On my nightstand...

Update 12 August: Turns out the Ken Follett book sitting on my nightstand is the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, called World Without End, so this one will take a back seat until I purchase and read the former. Instead, I'm replacing this book with another book written by Jeanette Walls.  As part of book club, we read The Glass Castle (check out my review here).  She's written a book about her grandmother's life called, Half Broke Horses.  She calls this book a true-life novel ... I imagine she had to fill in some details while bringing the story together.  I also suspect some of the information is a retelling of her own mother's life experiences with her grandmother, Lily Casey.  

image taken from amazon.com

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Here's a quick review of books on my nightstand/in my iPhone/on my Kindle (geez... do I have enough ways to read a book?!) that I'm hoping to write about soon.

If you click on the image it should take you the amazon.com synopsis, where I also acquired these images from.  Just in case that doesn't work, I've added a link to the title in my discussion below.

 


The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende - I added this book to my list of reads after watching the movie on Netflix while we still lived in Italy and after reading Portrait in Sepia (during our trip home in between living in Italy and moving to the Netherlands) which is the sequel to Daughter of Fortune (which I also read, but well before our life in Italy - I remember it was a random Barnes and Nobel pick up in the discount section!). I'm almost through it, it's taken a lot longer than expected, but I have had some visitors in the last month.  In general I find Isabel Allende's books a very dense read and occasionally catch my mind wandering while reading her all too often run-on sentences.  Isabel Allende's books are jam packed with action, adventure, love and often cover generations of the family at the center of the book (all three primarily set  in Central America).  This book is completely different from the movie and really, both are great!  I can't wait to share my thoughts with you on this book.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer - This book was randomly added to my current reading list when I mistook it for the July Eindhoven book club choice, ha!  This is an interesting read about the state of things in the U.S. (since the early 60s/70s to 2010), but there's not a lot of interpretation of the stories George Packer shares.  I think the stories themselves could be great discussion topics for a book club, if you're willing to get political.  Mostly for now (at least of what I'm willing to share at the moment) I've realized that this is not a book I want to read before I go to bed, it's not a comforting read.  Right now this book has taken a back seat to The House of Spirits, but I'm about 70% of the way through and I plan to finish it before adding anything else to this reading list.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett - This is a book my mom set beside the door of the room my husband and I were staying in when we went home for the month between living in Italy and moving to the Netherlands as a slight nudge to read this book... it was very cute, I have to say.  Well, I brought it all the way over from the States, and now that I have heard enough about it and it has been recommended by others, it has made my current reading list.  TBD on  my initial thoughts on this one, I haven't even cracked a page!

Until the next book review...