Books Read, Week of 12/23/13

 

Here are the books I read/finished this week.  Not bad for a busy week!  Felix and I finished Cornelia Funke's When Santa Fell to Earth, which he certainly liked.  I think he was just the right age for it.  I've never read anything by Funke, but I've always intended to try Inkheart.  Someday.

My book club read The Florist's Daughter last month, and I'd only gotten halfway through it by the time of our November meeting.  I was enjoying it and intended to finish; late November and December's busy schedules meant I got to it later than I wanted, but I was able to jump right back in where I'd left off.  Patricia Hampl's memoir about her parents, written at the time of her mother's death, after her father has already passed, was interesting and engaging.  Hampl is a local writer, and I found her descriptions of mid-century St. Paul, the neighborhoods and the people, fascinating.  She writes beautifully and intelligently, and the style is very memory-based, moving around in time, just as memories move along with us through our lives.

Laini Taylor's Lips Touch: Three Times was a treat.  We'd read one of her Faeries of Dreamdark books, Blackbringer, with our teen book club this past year, and when I saw this on the shelf at our library during book club in December and expressed a keen interest in reading it, one of the teens strongly encouraged me to check it out that day.  So I did!  She's a wonderful writer, and I love how she plays with the fantasy genre.  Her characters are fabulous, and her storytelling keeps you reading.

Cinderella: The Graphic Novel was even more of an impulse check-out at the library.  I often check the graphic novel shelves, and seeing this one, was curious about it; I'd just seen a wonderful version of Cinderella at our Children's Theatre Company, and so I was primed.  The drawings in this book are about as different as you can get from the scenes set in the play I saw, but I thought about how neat it is that this story can be told in so many different ways, and still succeeds in hitting the spot.