The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

Not often do I read a book that takes my breath away. Margaret Atwood has managed to do that twice. First with The Handmaid’s Tale, an absolutely brilliant and imaginative book, and now with The Blind Assassin. Every moment of reading, felt like a luxury, like eating a very rich and creamy dessert. Atwood writes beautifully and has some very inventive descriptions. It’s rare to want to read a sentence for a second time, not because you didn’t understand it, but because you want to savour every word.

The story is of two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase. Iris is now an ‘older woman’ looking back on her life and all the events leading up to her sister’s death at the young age of twenty three. We learn in the very first page that Laura drove a car off a bridge and immediately our interest has been grabbed. Why did she do it? Continue reading

Top 5 Memorable Holiday Reads

After recently returning from my holiday in Naples and reading Naples ’44, I got to thinking about some of my most memorable holiday reads. Packing is always difficult when going away, but one of the most important things is to pack the correct books. Everybody has a holiday reading list, usually books they haven’t had time to open and want to be able to fully relax with. If there is one thing I have learnt, it’s that the enjoyable books are not always the most memorable books that you might read on holiday.

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Top 5 Desert Island Books

I have been listening to a lot of BBC’s Desert Islands Discs recently as I have found that the website has years of episodes archived. If you are interested, have a listen  http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs . It must be really difficult to choose only eight songs to have on a Desert Island, but imagine how difficult it would be to choose only 5 books! According to the BBC’s rules, each castaway automatically gets a Bible and the full works of Shakespeare. Along with these, I would choose…

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Top 5 Books That Inspired You To Read As A Child

As a child, I remember hours of car journeys with my dad playing a certain game called Top 5 Favourite. It was more interesting than Eye Spy and more exciting as I really believed my dad had made it up. It’s only in the past few years that he has admitted that he stole the idea from Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity. However, I still love to play this game on long car journeys.

Recently, someone asked me why I loved to read so much and how they could get there child to love reading. I thought about it and came up with my Top 5 Book That Inspired Me To Read As A Child. Continue reading

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

After reading Breakfast At Tiffany’s and not enjoying it half as much as the film, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and give Truman Capote another shot with In Cold Blood. The synopsis sounded promising, and I was not disappointed!

It is based on the true murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. However, it’s not the murders themselves that make this book such a good read. It’s the aftermath; how the town dealt with it, the police investigations and of course, the story of the killers. Whereas in most books, the reader is usually kept guessing about the killer’s identity, In Cold Blood has them as main characters from the first few pages. Continue reading