November/December Book Review

I'm pretty behind on book reviews, since it's the end of January.  I didn't read much in November and December, because um, Christmas.  But I had this post ready to go, so figure might as well post this and then work on a post for all the books I read on vacation!



The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy

I read this book in 2 days.  It was good and I really needed one of these mystery books that I haven't read in awhile.  This book is about a group of women who met through an online mommy message board basically.  They are called the "May Mothers" as they all had their babies in May.  One day, one of the babies is kidnapped.  This book goes through the 13 days that follow from different perspectives of the different mothers trying to find baby Midas.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

I gave this book 5 stars.  It wasn't my favourite book every, but I did enjoy it.  But I gave it 5 stars because it had so much depth.  It made me think, it made me smile, it made me cry.  

This was my book club book for this month, and I'm glad I actually read it, even if I can't get to the book club meeting. 

Ove is an old man whose wife recently passed.  This is what bothered me the most, that he was described as a grumpy old man, but was 59.  That's not old enough to be considered a grumpy old man and have friends who have Alzheimer in my opinion, but I digress.  This story is about him, but it's also a love story about a man who doesn't know how to function once the only person who understood him is gone.  And it's a story about a man who comes across as miserable but actually has more compassion than most people.  To watch Ove develop, and relationships develop was enjoyable.  

A main takeaway from this book is the common line "be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" and also that by being kind to someone, you never know what kind of impact that might make on their life.  You might be giving them something to live for. 

An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena

When you are in a reading rut, get yourself a good murder mystery.  I had started reading Beyond Belief by Jenna Miscavige Hill about her life in Scientology.  I found it interesting, but biographies are sometimes difficult because things aren't constantly happening an they are slow.  So it was taking me forever, and I had already renewed it once.  So I returned it and grabbed this one.  I read it in less than a day. 

Like other Shari Lapena books, I found the whole premise a bit odd and unbelievable.  But that doesn't stop you from wondering who dun it. 

A group of people are at a cute boutique hotel in the middle of nowhere.  A big storm hits, they lose power and are stuck. Suddenly someone is murdered.  Is there a murderer in their midst or is there someone else there that they don't know about.  

This book was kind of like reading a murder mystery dinner.  A group of people, one is a killer, who is it?

My First Book Club

So basically I am a super nerd and it has always been a dream of mine to be part of a book club.  But I didn't really know how you go about finding and joining a book club.  So I started my own.

I threw it out there on Facebook that I wanted to start a book club and thought I would just wait and see if there were any responses.  And there were!  About 8 other girls responded and said that they were interested.  So I set up a Facebook group, we chose a book and set a date for our first meeting, which was this past Tuesday night.

Now unfortunately, things came up for a few people, and so this first meeting was rather small.  But that's ok!  There were three of us there and we still were able to discuss the book and have some other good conversation.

Our first book was Dark Places by Gillian Flynn.  I thought it was a really good book and it kept me interested from the very beginning.  It was a good book to start with because it was fairly easy to discuss.  The neat thing about book club is that other people notice things that you might not in the book, so you get some different perspectives.  If you are a non-reader, you probably won't understand why you would care to have different perspectives, but as a reader I loved this aspect of it.    

So my advice to you today, is that if you want to try something new, go for it!  This is what social networks are great for these days.  They can bring people together and get the word out there in ways that would have been impossible 15 years ago.  

There's one more item off the 30 before 30 list!