Book of the Week

I love books that have good plot twists. This book has two of them. Two plot twists that will completely change your perspective of the victim and the characters associated with her. 

"Young girls and mass murders are tender hearted creatures" 

Alex Prévost—kidnapped, savagely beaten, suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a tiny wooden cage—is running out of time. Her abductor appears to want only to watch her die. Will hunger, thirst, or the rats get her first?

Apart from a shaky eyewitness report of the abduction, Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven has nothing to go on: no suspect, no leads, and no family or friends anxious to find a missing loved one. The diminutive and brilliant detective knows from bitter experience the urgency of finding the missing woman as quickly as possible—but first he must understand more about her. 

As he uncovers the details of the young woman’s singular history, Camille is forced to acknowledge that the person he seeks is no ordinary victim. She is beautiful, yes, but also extremely tough and resourceful. Before long, saving Alex’s life will be the least of Commandant Verhoeven’s considerable challenges.

Book of the Week

 I read this book a long time ago. I've always loved Christian mythology, angels and demons. I think these are topics where you can explote a lot and, well treated, you can write really good stories. So, obviously, when I saw this book, I couldn't resist.
It's well written, realistically. When you write about supernatural topics, especially about angels, it's so easy to fall into the ridiculous. You have to be careful. Coherence is essential when you write any story, especiallly supernatural stories. Coherence gives credibility.
You never get the feeling that it's too fanciful or that lacks logic, and that's a big plus with these stories.

“Angel and devil,” he said. “One is but a shade of the other.” 

The story follows a nun in New York who unwittingly reignites an ancient war between Angelologists, a group who study angels, and a race of descendants of angels and humans called the Nephilim. The story blends ancient biblical pericopes, the myth of Orpheus, and the fall of rebel angels.

Book of the Week

 This is one of my favorite books. It's a short story, which is a shame, I'd have liked to go deeper into the story of Carmilla and Laura. But it's short story full of beauty. A story of love and repulsion, opposing feelings, terrifying truths. A story full of sensuality and sexuality, narrated so subtly that it is irresistible.

 “Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

  Laura begins her tale by relating her childhood in a "picturesque and solitary" castle in the midst of an extensive forest in Styria, where she lives with her father, a wealthy English widower, retired from the Austrian Service. When she was six years old, Laura had a vision of a beautiful visitor in her bedchamber. She later claims to have been bitten on the chest, although no wounds are found on her.
 Twelve years later, a carriage accident outside Laura's home unexpectedly brings a girl of Laura's age into the family's care. Her name is Carmilla. Both girls instantly recognize the other from the "dream" they both had when they were young. Carmilla appears injured after her carriage accident, but her mysterious mother informs Laura's father that her journey is urgent and cannot be delayed. She arranges to leave her daughter with Laura and her father until she can return in three months.

Book of the Week

  I've always been very interested in World War II topic, and I love reading books about this historical period. This book is a very well narrated story about the search of the truth. I cried like a baby in some parts, maybe because it is a really sad book, or maybe because I get emotional very easy with this topic, the truth be told.

  “Michel. In my dreams, you come and get me. You take me by the hand and you lead me away. This life is too much for me to bear. I look at the key and I long for you and for the past. For the innocent, easy days before the war. I know now my scars will never heal. I hope my son will forgive me. He will never know. No one will ever know.”

 Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Book of the Week

  This is, by far, my favorite book. Once I read that if a book doesn't deserve a second reading, then neither deserved the first one, and I read this book many times, because it deserved, and I'm sure I'll read it again many times in the future. One of the things I love most about The Name of the Wind is that no matter how many times I read it, the story always catchs me like the first time, even though I know what will happen, I find myself lost in its pages, eager to continue reading, unable to leave Patrick Rothfuss world. 

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” 

So begins the tale of Kvothe—from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In these pages you will come to know Kvothe as a notorious magician, an accomplished thief, a masterful musician, and an infamous assassin. But The Name of the Wind is so much more—for the story it tells reveals the truth behind Kvothe's legend.

