This year I’ve picked books from my shelf to
read mostly according to the prompts provided by The 52 Book Club – 2023
Reading Challenge. I know I can’t read 52 books a year so I skip some
unfavorable prompts.
# 1 A book with a subtitle
The
Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
Author: Paula Byrne
Genre: Biography
Rating: five stars
* First sentence: This is a watercolour of
Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England.
* One sentence comment: This is the most
detailed and intimate account of my favorite classic writer, Jane Austen.
It was this prompt that gave me the urge to
read this non-fiction I meant to read for some time. I bought this book for a
while, but among fantastic looking fictions, this book with a quiet looking
cover had been put off for perhaps a year. However, this year I made it my
first book to read, and it is a real treat for a new year. Through the objects
of Jane Austen’s time, I got close to the daily life, joy and plight of my
favorite classic writer. I have read a few biographies about Jane Auten, but
never had a book given me such vivid accounts about her romance, friendship and
travels, especially her linkage to the West Indies.
Against my previous knowledge, Jane Austen
actually had quite a few suitors, and one of the proposals was accepted but
turned down overnight. The real Austen chose love over heritage just like her
heroines in her novels. Austen had a few close friends with whom she
corresponded with letters. They became important sources for us to understand
her life and thoughts. We know she was playful but stern in her principles. Her
experiences with Prince Regent was extraordianry. Reading it put a smile on my
face because I was reminded what was written in a previous book I read, about a
sycophant to the Prince. I am looking forwards to reading on the book series, A
Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery.
The book made me fantasize to visit all the
places Austen had stayed, such as Bath, Chawton, and Brighton.
#2 Featuring
an inheritance
The
Dutch House
Author: Ann Patchett
Genre: Novel
Rating: two stars
The characters are all too dramatic and
unrealistic. The father was too stupid, the mother was too saint like and the
stepmother, too ruthless. The plot is boring and the reason why I continued to
the end was I wanted to find the ending. After I read it I thought perhaps
there was a point in the story.
#3 Title starting with the letter “G”
Giving
Up the Ghost
Author: Hilary Mantel
Genre: Memoir
Rating: four stars
First sentence: It is a Saturday, late July
2000; we are in Reepham, Norfork, at Owl Cottage.
One sentence comment: Mantel’s prose is
full of wonders.
Hilary Mantel was a modern legend that had won
the Booker Prize twice in a row. I have read a couple of book reviews written
by her and was affected by her prose. More surprisingly, I got to know she’d
suffered from chronic illness since her teenage years from her memoir. Endometriosis
came back at her mid age, and she described how she had felt as well as how she
had seen herself, “My skin turned gray and my weight began to fall so that one
day when I saw myself sideways through a mirror, I shocked myself: I looked
like one of those beaten dogs that the RSPCA used to photograph, with bones
sticking through the hide.”
Near the end of the book, she wrote,
“everything about me - my physiology, my psychology, feels constantly under assault: I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the
inhabitants have vacated years ago.” I think her words about writing have
revealed the innermost longing of many writers, “I feel that every morning it
is necessary to write myself into being…. When you have committed enough words
to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind.”
I couldn’t help wondering what if the ill
fate happened to me, and I was touched by her words: “We were taught to be
thankful that, whatever is in store for us, it wasn’t crucifixion: unless you
were a missionary or really unlucky.”
Fun with the Bookish Pictionary for Once upon a Bookish Club
The author's first memory was her mother walking backwards to
take a picture.😛
“I don’t understand why she goes backward,
back and aslant, tracking to one side. The tree overhead make a noise of urgent
conversation, to quick to catch; the leaves part, the sky moves, the sun peers
down at me.”
My hobby: making cake
On the 22th of January, it happened to be
the Lunar New Year, so we played a game after the church service. I also made a
chocolate cake the day before. I seldom made a chocolate cake, and this time I
couldn’t get confectioners' sugar in the supermarket to make Creamy Chocolate
Frosting. I decided to bake the chocolate frosting; otherwise we would have
tasted the sugar’s granular texture. The base was baked for too long; therefore,
it tasted a bit hard.
A Lone Woman at the Convenience Store
It was a late afternoon on the second day
of the Lunar New Year. I went into a convenience store to withdraw some money.
Then I strolled to the shelf for food to look for a dinner box. I saw a woman
squatting by the shelf, holding a cup of hot soup, supposedly having just bought
it from the store. At first I thought she was an old tramp, but when she
started to talk to me, I found that she was too well dressed to be a tramp. She
recommended me to buy a curry, which she considered very tasty and she often
bought it since she just lived in the building next to the store. I told her
that I often had curry and today I hoped to buy something I rarely had. I know
the building she mentioned is an expensive complex, so I realized that the
reason she was squatting there was to look for a chance to talk to someone like
me, who looked for one-person food during New Year so that she could converse with
another lone woman.
