Recent Books Worth Mentioning

I just loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. The book is written in an epistolary style. The setting is Guernsey, England post WWII. The characters write about the various books they've read during the German occupation of their island and how their book club kept them sane during that time. When I finished the book, I was looking forward to reading more from this author. Sadly, she died before the book was actually published.

With Masterpiece Classics airing some of Charles Dicken's stories this winter and spring, I was inspired to read Oliver and Little Dorrit. It just seems so hard to believe that parts of Oliver were based on Dicken's life. It just made me thankful that life has changed for the better since then. Little Dorrit is another story that seems almost unbelievable. People lived for years in a debtors' prison because they couldn't pay off their debts. Yet, they weren't given a chance to work off their debt once they were imprisoned. This book was an unexpected gem. There is mystery and love story intertwined.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a book on a book club. At first I was highly disappointed in the book. I thought this was going to be light reading. It's pretty heavy stuff. I almost stopped reading it because it was hard to stomach. Yet, I felt compelled to read on. I wanted to know what happened to these women. The supression and degradation that the Iranian women went through is just hard to accept in this day and age. Nafisi has another book out that looks good but I think I have to be in the right mood to read it.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell is one of my favorite stories by her. It reminds me of Pride and Prejudice in some ways. Cranford is my other favorite. The BBC has done nice adaptations of these books. Elizabeth Gaskell has also wrote a biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, which I found to quite interesting.