The Time Will Come (10)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.

This was actually the first book I swapped for. I have no idea why I haven't got round to reading it yet (seeing as it WAS the first book I swapped), but I will! I haven't seen the film, but I have heard that it's supposed to be very good. Now that I have the book, I don't want to watch the film before reading it, so I will have to get to it soon!

The Time Will Come (9)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

My Sister Lives On The Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

Ten-year-old Jamie Matthews has just moved to the Lake District with his Dad and his teenage sister, Jasmine for a 'Fresh New Start'. Five years ago his sister's twin, Rose, was blown up by a terrorist bomb. His parents are wrecked by their grief, Jasmine turns to piercing, pink hair and stops eating. The family falls apart. But Jamie hasn't cried in all that time. To him Rose is just a distant memory. Jamie is far more interested in his cat, Roger, his birthday Spiderman T-shirt, and in keeping his new friend Sunya a secret from his dad. And in his deep longing and unshakeable belief that his Mum will come back to the family she walked out on months ago. When he sees a TV advert for a talent show, he feels certain that this will change everything and bring them all back together once and for all.

I'd wanted to buy this one ever since I first saw it. So, when I spotted a rather cheap hardback copy of it in a Greek bookshop, I bought is straight away. Needless to say, it is still sitting on my bookshelf, unread, though I have picked it up a few times while trying to decide what to read next. Soon.

The Time Will Come (8)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

A novel set mostly in Afghanistan. The introverted and insecure afghan narrator, Amir, grows up in Afghanistan in the closing years of the monarchy and the first years of the short-lived republic. His best and most faithful friend, Hassan, is the son of a servant. Amir feels he betrays Hassan by not coming to his aid when Hassan is set on by bullies and furthermore forces Hassan and his father Ali to leave his father´s service. Amir´s relatively priviledged life in Kaboul comes to an end when the communist regime comes to power and his extrovert father, Baba emigrates with him to the U.S. There Amir meets his future, afghan wife and marries her. Amir´s father dies in the U.S. and Amir receives a letter from his father´s most trusted business partner and, for a time, Amir´s surrogate father, which makes Amir return, alone, to a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan in search of the truth about himself and his family, and finally, a sort of redemption.

We've had this book for ages. I really do mean that. It's possible it's been sitting on our shelves since 2004 or 2005. I haven't read it yet and, to my knowledge, neither has my brother. I remember my Grandma telling me about this book and how good it was, but for some reason I can't remember, I acted like a big snob and refused to even try reading it. And then, I just forgot about it. The only reason I remembered its existence is because we are currently going through all our books and putting them into boxes to move to our new house. But, now I am a bit older, I think I must give this one a try. Hopefully soon!

The Time Will Come (7)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

An enjoyable historic thriller, well told. A mystifying puzzle involving the execution of an innocent man, the erection of a magnificent cathedral, romance, rivalry, murder, arson, lust, and love. Set in 1135 England. 

Tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known... of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother. 

This book - I am rather ashamed to say - has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for so, so, so many years. But have you seen the size of it? I usually don't mind reading books that are 700 or more pages long, but this one, with its 1076 pages and its tiny font, just seems like an insurmountable obstacle... I know that this is one of the most-read books of all time and that it's supposed to be very good and very well written, but that's not what convinced me to decide to try this book out someday. It was recently made into a mini-series (for TV) and I happened to watch a half hour segment of an episode. It was so well made and it made the story sound very interesting. So, I decided then and there to stop watching the series, go read the book first and then watch it. Still haven't got round to it, but I have promised myself I will! Soon! I mean, despite the size, there must be a reason so many people love it, right?

Have you read this one, or know about anyone who has read it? 

Please let me know what you/that someone said about it!

The Time Will Come (6)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

Alice Ascher from Andover is the first victim. Next to her corpse is a spellbinding clue. It seems that a killer is knocking off his victims one-by-one, A through Z. Alphabetically speaking, Hercule Poirot fears that it's a matter of one down, twenty-five to go.

This book I remember seeing in my local bookshop a couple of years ago and really wanting to read it. When it got round to Christmas, my Mum had actually remembered that I'd said I wanted it and had bought it for me. (Cue quite a bit of excitement!) But, I am ashamed to say, I still haven't got round to reading it. This is baaaaad.... I've never read anything by Agatha Christie and I would really love to; I just don't know what's keeping me from reading this one.

The Time Will Come (5)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver-s license...records my first name simply as Cal." 
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

I've had this book on my bookshelves for well over a year now. I did start reading it back then, but I was probably reading something else at the same time and I just forgot about it. I got it on the recommendation of one of my friends, who loved it, and I still haven't told him that I haven't finished it.... Really must get round to it soon, because I remember enjoying Eugenides' style of writing (when I was reading it all that time ago). 

The Time Will Come (4)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

Berlin 1942 
When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. 
But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

I'm pretty sure we've had this one sitting on the bookshelf for a couple of years and I still haven't got round to reading it! I know! I must! From what I've heard, it's supposed to be very sad, but very good. I hope I get round to it soon. 

The Time Will Come (3)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

A sensation across Europe—millions of copies sold. A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue. It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves. It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.




We've had this book sitting on the bookshelf for a couple of years now and I still haven't got round to reading it. I've heard many great things about the whole Millennium trilogy (as it is called) and it does sound rather good. But the main reason I haven't read it yet is because of this:

Now, I'm not usually a fan of covers that have stills from the film, but this one is just exceptionally bad and off-putting for some reason. It's just making me not want to read it, which is a shame, really. So, I decided to put it into a "The Time Will Come" post, in the hopes that that will make me read it soon!

Has anyone read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?? If so, what do you think about it?

The Time Will Come (2)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

This week's pick is:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins, "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them." His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

We had this one on the bookshelf for nearly a year now and I still haven't got round to reading it! I always seem to be picking something else up and not that one. I've heard good things and bad things about it and I really want to get round to reading it, so that I can see what I think of it! 

The Time Will Come (1)

The Time Will Come is a great meme hosted by Jodie over at Books For Company. The point of this meme is to list a book that has been sitting on our bookshelves unread for too long and we have been meaning to get round to for ages!

I have been thinking of participating in this meme for quite some time, but I always seemed to forget about it! Anyway, the time has come for The Time Has Come! (Now, wasn't that extra smart of me??)

Yes, I give you permission to laugh...

Seeing as this is my first TTWC post, I will be talking about a very well known book that I still haven't got round to reading, which is......

Divergent by Veronica Roth   In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself. 
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her. 

Since I saw the first reviews of it, I really wanted to read it. So as soon as I saw that its price had dropped considerably on the Book Depository (which was actually only a few days after its release), I decided to buy it. Needless to say, it's still sitting on my bookshelf and the main reason for that is that I don't want to get caught up in the hype. I am usually pretty objective about the books I read, but I'm holding back on this one a little. Even still, it pretties up my bookshelf with its shininess!