Book of the Week

 A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to read the saga that has conquered the whole world: The Hunger Games. And I really loved it! I love strong women who fights, I like the revolutions, the situation of being against the wall, when your options are or cowardice or fight to death. In short, I like the stories whose plot seems to quote Che Guevara: ''I would rather die standing up to live on my knees''

  “What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment?”

The Hunger Games trilogy takes place in an unspecified future time, in the totalitarian nation of Panem. The country consists of the wealthy Capitol, located in the Rocky Mountains, and twelve (formerly thirteen) poorer districts ruled by the Capitol. The Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, but the twelve districts are in varying states of poverty – the trilogy's narrator and protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the poorest region of Panem, formerly known as Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. As punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol wherein twelve of the districts were defeated and the thirteenth supposedly destroyed, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, are selected by lottery to participate in the "Hunger Games" on an annual basis. The Games are a televised event, with the participants, called "tributes", being forced to fight to the death in a dangerous public arena. The winning tribute and his/her home district is then rewarded with food, and supplies and riches. The purpose of the Hunger Games is to provide entertainment for the Capitol and to serve as a reminder to the Districts of the Capitol's power and lack of remorse.

Book of the Week

  I remember four years ago I saw, by chance, a book: Study in Scarlet. I had heard of Sherlock Holmes, superb detective, but had never ever read any book of Arthur Conan Doyle.  The book was very cheap, so it was the perfect time to meet Sherlock. I bought it, and I fell in love with Holmes.

  “It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.''

  A Study in Scarlet was Sherlock Holmes' first outing into the literary world. Published in 1887 (after many rejections) it was an immediate success. Conan Doyle's quirky hero, with his cold deductive mind, violin playing and cocaine addiction, fascinated the reading public, and laid the foundation for the many Sherlock Holmes books and short stories that were to follow over the next three decades. In this first work, all the winning ingredient of a Holmes novel appear fully-formed: a murder, puzzling clues, evil villains, startling locations and an elegant, surprising solution provided in typical laconic style by the arch-sleuth himself.

Book of the Week

 It's not an easy lecture, not because its narrative style, but because the confused, incoherent and wandering thoughts of the protagonist, Raskolnikov. It's not easy to understand, neither. I know people that the only thing they have taken from this novel is that the protagonist is stupid, which is sad, and even outrageous.
 As the title itself suggests, a crime is committed, and it is interesting to see what the punishment is. For me, the more interesting, and even instructive about human nature, element is why the Raskolnikov commits the crime, and how he tortured himself for it. His conscience makes him suffer, not for the lives he has taken, but because of his fear that the truth comes out.

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is." 

The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men being above the law, since in their brilliance they think “new thoughts” and so contribute to society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two characters — the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder — both of whom compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime — which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment — to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become.

Book of the Week

 The element that surprised me when I read this book, a few years ago, was the narrator of the story: death itself. I think the writer was right to tell the story from the point of view of death, after all,  there's no better narrator to tell a story set in World War II. Also liked how the writer gave humanity to the character's death, making the reader sympathize with it and feel sorry for it (priceless the last setence of the novel, my favorite,  wich manages to send chills down my spine).

“Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.” 

 It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist: books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Book of the Week

 I was sixteen when I read  Pride and Prejudice. It was the first Jane Austen novel I read and I fell completely in love with this author. Since then I've read everything she wrote.

"From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

 When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Mr Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Mr Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever.

Book of the Week

I read this book a long time ago, I fell in love then, and still love it. I read it in Spanish, so I don't know how good and reliable is the translation, but still recommended:

''Fifteen years on, the remembrance of that day has returned to me. I have seen that boy wandering through the mist of the railway station, and the name of Marina has flared up again like a fresh wound. We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine...''
 In May 1980, 15-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts... His story begins in the heart of old Barcelona, when he meets Marina and her father German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the fourth Sunday of each month. At 10 a.m. precisely a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman dressed in black, her face shrouded, wearing gloves, holding a single rose. She walks over to a gravestone that bears no name, only the mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings. When Oscar and Marine decide to follow her, they begin a journey that will take them to the heights of a forgotten, post -war Barcelona, a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.