Ags wrote: having just finished 'The book thief' by Markus Zusak......a slow start but a truly amazing book.....very clever, thought provoking and extremely moving......I highly recommend it!
Ags - very interesting choice! My 12 year old daughter is a
voracious reader - devours books at an unbelievable rate, and has well developed literary tastes (thank goodness!). Anyway,
The Book Thief is her all-time-favourite book. She has re-read it many times, and has
often recommended it to me... and I have been resisting! Your words, and reviews on the amazon site that I have now scanned, have now persuaded me to give it a go now. It is one of these cross-over children-to-adult books – and I like that idea.
My most recent reading has been the Alexander McCall Smith books, in the ‘Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency’ series. I loved the keen sense of place, slow pace, and evident humanity in them. I started reading the books long before they became as commercially successful as they now are, and was drawn to the alternative view of African countries they portray - one that I have witnessed - and one that gets too little exposure. Too often we are presented only with the
'starving Africans' image in the media, lumping the whole continent together, and presenting it as one massive impoverished basket-case. And implying that what happens in one country probably happens in every other. While there are undoubted problems, and Zimbabwe is obviously in desperate straits, it is great to find literature that holds up a mirror to the some of the nuances and characteristics of one small corner of that vast continent.