So it's been ages and ages since I've posted and my main excuse is that during that time I was abducted by aliens and they wouldn't let me take any books with me or let me read any of theirs. Aside from that things around here have become awfully busy. I have started writing for the online foreign film magazine Subtitled Online and I've also started working as a teaching assistant at a secondary school in Cardiff. I thought that a daily two-hour commute would make for lots of reading time, but it turns out that the only manageable activity on a train at 7am is the one where you don't fall asleep and spill tea on other passengers. So outside of my time watching amazing films and trying not to fall over in the early hours I have managed to read only two books, but they were two really very good books. They were The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.
The second book that I read in the last few weeks is The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. The Glass Castle is a memoir by American journalist Jeanette Walls, which documents her childhood, from the age of three when she was rushed into hospital with burns following an accident while she was cooking herself hot dogs, to the beginning of her senior year of high school when she finally moves away from her parents and on with her life. The story is far from the usual sob-story style childhood memoirs, but is instead written with the right balance of intelligence, humour and tragedy to make it an instant classic. Walls writes the accounts of her family experiences with an equal level of frustration and compassion that makes it clear to the reader that it is these experiences that define the person that she has become. While I would definitely not go as far as saying that I can completely relate to the childhood of Jeanette Walls and not at all with the more serious and disturbing experiences of her life, I can definitely relate to certain aspects of the story, in particular with having take on too much responsibility at too young an age and so for me this story was remarkably engaging.
mini book haul |
http://www.subtitledonline.com
/http://www.subtitledonline.com/author/kayleigh-cousins
I am currently reading The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin and I'm already completely mesmerised. Has anyone read this or any of the other books that I've mentioned? I would also love to hear what your reading this month.
Happy reading
xx