Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Open Book: July 2016




    June's general life craziness did not allow for much reading. I was able to finish the Princess Bride memoir As You Wish; as well as an advance copy of my sister's newest which will be published later this summer.

Current reads include You Learn by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt. This interesting combination of advice book and memoir is proving to be a wonderful read with lots of interesting tidbits about her life and insights she gained along the way.  The format is her responses to the questions she was most often asked in letters and despite being written over 50 years ago her reflections very much resonant with me.

Emma: a Modern Retelling by Alex McCall Smith, is just that and so far so good. McCall spends the first several chapters providing Emma's back story which I enjoyed as Jane Austen never explains the reasons for her father Mr Woodhouse's hypochondria and it is nice to have some context for that but am now excited to be reading the actual retelling of the Emma story of well meaning matchmaker gone awry.  While McCall doesn't quite have the knack of the Austen voice nor is it grating and so far the modernizations have been reasonable and on several occasions very funny.



Please head over to Carolyn's for more Open Book.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for linking up! The Eleanor Roosevelt book sounds very interesting. I'm afraid all I know of her has been politicized, and it would be nice to read about her in her own words.

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  2. Ooh, I really want to read both of those! Glad you're liking them. I have the e-version of the Eleanor Roosevelt book to read next. :)

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