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Saturday, June 13, 2015

New On My Cyber Bookshelf

I have just finished Reading Laurie Halse Anderson's first novel Speak, which I downloaded at the Reading Matters conference the other week. I thought it very good and might consider reading it online during Banned Books Week this year, as it has been banned and challenged, for what good that did(a million sales, I believe!).

This week I downloaded Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, after someone mentioned it on their blog. I had forgotten how good it was.

I'm reading my first Phillippa Gregory book, The Lady Of The Rivers, about Jacquetta, the mother of Elizabeth Woodville. It was going very cheap on iBooks this week, so I thought, why not? And it's interesting to read a version of her story that is told sympathetically - mostly, she only appears as the manipulative and nasty old lady. Right now, in the novel, she is fifteen and reluctantly about to witness the death of Joan of Arc, whom she had considered a friend when Joan was imprisoned at her great-aunt's castle.

Other new downloads are Robinson Crusoe(from Project Gutenberg) and Gillian Polack's new novel The Art of Effective Dreaming and Laurie Halse Anderson's Untraviolet, which looks to be an interesting read.

Back to the reading!

2 comments:

Lan said...

I've always meant to read Catcher in the Rye but I'm concerned about what my feeling will be like towards Holden. I've got very little patience these days!

Sue Bursztynski said...

Probably not a good idea to read it, then. A lot of people don't like Holden, and that's fine. It's not really about liking him. I had to read it in Year 11 AND in Year 12, along with Brave New World. Just as well I loved both books! You might be interested to know that at one time, it was totally cool to read Catcher and it was the sort of thing you read under the blankets at night. Then it became a school text, so it wasn't cool any more. :-)