One of my favourite books from the 100 Book Challenge! I enjoyed every page of this one and purposely slowed down my reading to delay it being over.
The best part about my experience with this book is that I was able to read it while travelling around Japan.
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[Trigger warning: This post discusses rape and child sexual abuse]
I didn’t enjoy the feeling this book left behind. It was meant to be a classic, a reflection of real life and culture in Colombia over a 100 year span. It was meant to be witty and even laugh-out-loud funny. But something about it was off.
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When I read my book club read for September, This Summer will be Different, I loved learning about Prince Edward Island off the coast of Canada, with its red dirt and rugged coastlines. And I was also excited to discover that Anne of Green Gables was set there, a book on my 100 Book Challenge list. I took it as a serendipitous sign that I should read this one next.
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For the first time in my life I’ve joined a book club. It’s through my local gym and will be a lot of fun, but I’m not expecting the chosen books to be anything too deep or challenging to read. After all, book clubs are less about plot, structure and character arcs, and more about wine and cheese and gossiping about last week’s gym instructor, right?
Our book club book for September was This Summer will be Different by Carley Fortune, and I have to say it was a refreshing change to the classics I’ve been reading as part of this 100 Book Challenge. I couldn’t help making comparisons between the book club book and Madame Bovary, which was my 59th book in the challenge.
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Fifty-eight books in and this 100 Book Challenge continues to surprise me!
I have never enjoyed fantasy. Part of me has never been able to take dragons and fairies and magic powers seriously. My son (who is very much like me) felt the same way, leaning towards non-fiction books or realistic novels with complex characters and plot twists.
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After the Bible, I needed something light and easy, and this one was the perfect choice from the remaining books on my 100 Book Challenge tally.
Swallows and Amazons is a children’s book first published in 1930, about four kids who go on a sailing adventure to an island where they camp for a week in the summer. It’s as long as an adult book, but much more fun. It had none of the heavy themes or complex language that most books have, and so I was able to simply sit back and enjoy. But that’s not to say I didn’t get anything from it – quite the opposite.
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A week after my dear cousin died from brain cancer in October 2023, I picked up The Bible. It was always going to be a tough one to conquer from the 100 Book Challenge but it seemed like a fitting read to take me through the inevitable grief to come.
Thirteen years earlier, my stepmother Margaret died from pancreatic cancer. I was overseas during her final weeks and never got to say a proper goodbye. She was a lifelong Christian, and left each of us girls The Message Remix versions of the New Testament bibles, with the following message pasted in the front cover.
And this is the version I decided to read.
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I’ve taken a while to write this review because I’m finding it hard to explain what it was that I liked about it. Don’t get me wrong, I actually really liked Brideshead Revisited; I read it regularly and reasonably quickly. Despite being set between the two world wars in England and France, it didn’t teach me anything new about those times, neither did it teach me anything new about human behaviour.
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Our boy went through a year of not reading much when he was 8. He’d become bored of the junior non-fiction on offer, and despite his teachers trying to encourage him to try fiction, it just wasn’t his thing at the time. The last post I did was 2 years ago.
This past year everything’s changed again, and it’s back to nightly reading in bed – and we’ve again found ourselves telling him multiple times to put the book down and go to sleep. And… I’m pleased to report this year he’s finally found a taste for fiction!
1. Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson
“This is fiction, but it’s like non-fiction. Because it could be a true story”. This was his summary of Goldfish Boy, which was the first non-fiction novel he finished cover-to-cover. He was so absorbed, he finished it in just a couple of nights.
It’s about a boy who lives his entire life inside, and from the clues he observes by looking through the window, he goes on the journey to solve a neighbourhood crime. The 9 year old was gasping, sighing and cheering out loud as he turned the pages and tried to solve the mystery himself.
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Fifty-four books done!
In my very first post back in 2014 – when my almost now-10-year old was a little baby and I was wondering where I was going to find the time to read all these books – I calculated that it was going to take approximately 1,500 years to get through the 100 book challenge, at the rate I was reading at the time.
The other day I mentioned to my partner that I was about to finish Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, that I’d started 6 months ago.
“It must be a terrible book!”
No.
“It’s actually a great book. I’m enjoying it a lot.” I’m just REALLY slow at reading.
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A (very) average lawyer's musings on the Australian legal profession. With occasional pug pictures.
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Jessie Ansons 