Top Ten Tuesday: Water-y!

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is April Showers (Interpret this however you’d like: rainy day reads, books that make you cry, books that give you happy tears, books to wash away a bad reading experience, books set in rainy places, books with rain/raindrops/umbrellas on the cover, blue book covers, etc.). I am choosing to focus on water and rain!

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - I haven't thought about this book for the longest time!

The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve - I am not sure I remember anything about this book

The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman - I read a number of Carol Goodman books back in the day!

The Water Horse by Julia Gregson - I read a few of this authors books but it's been a long time since I did so.

Fish Out of Water by Mary Janice Davidson - I only read this book because the author was coming to Australia as a guest of honour at a reader convention I was going to many, many years ago!

A Life on Pittwater by Susan Duncan - Next time I go to Sydney I wouldn't mind going out to Pittwater. It sounds like a beautiful place  

Water Under the Bridge by Lily Malone  - This is part of a trilogy set in a small town in Western Australia

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin - I read this for last year's Paris in July. I have a couple more books from her to read at some point

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith - This is part of the Isabel Dalhousie series set in Edinburgh

The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang - This is a fun Korean fantasy novel 

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Book of Form and Emptiness to The Good Earth

 

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz. 

 

This month's starting book is The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.

I chose to use the phrase "The book of" as my first step and which led me to The Book of Lost Threads by Tess Evans

The word threads made me think of sewing and tapestry, which lead me to the book 

Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bowers which is partially features a story of one of the women who worked on the Bayeux Tapestry.

My next choice is The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani, a book I read and loved a number of years ago now.

My next two choices are because of the name Anita. First, there is 

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by indigneous Australian author Anita Heiss. My review is here.

My next book by an Anita is Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, which I read way back in 2008 because it was chosen as one of the Oprah Book Club books.

My final choice this month is another Oprah book club choice, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. This is one that I read along with along with other readers on the forums. I met so many other passionate readers on those forums!

The starting point for next month we need to start with the book we finished this month, so I will be starting with The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck.

Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

I haven't read an Anita Shreve book in years before picking this book up to listen to at the library a few days ago. I had such fond memories of reading Fortune's Rocks and The Pilot's Wife that I guess I had expected much more than what I got from this book.

Twelve year old Nicky Dillan and her father Robert Dillan have been living in an isolated house outside the town of Shepherd in New Hampshire for about two years, having moved from New York after her mother and sister were killed in a car accident. A short time before Christmas, Nicky and her father were snowshoeing through the woods near their house when the hear a sound. They go off to investigate and find a baby who has been abandoned there, and so they rescue the baby.

Becoming minor celebrities in town, it isn't too long before the mother of the abandoned baby comes to thank them for rescuing her baby, but before she can leave again, a snow storm sets in and she ends up staying with them for a couple of days. The days from when the baby was found up to the end of the storm are a real catalyst for Nicky and her dad, bringing changes for both of them.

This novel was, I think, meant to be a study of grief, but also about facing the consequences of your actions. On those levels, I guess it worked, although at times it felt a bit superficial.

Once again, I had issues around the perspective of the novel. For reasons we are not told, the story is told by Nicky when she is around 30 years old, but all the events are told in present tense, so there seems to be some confusion about this perspective at some point in the novel. Maybe there was some differentation between timeframes in a written book, but I certainly couldn't tell in the audio book.

Another thing that I really noticed in this book was a lot of the dialogue was followed by "he said", "Robert said", or "she said". For example if Nicky were to say "But Dad..I don't want to go to my room", it would almost always be followed by I said. Of course it was Nicky who said that...who else would call him Dad!. Occasionally there were other descriptors, but it was overwhelmingly noticeable that these were all throughout the story, to the point that it distracted me. To an extent it felt as though the dialogue wasn't sufficiently strong enough to stand alone without the reader being specifically told who was doing the talking..their characters voices were not individual enough within the text let alone before we add a narrator's interpretation.

Snow plays a crucial role in this story, and I have to admit that all the scenes where Shreve was describing the snow, and the conditions through the snow storm felt really real, although having never experienced anything like those conditions I wouldn't know for sure.

Overall, this was an okay read, that had the potential to be really interesting, but just didn't quite make it! Oh well....I could always reread Fortune's Rock if I really wanted!

Rating 3/5


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