I read a total of 10 books in June:
- 4 five star books
4 four star books
2 three star books - 2 read alouds
2 audiobooks
2 ebooks
4 physical books - I read a total of 3507 pages, which averages 117 pages/day
Books I read from my reading list
The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera ***
This is the story of Pudencia Prim, a young woman who moves to a little town to be the librarian for the mysterious Man in the Winged Chair. She discovers that the little village is actually a refuge for people who turned away from the modern world. We follow her falling in love with the village and the man.
I liked the book, but not as much as I thought I would. I have been anticipating reading this novel since I heard about it on a podcast episode and I thought it was going to be right up my alley. Unfortunately I felt like it lacked depth. Everything stayed very much on the surface: the story, the characters, it just wasn’t very engaging. It was okay but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.
My year of rest and relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh ***
This book follows a woman on her quest to ‘hibernate’ for an entire year. Not feeling good about herself and life as the millennium comes to a close, she decides to sleep for a year. She is very much helped/enabled by her psychiatrist who prescribes her pretty much everything she askes for and more without much therapy or supervision. Along the way the story exposes her relationship with her dead parents, her best friend/frenemy and her boyfriend, as well as her life before this point.
I thought the book was very repetitive with a lot of attention going towards all the drugs she is taking,what they are called and the combinations she takes. It did get more interesting every time the book ventured more towards the people around her. Of course there was very little action, since the book talks mainly about her efforts to sleep as much as possible and it got kind of boring. I thought it was going to be a two star book, but the ending really gripped me and made it an interesting read after all.
Kristin Lavransdatter. Book 1: The wreath by Sigrid Undset *****
Kristin is the daughter of a well respected man in a small village in fourteenth-century Norway. She grows up watching her father and admiring the kind of man he is: loyal, devout, smart and strong. We follow her during her first experiences in love and her decision to go against the man she grew up respecting so much.
I absolutely love Sigrid Undset’s writing style. It’s not very flowery and very much to the point, but she manages to convey so much story and such depth to her characters in so few pages. Not only do we get a clear look into the personalities of her father, mother, Kristin herself and her various suitors, we also get a glimps into life in rural Norway during the Middle Ages with a mix of folklore and christianity and the plentiful everyday hardships the people endured. A masterpiece and I am looking forward to reading the rest.
Book Bingo
nr. 32: Fair Play by Eve Rodsky *****
With this book Eve Rodsky tries to level the playing field between partners when it comes to household chores. The starting point is that when it comes to organising and maintaining a home, the woman is often the default. Even when they don’t do the executing of a task (which they mostly do too), the conception and planning almost always falls on them. Enter Rodsky who came up with a new system to divide the most dreaded of chores. The goal: making sure each partner gets to spend time on what she calls the Happiness Trio: self care, adult friendships and Unicorn Space (the thing that makes you tick and gives your life purpose beyond your family life).
I thought this book was so revolutionairy in its simplicity. Until the halfway point I kept on looking forward to what the actual ‘game’ aspect was going to be, but ultimately what she advocates is this: make sure all tasks become visible and explicit and start dividing them up. It doesn’t have to be 50/50 or even close to that as long as you both as a team divide all the chores and execute them from beginning till end (or CPE them, which stands for concieve, plan and execute). This feels so true for me, so often the fact that I have to think of everything is so exhausting and when I am tired I will shout: just come up with something yourself! Being able to let go of some things, mentally and in execution, would change the game drastically.
nr. 85 (mood read): I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes ****
In this thriller we follow an ex spy as he gets recruited to prevent an attack on American soil using a virus without a cure. It’s a race against time to capture the terrorist before he sets the virus loose. Along the way we get to know our main character and his background in the secret world. At the same time we get the point of view from his adversary, a religious fanatic set on bringing the West to its knees. The book sheds a light on his past and how and why he became a radical.
This book started out very slow with a bunch of different stories with no real clue on how they all connect. It made it very hard for me to get into the book. However, once the race was on, I read more than 200 pages in one day, finishing the book at seven o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t stop after reading during a nightly breastfeeding session. The suspense completely got to me and I had the full thriller experience.
nr. 84 (mood read): The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis *****
When I told my kids I was planning on reading this, they basically begged me to get the book in Dutch instead and read it aloud to them. It was a wonderful daily ritual during quarantaine to read a chapter in the afternoon every day on top of our daily picture book at bedtime and my read aloud time with my oldest after the little ones go to bed. When we finished, we watched the movie as a family.
Read alouds with my kids
The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis *****
This classic tells the story of four children who discover a whole world, Narnia, inside the wardrobe of a mansion in the countryside where they get sent to during the London Blitz. Once there they join an epic adventure to help Aslan, the lion, free Narnia from the grips of the white witch.
This story is so beautiful and even though I thought it read a little dated, my children didn’t mind at all and completely fell in love. I hope to read the sequel, Prince Caspian, with them as well.
Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend ****
This is the sequel to Nevermoor, in which we encounter Morrigan Crow, a girl who thinks she will die on the eve of her 11th birthday, but instead gets scooped away from her miserable life to the city of Nevermoor. There she competes for a spot in the prestigious Wundrous Society. Since this is a sequel I will not spill too much about the synopsis as not to spoil the first book.
Honestly I loved this one way more than the first one. The friendships start to really develop and overall a lot more happened. I am highly anticipating the third book coming out in August. I hope it will be translated very fast so my son and I can continue our adventure alongside Morrigan and Haldorn.
Mood reads
Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling ****
So this month I read the third Harry Potter and I again thoroughly enjoyed it. Not as much as the second one, but a lot more than I expected. I was really annoyed in the first half of the book because Harry and Ron seemed to fight a lot with Hermoine over seemingly unimportant stuff. And why couldn’t she just be honest with them? And all the fights didn’t even seem to serve much of a purpose throughout the book, except so Hermoine wouldn’t tell the boys what she figured out about Lupin.
What I really liked is that Harry finally gained some personality in this one and at times he is straight up sassy. Bring on the fourth one next month!
A study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro ****
This book is a Sherlock Holmes retelling in which the main characters are teenage decendants of the famous Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Charlotte and Jamie. When they meet at an American bordingschool, there is instant chemistry and when one of their schoolmates gets murdered, they not only start investigating but pretty soon become chief suspects themselves.
I thought this was a really fun book. I listened to it on Scribd and I loved the narrator, he managed to capture Jamie’s mixture of English and American perfectly and had a very soothing voice. The story itself was very amusing and suspenseful with a lot of references to the old Sherlock Holmes stories. I also loved the epilogue so definitely stay for that part!
The hate u give by Angie Thomas *****
This book tells the story about Starr who witnesses her best friend getting shot after they are pulled over by a police officer. Starr has to deal with the grief of losing her friend, split loyality between her mostly white high school friends and her predominantly black neighborhood and the confusion of stepping forward in the upcoming media circus and police investigation.
At first I thought I was not going to like it: I didn’t like the narrator of the audiobook much and the story started of kind of slow. However, as the story progressed it totally sucked me in and I was blown away with how masterful the writer descibes her characters (there are a lot of them but I ended up loving or at least really knowing them all). The voice bothered me less and less and when I was about halfway through I discovered that putting it on 1,2x speed actually made it more enjoyable to listen to, since my main complaint was that she was a little ‘naggy’.
So 5 well deserved stars and as far as I am concerned a must read for both young adults and adults. Looking forward to the prequel coming out next year.
Books & Babies 