to talk about it!

Goodnight Mister Tom

I read Goodnight Mister Tom in just a few hours. (WWII obsession...check) I loved this book even though there are some painfully sad parts. I love that grumpy Mister Tom softens and that scared Will becomes comfortable and happy and I love that something so wonderful could happen in the middle of such a horrible place in history. I haven't read a book recently where I wanted the book to keep going and not stop - I have been reading a bunch of series and I know there is more to come, so even though I feel like those stories are not complete, I know there is more coming...it's different - I really wanted to read page more about Will and Mister Tom.

Under A War-Torn Sky

As I've mentioned before, I inherited a bizarre love of World War II from my mom - not just novels, but history too - so this story about Will, an American pilot, and his journey through occupied France after being shot down by a German plane grabbed my attention and held on. And I've just discovered there is a second book - A Troubled Peace - that I'm trying to track down in the library system.

The story of Will's journey through France and all of the people who helped (and some who hindered) his quest for freedom reminded me of how lucky we are to live in a time of relative peace. At least in North America.

The book also reminded me of a book I read when I was a kid - it was a banned book I think because it told a sympathetic story of a family on the wrong side of the war. I'm trying to track it down, but I can't remember many of the details...

Anyway, Will relies on the generosity and discretion of the people he encounters in the French countryside to find his way back to Allied troops so that he can go home - he meets a variety of resistance workers - the farming family who's young boy is Will's caretaker, Claudette, a feisty young girl who wants to be more involved than her boyfriend will allow and various groups of maquis of assorted political persuasions, but all with the common goal of liberating France from the Germans and the puppet Vichy government.

I'm on a hunt for good non-fiction about the French resistance now, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Bonus Book: Sarah's Key

It's time for me to get moving...it's now less than a week before the end of October and I still have part of August, all of September and now all of October's books to post.

I saw Sarah's Key ages ago, but the book diet was still being enforced (common theme or what?) I needed a book to keep me entertained when we went to Manning Park for my cousin Amy's wedding and I thought this would be the perfect book to take. Except one evening I picked it up and started reading. And that was the end of that plan. It only took me a couple of nights to devour this book.

I inherited my love of reading from both of my parents, but my strange love of all books World War I and World War II and Holocaust and Russian Revolution I'm going to attribute solely to my mom (my dad introduced me to the Hardy Boys and spy and detective novels and Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell and books of that genre). So this book was definitely on my radar for a while before the book diet ended.

I loved how the first part of the book alternated between the stories of Sarah and Julia and then Julia picked up the whole story and became Sarah's voice. Sarah is a young Jewish girl who locker her young brother in a secret cupboard when the rest of the family is arrested in the Vel d'Hiv. She struggles to survive and return to Paris to save her brother. Julia is an American journalist married to a Parisian who is assigned to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv, a piece of French World War II history that is seems many know little about.

Julia's investigation into the Vel d'Hiv leads her to Sarah's story and in turn a story of her own.

I really liked this book. I flew through it and I think I will go back and reread (parts) of it. I have this bad habit of reading really quickly and enjoying what I read, but then I can't remember what the story was, or I mix two or three stories together.

Definitely a book I recommend - has anyone else read it?