Bookish Thoughts

I'll admit that I picked up Carlos Ruis Zafon's  The Shadow of the Wind  partly because it takes place in Barcelona and that's where we were heading for the first leg of our honeymoon. But I also read the sequel to it several years ago when my mother in law (I can finally say that!) read it for her book club and liked it. Picking this book turned out to be a spectacular idea. I'd read about a third of it by the time we landed in Barcelona, so I was already able to pick out some of the major landmarks on the way to the hotel. As I became more acquainted with the city, the book, which relies heavily on Barcelona's geography, became more alive. I couldn't place many of the smaller streets where characters lived, but when someone was cutting across town, dashing through the Plaza de la Catalunya or passing a specific cathedral, I was able to mentally trace their journey, and that added a lot to my experience of the book. The Shadow of the Wind ...

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a much longer book than I was expecting it to be. This is partially because I read it on my kindle and had no physical sense of how big the book was when I started it. It was also not at all what I expected. I'd just finished Pride and Prejudice and Little Women and for some reason I was expecting a similar story, which is part of why I started reading it But right off the bat I had to toss my expectations out the window. The opening chapters of the book reminded me strongly of the beginning of Harry Potter . Ten-year-old Jane is an orphan living with her uncle's widow. She suffers from an abusive cousin and a neglectful aunt and can never seem to please anyone. No one arrives to tell Jane that she actually has magical abilities, but she is whisked away to a boarding school for orphans where things get marginally better. And by better, I mean that no one beats her or locks her up, but they do still starve and freeze her...