February Summary and March Plans

The month of February ended with another 7 reads, and surprisingly enough, I was able to stick to my schedule posted in my earlier entry "January Summary and February Plans".

The summary of my February reads is as under:-

1. The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks ()

2. Die Trying by Lee Child ()

3. The Serpent's Tooth by Alex Rutherford ()

4. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold ()

5. Jeeves in the Offing by P.G. Wodehouse ()
6. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss ()
7. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery ()

My March plans are as under:-

1. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (for Book Club)

2. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (online Group Read)

3. Use of Weapons (Book 3 of the Culture Series) by Iain M. Banks (online Group Read)

4. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (for Book Club)

5. Salem's Lot by Stephen King

6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

7. The Great Influenza by John M Barry (online Group Read)

14. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

My last read for February, this was one more of my online Group reads - Anne of Green Gables, a children's story, which turned out to be a most delightful, little read. Set in, from what I hear, the very picturesque Prince Edward Island in Canada, the pride and delight of the author in describing the beauty of the island, through the eyes of little Anne, was very apparent.

And little Anne turned out to be quite a character too! With no one immune or able to resist her enchanting influence, she thrills the otherwise quiet folks at Avonlea. That she charms the reader too, is a foregone conclusion.

The book was just the right length too, and ends with Anne as a 16 year old girl. Apparently there are sequels, but I would likely skip them, for I highly doubt the young woman, Anne, would hold my attention as much as girl Anne did.

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13. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The History of Love is different, even if my writing skills fail to showcase how. This is not a sad story or a happy one, it just is. A book with the most interesting and extreme characters, this is not a love story, at least not entirely, and yet it is about love. It is about a love story with an unsatisfactory end, another with a satisfactory one, a story about lives wasted, betrayal and guilt, about never getting over a lost one, a story about a father's love for his son, friendship, a young girl in past, a young one in present and a very eccentric child.

It is extremely well written, even as it challenges the reader to keep up with the multiple threads interwoven across lives, across time. While covering the lives of so many characters in detail, the author does an even more amazing job of consciously ignoring some of them, leaving just enough to the imagination of the reader, and all the reader has are the realities and perceptions of those characters, as seen through the eyes of the ones whose lives were covered. There is not a sense of closure to  most of the characters and even that is not unwelcome.

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