MerrilyMe

When I'm not being Merry Raymond of Patch of Puddles, I'm writing as MerrilyMe. Unless I'm selling toys. Or parenting.

Merry

Book Review #1: A Fine Balance

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Time to start fresh for 2012. This year I’m only going to aim for 40 books as I want to do more creative things in my bits of time between, I hope, gazing at a living, breathing baby.

A Fine Balance is the story of four people living in India at the time of Indira Gandi’s ’emergency’. It is a part of history I know nothing about, to my shame really, and initially I found the book a little hard to get into, even though the style is gorgeous and it is easy to read. But the pace of the book is part of its beauty and gradually I was sucked in. The description of the caste system, the horror of life in the lower castes, the tiresome difficulties facing women who wanted to be strong and independent and the sheer grim reality of life there were fascinating.

I’ve read reviews that this is one of the most depressing books ever written. It certainly isn’t a laugh a minute, given the subject matter it could hardly be so, but it is incredibly uplifting. It is a tale of people who change, of friendship and family and the overcoming of barriers, whether mental, moral, physical or political. As such it is an epic and an enormous achievement and probably a book every person should read.

Thanks to Love-a-Book for the recommendation.

2012 Reading Challenge

2012 Reading Challenge
Merry has read 1 book toward her goal of 40 books.
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Book Review #47: Black Sea Twilight

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Once I had done reading epics, I went back to the Love-a-Book reading list. I really need to be set challenges to read; one way of doing this is to download random stuff on my Kindle, another is to actually get to the local library but the best way for me is online reading groups. I do hope you carry on with it, Cara.

Black Sea Twilight is a young love story first and an account of life in Romania in the last days of the East/West divide. It combines delicately handled romance and politics and brutality, twisted together with hope and resignation in equal measures. I found it compelling and extra-ordinary and can heartily recommend it.

Which is not a very good review – but I read it a while back now!

Book Reviews #43, #44, #45, #45 & #46 Song of Ice and Fire

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Well, I failed in my attempt to read 60 new books in a year, though I did end up getting to 47 in all and considering it was a busy year and I did a lot of knitting, I think that is okay 🙂 The  main reason I failed though was these 5 books, which range from 800 to about 1200 pages long each. I got completely engrossed in the story and couldn’t stop until I had got through them.

The Song of Ice and Fire series is a fantasy/medieval/magic/alternate world series which starts off with a supernatural threat coming out of the frozen north and centred on a single family of aristocracy. Initially, the story is compact and the characters are (and remain) compelling. It becomes a journey and adventure story quickly and the themes and concepts of the books set out well. It is brutal, no one is safe, but exciting and the world is fabulous. I devoured the first two and went on eagerly to the next. The story telling method of each chapter centring on a character takes some getting used to, but worked well

Sadly the third begins to get rather too complicated as the cast multiplies, the kingdom spreads and the plot thickens and by the 4th (which the author split into two books, 3 and 4 I think) it has become rambling and, to me, impossible to really follow. While it is certainly the type of epic where people drop in and out of the story as they might in real history, it begins to feel a bit too much like he was egging it to produce more books and more royalties. I lost track. I was saved by really very enjoyable writing and great characters and so each piece was enjoyable, but as a whole, I just couldn’t really keep hold of what was going on. I started to find the magic a bit weird too – so much of it was very normal that somehow the supernatural element didn’t fit for me.

Of course, having invested so much time in it all, I will no doubt read the concluding however many books. I do love fantasy and this had such promise. But it used up a few months of pregnancy, so I’m not complaining but in the end, I went from awed by the first two books to deeply disappointed. The 5th was better, so there is hope.