The Sunday Salon (a day late) – Feeling Displaced...

Sunday Salon is actually my favourite part of the week, blogwise. I’m annoyed that I can’t participate on a Sunday, due to library closure, and thus not being able to access the internet, so here it is, a day late!

Lately lots of people have been posting about being stuck in ruts, or feeling like blogging and reading are becoming a chore instead of being fun. While blogging is still huge fun for me, I am having (yet another) moment where I’m feeling really unsettled, both with reading, and in my personal life. We relocated to another part of the country in December, and for the first time in my life, I’m not living around the corner from my family. Also, outside of work, I’ve not yet met a lot of people, so I think that’s a big part of the uneasy kind of feeling I’ve been having lately. It’s kind of a ‘there’s loads of things I should be doing, but I don’t really want to do any of them’ sort of thing...

Reading wise, my concentration levels have been totally rubbish lately. I’ve got about six books on the go, and have been having a hard time getting into any of them. Excepting The Three Musketeers, which I was expecting to find really difficult, but am actually really loving. I’m only reading two chapters a day of it,though, so I don’t know that it really counts.

I read a great short story  yesterday (thanks to fatbooks.org!) and I’m thinking that maybe now’s the time to do a bit of short story, essay, and poetry reading, just to get my head back in the zone. I think I might have taken on a bit too much....

Having said that, I’ve started another challenge, to read more plays. Lists and details will be on their way later this week, along with my first Fairytale Feature!

Some of my reviews are going up on Goodreads at the moment, rather than here, to limit double posting. This is mostly for the stuff that I feel is a ‘lighter read’. Like Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, which I absolutely LOVED! (she’s coming to my local library in a couple of weeks, how excited am I????!)

Also this week, the first World Book Night in the UK. A million books were given away by booklovers throughout the UK, and I got one! Courtesy of the lovely Lyndsey @ teadevotee, I am now the proud owner of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. The whole idea behind the night is that you read the book and then pass it on, which I will probably do via a giveaway on this blog, so watch out!

All in all, a pretty good week last week! Hoping for a better one (and some loss of the unsettled feeling please!) this week.

Hope everyone had a great World Book Day!!

The Man who Would be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

In my last post, I wrote about the difficulty I was having wading through this book, short as it is. Well, I've finally finished it, and it's taken me a week. I am literally so relieved to be done! That being said, at no point did I feel like giving up on it. On paper, the collection is the kind of thing I should really love: the women and children are the heroes, and the men, mostly, are fairly useless. However, and for no reason I can work out, it just didn't grab my attention like a lot of the things I've been reading lately have. While reading it, I could see all of its' literary merit, and that it was very well written and structured. I think that maybe I just didn't relate to it too well. Having said that, the stories that I enjoyed the most (and actually got through without counting how many pages it was until the end!) were the ones featuring children as the central protagonists, and heroic characters. Most notably, 'Wee Willie Winkie', 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', and 'His Majesty the King'. They all showed the way that children unconsciously relate and respond to adults, and also, their resourcefulness, bravery, and the pain that they can go through as a result of adults not always understanding them. I think what I liked the most about these three stories was the authenticity of the children's voices. As opposed to the adult characters in other stories, they were very genuine and guileless, rather than contrived and manipulating, which is how many of the adults came across.
Oddly enough, I've not been put off wanting to read more Kipling. I'd still like to give 'The Jungle Books', and 'Kim' a go, but I think it will be a while before I attempt another one...

Rating: ***

Friday is For Fairytales - The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

Friday is for Fairytales is a meme hosted by Irena at This Miss loves to Read. Every Friday, you can choose a fairytale you love, or simply find interesting or haunting, and review it or simply say why you like it so much, or why it has captured your attention. Instead of a fairytale, you can choose a favourite fairytale character and describe him/her and tell us why you like them, or you can simply share an experience connected to a fairytale. Fairytales can be old and modern, written by a known author or anonymous, written down or passed on orally, short or in novel form (like re-writings of fairytales), international or typical for your country alone.

My choice this week is a collection of retellings: The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke, whose debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, has been sitting on my bookshelf for absolutely years without me reading it!

This book is beautiful, and I'm talking about the cover, the writing, and the illustration. For me, fairytales in any form are always made all the more magical by good illustration. This collection is based around English folklore, and, having read  a lot of Neil Gaiman, there were many references in it which I understood, as there is a theme of English legends and folklore running through a lot of his work. This made me feel extremely smug!

My favourite story of the collection is a tie, between 'On Lickerish Hill', a retelling of the well-known Rumplestiltskin story, and Mrs Mabb, about a man who leaves his fiancee for Mrs Mabb, otherwise known as Queen Mabb, the 'miniature creature who drives her chariot into the noses and brains of sleeping people to compel them to experience dreams of wish fulfillment' (ahhh Wikipedia).

This collection was an absolute joy to read, and I especially loved Clarke's strong and intelligent female protagonists!

Rating : *****