A Cup of Tea & Biscuits

My mind, the part of it that appreciates a good book, was rather wary and numb of mainstream portrayal of vampires and their kin. It's too much glitter and falling into arms of an immortal one who will protect the helpless heroine for all eternity going on there. It may be what makes them read by all and produce a senseless fan gathering, but it has not allowed imagination grow. Therein lay my mindset when I picked up Vampire Empire by Clay and Susan Griffith. The blurb on the back of   book set my expectations - as simple as it seemed. I was so pleasantly taken in, hooked and surprised. This trilogy, titled Vampire Empire , written by Clay and Susan Griffith , begins with the premise that the Great Killing of 1870 pitted the entire world into a horrifying war. A plague, if you will, of vampires. Millions of humans died at the hands of the parasites while the aftermath ensured the death of more. Empires were brought down and humanity driven to the edge of despair. Vampires settled ...

It occurred to me that I have been ignoring this blog for way too long even though I have been reading constantly. I must admit that I have fallen back on my schedule - 10 books behind last week now reduced to just 5 books - but I've been working my way through it. I have made remarkable progress in my attempts to include American authors, straying away from my comfort zone of British writers. Ray Bradbury and F. Scott Fitzgerald being the two I finally crossed off my list. While I loved their writing and found salient features in both, Farenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby ,  James M. Cain 's  Mildred Pierce , the most recent book that I've put back on the shelf, has brought me back to this blog. Why? Because I read through this unputdownable book with a grimace. Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife of a cheating husband, Bert, and mother to precocious and arrogant Veda and unassuming Ray. Set during the Great Depression, and at a time when Mildred finall...

I haven't read too many American historical novels, only because there are so many more European historical novels that took up most of my time and not because I'm geographically biased or anything :) A colleague, who mostly reads crime, mystery and thrillers, recommended this book telling me that she never expected to like it, but did. I must say I concur with her opinion. I didn't expect to like it, but I did. Water for Elephants , written by Sara Gruen , is written in the first person by Jacob Jankowski, a ninety or ninety-three year old resident of a nursing home. The story drifts between the ninety or ninety three year old and the twenty three year old. Jacob, a veterinary student at Cornell, loses his parents in a car accident just before his final exams. Shocked and taken over by this intense loss, which also costs him his family house and his father's practice, Jacob wanders about and in a moment of, what I term, insanity, climbs aboard a train hoping to get bac...

My brother, ten years my junior, literally bullied me into reading Suzanne Collins ' The Hunger Games trilogy. He ranted and raved about how good the books were and I was convinced that they should be, to have caught his attention! He who doesn't read unless it is for school work or only if he is truly impressed by the novel. I've read my fair share of young adult novels as an adult that occasionally dabbles in a quick read just to keep myself occupied (and the count of books going), so I wasn't skeptical about this book (as I had been about ' The Host '). I read it in two days and was, I must admit, thoroughly taken by it. As gruesome as the summary might sound, this is definitely one of the nicer, better written young-adult books currently in the market. No stupid vampire love triangles or supernatural presences. Just a nice story of adventure, loyalty, love, and survival. ( Since I've read only the first book, as of February, 2012, I shall base this post...

Day 11: A Book I Hate Given the number of books I read it should be that I come across at least one that I absolutely hated reading. If asked, I would immediately say that anything in the 'romance' genre I hate; to be more specific, anything other than historical romances in the romance genre, I hate. And yes, the Twilight series falls into that category. I read the books right after Breaking Dawn came out, and the only reason I even knew of it at the time was because my sister was quite into Edward Cullen at that point. This was before the mad following it eventually garnered. Anyway. So I read the books in less than a week and can honestly say I didn't like them at all. I grew to hate it after the movie came out. The Twilight series is meant to be a young adult series by Stephanie Meyer , who has a style of story telling that can never be called 'literature'. It's just story telling. I'm sorry to be harsh, but it is true. The story is that of a teenage g...

Day 10:  A Favorite Classic Book Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter seems to be a good choice if not the perfect one for me - I would've picked a Jane Austen novel, but for want of having a wider selection of books on this list, I concur to the letter 'A'. This is one of the few classic American novels I've read and I've liked it since. A lot of the psychological depth was lost on me when I first read it as a twelve year old, though I did understand the social impact of such writing. The theme of 'sin' is something everyone can identify with. People and their reactions, not so much. I held Chillingworth with contempt and anger, Hester with pity and a just amount of admiration, Pearl and Dimmesdale with silent liking. One of the main attractions of this novel is the non-conformism of Hester. Who gives society's rules and regulations a thought when you have your own life to live? This is me being the silent feminist. It remains one of my favori...

Day 8:   The Most Overrated Book I read my first Dan Brown novel before The DaVinci Code came out and the whole world wanted to jump onto the bandwagon. Digital Fortress , Angels & Demons were the first two I read and Deception Point followed The DaVinci Code. I was duly fascinated by the history and inventive stories, the attention to cryptography (I was a big time computer networks nerd at the time), and the fast pace of the novels, but all of these are, possibly, the same reasons I now think they are highly overrated. The story gets old, told to you by the same author in different situations but in the same way. By the time I read Deception Point, I was fully aware of who the bad guy was going to be and what the protagonists would do! Which is also why I read The Lost Symbol almost two years after it came out. I am well aware that 'thrillers' are generally exactly how Dan Brown writes, and he does provide a good read, but it is my belief that his books are highly ...

Once you've read the Twilight series , you know what to expect from a Stephanie Meyer book. The Host is definitely, in my opinion, much better than the tales of vampire love, probably because it's just one book that takes you through the life of a Soul inhabiting a human body. It's a quick read - took me less than two days to finish it - and an entertaining one. Wanderer, a silvery centipede-like alien, is implanted into the body of a human host, Melanie Stryder, with the hope that she will be the key to finding the human resistance that lies hidden and seems to be, in some way, fighting the invasion from these peace-loving creatures. Now living in the body of another, Wanderer finds that she cannot suppress Melanie. Her memories are too strong, and Wanderer begins to turn... human. She falls in love with the people that Melanie loves, and turns against her own kind to find Jared and Jamie. At first, she isn't accepted, because she is, after all, an alien. No one is a...