Reading Roundup – June 6th 2014

June 6, 2014

First of all, my apologies on the delay of the Throne of Glass review – it’s coming, I promise!  Also my apologies for the confusion on the Ruin and Rising release date. This will be released on June 17th.

This week Amazon announced a product launch for later this month.  The introductory video is deceptively vague, but most analysts seem to agree a 3D smartphone is likely.  For the first time Amazon is also inviting customers to attend this launch in Seattle.  You can sign up for an invite.  I have put my name down, so we’ll see if I’m lucky.

[book-info]

One of the books i did read this week was Attachments by Rainbow Rowell.  I loved her Eleanor & Park and enjoyed Attachments very much, too.  This novel is split between two interwoven strands.  We have the traditional third person narrative of Lincoln’s story and the other strand follows Jennifer and Beth through email exchange.  The two are connected in that Lincoln’s job is to monitor his company’s email and so he gets to know the two women through their email exchange.

What I liked 

Fun, realistic characters.  As in Eleanor & Park, Rowell has a talent for writing engaging, realistic characters.  I loved Lincoln, Beth and Jennifer and loved their story.  Al three of them undergo beautiful character development and it was lovely to see them grow.  I enjoyed the romance between Beth and Lincoln, although I must say I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted them to get together at the end.  I felt their romance was more about each of them moving on from a difficult place in their lives to be able to move forward, not necessarily about the two of them as a couple.

Writing style.  Rowell has a very light, immediate writing style and it was easy to become involved in the story and the characters.

What I didn’t like

The writing in the email.  I felt it was too formal and too in-depth.  Certainly, I have been known to write long emails to my friends and granted, our heroines work in journalism so have a high standard of written English.  All the same, I felt the style didn’t quite mesh.  A better example of how emails as a novel can work would be Matt Beaumont’s e – a Novel.

Despite this, I loved Attachments and gave it four stars out of five.

Added to my library this week

Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence.  This is a new series by the author of the Broken Empire trilogy and is set in the same world.  I picked this up in both Kindle and Audible formats.  I’ve started it and so far I’m enjoying it although I have listened to the same section about three times now.  I keep falling asleep at the same point and being woken up at the same point!  Jalan seems very different to Jorg, so I am interested to see how his character arc plays out.

The Eighth Guardian by Meredith McCardle.  This was a book in Amazon’s new release email.  Time travelling teens!  Protecting and/or changing history!  It sounded a fun concept and at an introductory price of $4 I picked it up in Kindle format.  It’s Whispersync for Voice enabled, so I picked up the Audible book for a couple of dollars more.

Through Netgalley I was offered Ruth’s Story to review.  This is the officially sanctioned novel by Donald McCaig telling the story of Scarlett O’Hara’s Mammy.  I look forward to reading it.  I may well watch Gone with the Wind this weekend to get myself in the mood.

Finally, I picked up The Colors of Cold, a free novella set in the world of The Age of Ice by J.M. Sidorova.  Amazon keeps recommending Age of Ice to me, so it seemed a good chance to learn about the world.

What are you reading this week?

No Comments

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: