My favorite read this month.........maybe this year

Just finished.................even though I tried to slow it down to make it last longer. I was hoping it would take me through our quiet evening but I couldn't turn the pages fast enough and I literally gasped when reading the last line. 
My favorite read this month, maybe this year.

Added it to my 2011 Reading List here. 

Photo via Amazon

Your Summer Read...........early

Along with a holiday weekend with magnificent weather came the most wonderful read, a bit of a surprise to me. I had seen this book in a couple reviews but wasn't paying proper attention, somehow the title threw me off and I can't imagine why. The title is perfect (as it turns out) and so is the exquisite writing of new author Sarah Winman. When God Was a Rabbit is one of those books where you fight with yourself. Do I keep turning the page or put it aside so I can prolong the ending? Can I possibly slow down this reading pleasure? In the end you just can't stop turning the pages and you just want to cry because this wonderful story is over and you know you just finished one of the year's best reads by a most magnificent new writer.










Chapters-Indigo Blog Review link
Amazon UK link
Amazon Canada link
Amazon US link

Speaking of mothers.............a must read

How well do you really know your own mother? Do you really see her? Really know her? As adults, are we all guilty of seeing our mother in a one-dimensional form, one that begins in need when we are children?  Are we destined to always see our mothers through our own hopes and dreams? When a devoted mother leaves her remote, rural village to visit her adult children and goes missing in a crowded subway station in Seoul, a large Korean family wrestles with loss, guilt, blame, and love as they each question their emotional role in their mother's disappearance. How could this happen? And why can't she make her way back to them? Please Look After Mom by Korean author Shin Kyung-Sook is a most heartbreaking look at family dynamics, cultural expectations, and grief as each family member struggles to understand the mother they thought they knew, and the one they never took time to know.


"You stop arguing with Hyong-chol, because you realize that you're pushing him to take care of everything, as you always do. Leaving Father at Hyong-chol's house, you all head home. If you don't leave then, you will continue to argue. You've been doing that for the past week. You'd meet to discuss how to find Mom, and one of you would unexpectedly dig up the different ways someone else had wronged her in the past. The things that had been suppressed, that had been carefully avoided moment by moment, became bloated, and finally you all yelled and smoked and banged out the door in rage.

When you first heard Mom had gone missing, you angrily asked why nobody from your large family went to pick her and Father up at Seoul Station.

"And where were you?"

Me? You clammed up. You didn't find out about Mom's disappearance until she'd been gone four days. You all blamed each other for Mom's going missing, and you all felt wounded."




It was pure coincidence that I was reading Please Look After Mom
over Mother's Day weekend. When I finished, I found myself thinking how little I knew about my own mother's hopes and dreams and how I never asked her these questions while she was alive. This thought had been something I had been thinking about as I have gotten older and though I could ask the people in her life, how much better to ask your own mother if you can. I think it would be a lovely conversation. For both of you.  






Link to NY Times review

two books that have hit my all-time top ten list

It was pure coincidence that Sarah's Key was our book club choice this month and I will get to that part in a minute. As an avid reader, I had seen this Sarah's Key in bookstores but when I would read the  synopsis I would bypass it simply because it seemed such a sad subject matter and sometimes I just can't do sad when it relates to little children. But, I am a diligent book club reader even if I am late to this bestseller and I downloaded Sarah's Key and then noticed that author Tatiana de Rosnay had just released A Secret Kept on Sept. 15th which sounded like a juicy story to ease me into the sad Sarah's Key one. Within a few pages of the newly-released A Secret Kept I was so hooked to the way this author-journalist writes, the history, the characters, the compelling story, all the Paris references, that I was going to read everything she wrote, sad or not. It doesn't matter in which order you read these two books, just make sure you read them............both of them. And when you are done reading Sarah's Key tell me if you see a subtext to this story as well. I am dying to know if I was reading too much of a moral message into the intertwining (past and present) narrative of this story. 

I say it was coincidence because when I started A Secret Kept I didn't realize that this book club choice would be so perfectly timed to my return from Paris. Both books take place in Paris for the most part (and Noirmoutier Island in A Secret Kept which was fascinating) and I have to tell you I felt like I was still walking down Rue du Bac or through the Marais. Not only will both (or either) books have you turning the pages long into the night, the author compelled me to do several things that tell me it has captured my full attention, take discussion notes, download a book group guide, look up geography, google history, download all her books, turn pages so fast it annoys my husband (the click, click of e-reading on a laptop), hold off the end chapter as long as I can, and feel incredibly lucky that someone made me read these books. And even better, the upcoming Sarah's Key movie stars my favourite actress Kristen Scott Thomas. No US release date yet but it opens in France on October 13th.

I am really good at reading, not so good describing them and I don't want to even come close to spoiling it for you. Just trust me on this............and read them both if you haven't already. If you have read Sarah's Key (like the rest of the world) then you know you are going to love A Secret Kept which is totally unique in it's own right. But I am quite certain I don't have to tell you that anyways. Titiana de Rosnay is just one good storyteller.

Just head to your nearest bookstore or e-reader store. Personally, I haven't bought a real book since I jumped onto e-reading last spring. Our Canadian bookstore named Indigo/Chapters introduced a Kobo e-reader. It is not as fancy as Kindle (books have to downloaded to laptop, then synced to reader but they just introduced a wireless version)) but in my opinion their e-bookstore is far more attractive than Amazon and I love the look of my colour library on my laptop. Surprise, surprise, Canadian Kobo often has new release e-books not available in Amazon. I would know this because I also download Kindle Books to my Mac laptop. So yes, two e-bookstore sources and a library of books so I will never run out of reading material.  The laptop reading method is presently beating the smaller e-reader for a couple reasons: props up in bed nicely, bigger screen, and can check for blog comments (hint) with a click of a tab. Happy reading, however you do it.

Let it Snow...while I read

Our Home ~ Winter 2010

According to me, there are only two things you need when the snow starts falling.........groceries and a good book. Shovels are optional, I'm not going anywhere if I have some good fiction. It's the excuse I live for each winter, it almost as if someone is whispering go read..............let it snow, let it snow. I have the feeling this is going to be a particulary good winter for reading. With that in mind, some of my favorites from my 2009 Book List. They are all winter storm worthy...........the best kind. In the same note as my last post on A Bookish Gift, each book selection is accompanied by a quote , something to entice you to open their pages if you haven't already. This list should get you all the way to April, depending on the forecast of course. Let's start with my favorite 2009 read. The rest are in no particular order.

"My sisters and I have fought over shoes, over who's had a better life, and over who's smarter and prettier, but this time I don't have a chance. I know who will win. For so long I've wondered about my destiny. Now the tears of my greatest loss of my life roll down my cheeks." Shanghai Girls by Lisa See.

* I have omitted one line in the above quote that would have given away part of the story.

"The thought of what I needed to do in order to survive made me quite breathless at times; I'd have to sit and put my head between my news, like a grand lady overtaken by a spell of the vapours, like my Lady herself on one of her bed days. I had no time for such weakness. Time and time again, I forced myself back onto my feet." Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger.

"Children picked strawberries for the fun of it. Colored folks picked them for extra money, and for making jams. Farmers packed them morning, afternoon, and evening, and put them up in boxes to be drawn by horse to Toronto and to Hamilton. I didn't mind eating the strawberries, but I never picked them. Colored people had been bending over and picking things off farmers' fields for hundreds of years in the United States, and I sure as hell wasn't going to do it in Canada." Any Known Blood by Lawrence Hill

"She'll wake up soon and then be gone, so for awhile I'll watch her breathe and dream. So lovely. She's wearing a cotton nightgown, modest and opaque, but of course it reveals what isn't there, the breast she surrendered last year to save her life, and looking at her now, knowing the small secrets she's kept in her good heart, I feel a little better about my own. Perhaps we are all entitled to keep a small place that is our own." Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo.

"Even before I got to the front steps, I heard it. A wretched, unloosed, primeval keening. A sound I couldn't possibly be hearing from a human being, except that it was. I stood on the front porch, hearing the sound. I stood there. I even started to open the door. The knob was in my hand. Then I turned around and walked back home." Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

"She wanted to be someone else. The old Claire seemed provincial, ignorant.She had been to a party at Goverment House, sipped champagne at the Gripps while women she knew twirled around in silky dresses. She had her nose pressed up against the glass and was watching a different world, one she hadn't known existed. She could not name it but she felt as if she were about to be revealed, as if there were another Claire inside, waiting to come out." The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. Lee


"When my share of the world's cruelty struck, I was nine years old. It would take a great portion of my time as an adult before I realized that tragedy was hurled freely into every one's life as though it were a cheap newspaper, advertising porn shops and strip shows thrown into a overgrown yard. I was an old man by the time I turned ten years old, and I caught the terrible drift of things many years before my number should have been called." South of Broad by Pat Conroy

All photos by Sande Chase ~ A Gift Wrapped Life