I want to tell you about some books that I have read the first half of this year. They are just short reviews, not because the books aren’t worth a long one, but because even though I enjoyed them, and found a lot of messages for me, when I finished them I was not in the mood for great reviews and not for a coherent explanation of my feelings. Nevertheless, I really want to recommend them, and here we are.
Happy are the happy by Yasmina Reza
This book was recommended to me by my friend Trini, a reader whose taste I respect in reading, and like she said it is worth reading.
If you want to browse through relations between families, friends and colleagues this is the right book. Here you have a group of stories all of them connected to each other by characters and stories to see your reactions and try to understand others in the same situations.
This book is meant to be humorous, serious and mysterious at the same time, but for me it had no humor, and made me feel sad about how poorly we understand each other.
Anne of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
This is one of my star authors. One of the few whom I can always return to read a good book, and feel that that is the case, no matter what he is speaking about.
I discovered this author a couple of years ago thanks to one of these initiatives of another blogger that wanted to commemorate the day of his birth. This is only the third fiction novel that I read by him. I read other non fiction books by him in which I found an elegant writer capable of criticizing the injustice in social situations, gender, and education, without being derogatory, insulting or sugary.
In this book, the criticism goes against the lack of opportunities in women’s lives to decide about their future, just because of their gender.
The hours by Michael Cunningham
In this book with three stories, we start living the last moments of Virginia Wolf, and after that getting to know a different Mrs. Dalloway, and our third character will be Mrs. Brown a married woman, mother and mother to be, but wondering about something else.
These three stories are a little overwhelming as well, or as I said I read them in a bad moment, because I felt it too hard.
With this third recommendation come some of the sentences of the book.
“Not flowers; if flowers are subtly wrong for the deceased thery’re disastrous for the ill.”
“It is good, she reminds herself- it is lovely – that her husband cannot be touched by ephemera; that his happiness depends only on the fact of her, here in the house, living her life, thinking of him.”
“She believes that by obeying the rules, she can have what men have.”
“It’s time for this day to be over.”
I will return someday to this book and I will write the proper review that it surely deserves.
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler
I had a reading crisis. What a horrible feeling! I have already had a few, or, to be honest, a lot more than a few, but I cannot get used to these crisis.
This one was like all the others. Suddenly, every book that I took was boring, too descriptive, too narrative, too much dialogue…. It doesn´t matter what the real problem was, but any way without a book to read I felt lost. Fortunately, I always continue to try with different fiction and non fiction books until one of them gives me what I need at that moment.
This time I needed something humorous and imaginative, and this was the book that brought me back to reading: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.
I am mad about time travel books, and I am an admirer of Jane Austen books. They are a good critic of social classes and genres of her time, not the romantic Jane Austen that film directors like to present in the cinema and on TV.
Accordingly, this was a good book, and furthermore it contained some humour. That was a perfect combination on my way back to book reader.
The main character, Courtney Stone is a modern North American woman who one day wake up in Jane Austen time, in the body of a Regency England woman called Jane Mansfield. She is well aware that she is not Miss Mansfield, or that Miss Mansfield is not she, who knows. But at the same time it seems that she can behave like a woman of that time and age without a second thought. She wants to return to her life, but will she return or does she even want to?
Life has a new lesson for us around every corner, and this time travel will help Courtney to understand her real life better.
Juliet is married, and she is not. Her husband disappeared one day and now for her people she is married and cannot divorce her husband. In Jewish culture only men are allowed to ask for a divorce. The community feels pity for her and ignores her, but a sudden encounter with a young painter change everything and gives her the opportunity of starting a new life.
was as a shepherdess, minding the flock on Bulbarrow hill. Since then, she has worked as a screenwriter with her husband, and they are currently working on the film adaptation of her first novel, Mr Rosenblum’s List. She is also researching a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century poetry. She lives in Dorset. 
The hand of good fortune 