Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue.✔✔✔✔✔

"Today I'm five." The reader already knows the significance of this first sentence of Room because we already know from the title and the book jacket that Room is Jack's home - the only thing he's known in his life. He lives there with Ma, for whom Room is a prison. This is a most unusual book, because the narrator is Jack, so everything is seen from the child's aspect, a situation which becomes more intense when Jack and Ma leave Room.

I really don't want to say anything more about this book - it just has to be read. I read it in less than three days, and didn't want it to end.

Emma Donoghue is from Ireland, now living in London, Ontario. This book was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize this fall. I will remember this book for a very long time!

This Body of Death by Elizabeth George.✔✔✔✔✔

This is the 16th of George's novels about Inspector Lynley, and I've read each and every one. I'm positive that each time I read her latest, I think they can't get any better, but they do. I'm filled with admiration for her as a writer of British mysteries, first for her detailed knowledge of the country, a fact which is notable because she herself is American ( you'd never, ever, know it from her writing), the intricacy of her plots, which while you're reading you marvel at their complexity, but when everything is finally revealed, were very simple, her use of surprise, which can make you gasp a little as much for the fact that you wonder how dull you must have been not to see it coming, and the roundedness - is there such a word?- of her characters.

Bloody marvellous, as Barbara Havers would say!!

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti.✔✔✔✔

This is another book that's been on my list for over two years, not because I didn't choose to read it, but because I couldn't find it, either in book stores or in libraries, so I found and bought it on Kindle Store. I read it in just under two days - a quick, easy read, but also hard to put down.

Ren lives as an orphan at a monastery until a stranger, Benjamin Nab, comes and takes him. Nab is a con man, telling him he is Ren's long-lost brother, but it soon is apparent that Nab takes him more for the fact that Ren is missing his left hand - a definite entertainment value with the many thieves, liars, cut-throats and double-crossers the two meet in their adventures. Ren takes well to this new life, even as he remembers the moral values instilled in him back at the orphanage, which was not the most ideal place to grow up by any means.

It is a kind of dark fairy tale- I envisioned lots of dark colours, twisting branches, cold cellars, sterile hospitals and dingy factories, like the mousetrap factory where ugly girls work fashioning mousetraps - but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would happily recommend it to anyone. It's listed as a young adult book, but is equally suitable for adults.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett.✔✔✔

Another Kindle book, I read this in between my last two postings! Being the child of missionaries myself, I was interested to read this account of the author's 30 years among the Piraha ( Pronounced "pee-da-han) in the Amazonian jungle, and how his experiences with these people led him to lose his faith!

The group he represented did not actively try to convert the natives: they went to these tribes to learn their language enough so they could translate the New Testament into that language, then trusting the word of God to reach and change the lives of the readers. It didn't work - the Piraha live in the moment, and had no interest in learning about a man no one had ever seen or experienced. Everett is primarily a linguist, and his adventures in learning and de-coding their language - which is inextricably linked to their culture - was interesting enough, but I was most intrigued by the last chapter, where he recounts quite clearly his path to losing his faith.

For the rest of the book, I've copied the book jacket info:


From the book jacket
A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977—with his wife and three young children—intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live—so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them.

Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory.✔✔✔

Like countless other people whose childhoods spanned the 1950s, I was a keen reader of The Book of Knowledge. In one of those volumes was a portrait of the two young princes who were imprisoned in the Tower of London back in the late 15th century, and I was endlessly fascinated with the portrait, which showed them holding one another, looking down a passageway as if to search their way out.

When I learned that The White Queen was the story of their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, I placed the title on my "Must Read" list, where it has been for over two years, but I finally - but not without some mysterious disappearances of the book among the library's shelves - got to read it.

According to this novel, one of those princes was Edward, heir to the throne, but the other was a young boy who joined Elizabeth's household as a changeling for Richard, second in line to the throne, who was spirited away to France. Gregory does warn the reader that there is no hard evidence for this.

Elizabeth herself is a very interesting character, apparently the most beautiful queen of England, who also possessed some gifts of foreseeing and witchcraft, gifts which were handed down by her mother.

I enjoy reading Gregory's historical fiction. There's a lot of information and intrigue, but she keeps her story going well and doesn't let you get bogged down with details. I was a bit confused about the timeline in the book, which ended with the book's beginning period, but I realize now that this series, entitled The Cousins' War, is about the Plantagenets, who preceded the Tudors.

Now I've got her next, The Red Queen, on my list - it's about Mary, Queen of Scots.