Catka’s Comments (group member since Jun 08, 2018)

Catka’s comments from the Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge group.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is one of my favorites. funny book about suicide, with dry english humor, what's not to like.
and that seems to be quite a popular title with other authors too.

Alisia wrote: "I have Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure sitting on my shelf, so this is a perfect fit!
I read this and I think it is the most unfunny, uninspiring and boring misuse of Austen's work.
But I think this is a fun genre, so I will give a chance to another book for this prompt.

I read Erlend Loe's Doppler this year and found it very funny. It is a part of a three book series, so I want to read the other two as well.

Title/author of a favorite book you read for this year's challenge: favorite author - Celeste Ng, I read both her books Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You for

Prompt you used it for: A book set in the decade you were born and Previous Goodreads Award winner

Two to three sentences on why you loved it: I very much like her writing style with the microscopic precision of the description of characters, places and relations and how she can describe even the unsaid undercurrents running between people and members of families (many times dysfunctional families) in their relations.

Jacqueline wrote: "Oh and my husbands sister said she wouldn’t read a book to save herself. In front of her kids when they were young. They don’t read either. ."
Once I heard a presentation of a children's librarian and he said 5 conditions must be met for kids to become readers:
1. parents must read (and be seen reading)
2. there must be books at home (available at hand) to read
3. parents must read to children
4. school should support reading
5. their peers should be readers too (often the kids read when the are smaller but when they hit puberty, and have friends who do not read, they abandon it)

Nadine wrote: "Voyager was the book that killed the series for me. I finished that one and never looked back."
you are much sensible. I have finished the whole series - all 8 books (listened to audio, I would never have given my full time and attention to them), but I should have stopped after the second one. the rest has lost the esprit of the first two and she was just making more and more unbelievable and occasionally dumb plot lines.

This week I have finished The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, which I liked very much. The author took an Old Testament story of the family of Jacob, specifically a bloody cruel dark but by the Bible only briefly mentioned story of Jacob's daughter Dinah and turned it into a bright loving celebration of life given by women as told by Dinah herself. It was quite refreshing and positive to see a female view of the story originally told by men and focusing largely on men.
I also read the one of the classics: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which was a lovely heartwarming book.
Besides these nice feminine books, I am listening to the audio narration of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - a pseudo-scientific recounting of a human history and do not like it. So far I have learned that the agricultural revolution was a biggest fraud, all the current religions can be summarized as a two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing and the concept of money and Limited Liability Companies are just a figment of our collective imaginations. As much as I love me a good solid scientific facts and argument, I hope this leads somewhere other than the Sapiens are stupid fools and the whole human evolution made the biggest mistake in domestication of crops and it only goes downhill from there.

QOTW: I have a sister who also reads a lot. We are members of a bookclub which her friends have started. We have a bit different taste and preferences in books but I find this enriching rather than bad.

Title: Voyager (Outlander No. 3)
Author: Diana Gabaldon
What was a favorite quote or aspect of this book for you?
- Jamie and Claire meeting again after a long separation.
Would you recommend?
- Only if you loved the first two Outlander books and do not feel ready to abandon Jamie and Claire's world. However, this one was not as good as the previous books and was dragging a little. Especially the sea adventures, as if the author was just pilling one after another, one more unbelievable than the other.

Raquel wrote: "Kenya wrote: "Life of Pi, full stop.
Would you say this is still true if I watched the movie and hated it? Is the book significantly different enough that I'd get something more or different out of reading it?"

I did not like the movie and tried to read the book, but could not finish. Too cruel for me.
I know humans are not fluffy animals, but this was too raw.