Keep Reading September 2020

Keep Reading September 2020

Have you noticed that time has been behaving strangely since the virus has started ruling our lives?  Days last forever and weeks fly by.  Winter is coming and we, in the north, will be moving inside.  We can say goodbye to our social lives and books are going to be even more important.

Here are some books you might want to consider to help pass the time, take you away, and give you something to talk about other than politics.

The Ship of Brides by, Jojo Moyes starts in current times but quickly brings you back to the end of World War 2.  While British soldiers were stationed in Australia, many of them married local women.  The couples had to wait until the war was over to be united in the UK.  This story is based on a slightly reconditioned war ship that is bringing over 200 wives to their new husbands.  The trip is a tough one and the young women you come to know all handle the trip in their own way and it does not turn out the same for all of them. 

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis is also a great escape book.  If you have been to New York City, you have probably encountered the lion statues outside the Mid-Manhattan Library.  Did you know there is an apartment in the heart of the library?  It is now used for storage but in the early part of the nineteen hundreds, it was occupied by the manager of the building.  In this book a young family with two children live in the apartment.  The husband who manages the building spends all his extra time writing a book while his wife does everything else including trying to go to school to be a journalist.  Rare books begin to go missing. 

 Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo is the booker prize winner from 2019.  I often find Booker prize books difficult to read.  I think having a different writing style is what makes a book win this prize.  This book is no exception, but it did not take long for me to fall into the book’s rhythm.

Twelve characters lead vastly different lives in modern Britain. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, they all intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.