The Reader

It's been awhile since I last read a book. The last one I was reading was The Life of Pi, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel which stopped capturing my interest by the time I reached Chapter 3. If a Pulitzer Prize novel isn't gripping enough, then is there any hope for me! I decided to take a test and find out.

Today, on my day off work, I decided to sign up to my local library which is in Stroud Green, about a 10 minute walk from my place. The library is small, cosy and there isn't the hugest selection of books but in a way that's good so I have all of my attention focused on a concentrated space. I had no idea what genre I wanted to read...and I am pretty much clueless when it comes to the best selling novelists, though I know of the well known ones like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, that Patterson guy etc. So, I was pretty much open to anything. After about an hour - and Sainsbury grocery stop later - I arrived home with the following:

Atonement by Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of the day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Two Lipsticks and a Lover by Helena Frith Powell
Why is it that French women look just as glamorous in a T-shirt and pair of jeans as in a sleek designer dress? How do they look sexy, chic and timelessly elegant from eighteen to eighty? Pencil-thin, stylishly dressed and impeccably groomed? In search of answers, travel and lifestyle journalist Helena Frith Powell goes behind the scenes to investigate the famous French je ne sais quoi. Talking to fashion gurus, beauty experts and It Girls, professional seducers, lingerie designers and personal shoppers, she discovers a whole new world. Indispensable wardrobe and beauty secrets; shopping done the right way and exercise routines promising lasting success; advice on sex toys, family life, relationships and clandestine affaires. French women, Helena realises, achieve maximum effect with the least amount of effort. And with the help of a few little secrets, you too can become impossibly French...

The Food of Love by Anthony Capella
A hymn to la dolce vita and the joy of food...a text that breathes authentic backstreet Rome from every page.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
It's New York in the 1940's, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrespressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

Lipstick Jungle by Candice Bushnell
To everyone who's anyone in New York, Victory Ford, Wendy Healy and Nico O'Reilly are riding high, the beautiful faces of success in the city. Victory is the hottest new designer on the block; Wendy is President of Parador Pictures with a sure-fire hit in production and three gorgeous children; and Nico is the editor of Bonfire magazine, the city's style bible. To the outside world they've hit their prime. The trouble is, from where Victory, Wendy and Nico are standing things don't quite look that way. Nico is fitting in guilty extra-marital sex with an underwear model, Victory's last collection bombed and Wendy's twelve-year marriage to her metrosexual househusband is in freefall.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-sex, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare's struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

Can't wait to snuggle up in bed and be a nerdy bookworm.

M xo