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Showing posts from June, 2011

[Teaser Tuesdays] The Time Machine

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Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: * Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two "teaser" sentences from that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! You don't want to ruin the book for others!
* Share the title and author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
This week’s teaser comes from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Synopsis from Goodreads:

When the Time Traveler courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything had changed. H.G. Wells's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination is regarded as one of the great masterpieces in the literature of science fiction. “The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see I had…
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Mailbox Monday [8]

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Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia @ A Girl and Her Books, and hosted by The Bluestocking Guide for the month of June.
Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.
I’m so excited to receive my first package from The Book Depository recently. Loving those free bookmarks too. Three weeks worth the wait!
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum:  "Anna Brandt is eighteen years old in 1939. In her hometown of Weimar, Germany, where relationships between Germans and Jews are outlawed, Anna and the man she loves are committing the crime of race defilement." "When Anna is forced to flee the home of her father, a Nazi sympathizer, she takes refuge in a bakery owned by a Resistance member. Soon Anna is making pastries for the officers of nearby Buchenwald while also making "special deliveries," risking death to bring bread to the camp's inmates." "Then she is noticed by one of Buchenwald's highest-ranking officers. And…
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[Review] The Painted Veil by W.Somerset Maugham

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Title: The Painted Veil(This link goes to Amazon) Author: W.Somerset Maugham Page: 213 pages Genre: Classics
Subject: China First Published: 1925


Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with charming, attractive and exciting Charles Townsend. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange and terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages…

First published to a storm of protest, The Painted Veil is a classic story of a woman’s spiritual awakening.

- Synopsis from book cover
This is my first Maugham experience, a rather enjoyable one. Can a story be written in a style so direct and simple but holds a message so powerful that it captures its reader’s emotions at the same time? This book is one of those.

I sometimes shy away from classics because I feel that the language is a bit h…
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Theme Thursday [8]-Male Person

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Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:
A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays) Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate” This will give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.

Theme Thursdays is hosted by Kavyen @ Reading Between Pages.

Loving this book!


…now listen, Frankie, it’s going to be a long cold winter and I babysit in the evenings AND I NEED READING MATTER, NOW DON’T START SITTING AROUND, GO FIND ME SOME BOOKS.


- Page 53, 84, Charing Cross …
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[Review] The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

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Title:The Distant Hours(This link goes to Amazon) Author: Kate Morton Page: 670 pages Genre: Contemporary/Historical Fiction
Subject: Mothers and Daughters, Family Secrets, World War II (1939 - 1945), Kent (England) First Published: 2010



Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long-lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.
Evacuated from London as a thirteen-year-old girl, Edie’s mother was chose by the mysterious Juniper Blythe and taken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family.
Fifty years later Edie, too, is drawn to the castle and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Old ladies now, the three still live together, the twins nursing Juniper, whose abandonment by her fiancé in 1941 plunged her into madness.
Inside the decaying castle Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets…
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[Review] The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

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Title: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox(This link goes to Amazon) Author: Maggie O’Farrell Page: 277 pages Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Subject: Family Secrets, Psychological Fiction, Domestic Fiction First Published: 2006


Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.
Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.
Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris’s questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?
- Synopsis from book cover
This book was recommended to me by a fellow book blogger in response to my post about The Secr…
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[Teaser Tuesdays] The Scent of Rain and Lightning

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Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: * Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two "teaser" sentences from that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! You don't want to ruin the book for others!
* Share the title and author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!
This month has been good so far. Been reading good books lately and I’m feeling good about my current read as well: The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard.
Synopsis from Book Depository:
Twenty-six years ago, when she was only three years old, Jody Linder's father was murdered as she slept in her cot. Her mother vanished, presumed dead. Local trouble-maker Billy Crosby confessed to the murder and was locked up, leaving his wife and son to face the consequences in the small Kansas town of Rose. But his son Collin, now a lawyer, h…
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Mailbox Monday [7]

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Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia @ A Girl and Her Books, and hosted by Bluestocking for the month of June.
Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.
It’s Agatha Christie madness this week!          
(Image will bring you to Goodreads)   


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[Review] The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

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Title: The Bronze Horseman (This link goes to Amazon) Author: Paullina Simons Page: 637 pages Genre: Historical Fiction
Subject: World War II (1939 - 1945), Leningrad (Russia), St. Petersburg (Russia) - Siege (1941 - 1944), Love Stories, Sisters First Published: 2000


LENINGRAD 1941. Two sister, Tatiana and Dasha, share the same bed living in one room with their brother and parents. It is a hard, impoverished life, yet the Metanovs know many who are not as fortunate as they. The family routine is shattered on 22 June 1941 when Hitler invades Russia. For the Metanovs, for Leningrad and for Tatiana, life will never be the same again. On that fateful day, Tatiana meets a brash young officer named Alexander. The family suffers as Hitler’s army advances on Leningrad, and the Russian winter closes in. With bombs falling and the city under siege, Tatiana and Alexander are drawn to each other in an impossible love. It is a love that could tear Tatiana’s family apart, a love that carries a sec…
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Theme Thursday [7]-Colors

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Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:
A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays) Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate” This will give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.
Theme Thursdays is hosted by Kavyen @ Reading Between Pages.
A tough one this week because I’ve just started reading this one. I had to randomly open a page and scan the paragraphs for any color mentioned. Found one at last!

My mother is forty-five, a few pounds overweight, but …
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