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Looooong
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Whilst researching a previous book, Simon Garfield came across the diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt amongst journals collected during the Second World War for Mass Observation. Intrigued by her observations and character, Garfield became determined to learn more about her. After eventually receiving permission from Jean’s niece, he was able to read all forty-five of her diaries, edit them, and produce this huge manuscript for publication: A Notable Woman.

Jean began writing her journals in the April of 1925 at the young age of fifteen. Although she did not write everyday, she continued putting down her thoughts and experiences up until her death in 1986. Jean Lucey Pratt was not a celebrity, although she did write an, unfortunately, unsuccessful book; nor did she achieve anything spectacular during her lifetime. What makes her diaries worth publishing is the fact that she was “ordinary,” a woman who wrote not to impress other people, but to honestly express her emotions and opinions.

For the majority of her life Jean lived on her own in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, where she yearned for a husband. Her dreams of finding the perfect man yet only attracting a handful of lovers is both amusing and saddening. The most interesting part of her written records, however, has got to be the experiences of war. Unlike other diarist such as Anne Frank, who feared for their lives, or those that experienced the fighting up front, Jean provides the perspective of the average British citizen. She comments on the rationing, the blackout curtains as well as the political propaganda, providing her own opinions, which often changed as the war progressed. Jean amuses the reader by revealing she often slept through an air raid, only waking up at the sound of the All Clear.

The war ends midway through the book, thus delivering accounts of the latter half of her life, from career to ill health, incorporating in family events and, of course, her enormous horde of cats. Although a rather introverted, lonely individual, Jean’s relationship and love for her brother is often heartwarming. Separated by oceans and only seeing him every so many years, it is clear that the siblings are strongly supportive of each other. Jean often refers to her brother as Pooh (as in Winnie the Pooh), to which he responds by calling her Piglet.

Initially Jean did not intend to let anyone read her diaries but later began to imagine how other people would react to what she had written. She toyed with the idea of posthumous publication, but presumed only family and friends would read them – how wrong she was! Regardless of whether her diaries were to be viewed by outsiders or not, Jean usually referred to people by their initials. Whether she did this for a particular reason or merely to save time when writing remains debatable, however it does cause a bit of confusion when reading. Helpfully the editor, Garfield, has provided a character list that can be referred back to as needed.

Simon Garfield has done a magnificent job of compiling the diary entries together to produce an interesting, moving and occasionally amusing story about life during the 1900s. He has painstakingly sorted through handwritten entries, deciding what bits to omit and conducting further research in order to explain in footnotes the sections or references that would not make sense if left alone. Garfield has made the majority of Jean’s journals flow like a novel, only becoming erratic towards the end of her life when she would only write once every few months.

A Notable Woman gives a fantastic insight into the lives of ordinary people during an era of hardship and change. Readers are more likely to read an accurate description of the war and subsequent years in this book than in any emotionally detached textbook or biased account. Without a doubt this book is worth a read, although do not expect to be able to rush through it as some may do with a work of fiction. Garfield if highly praised for his efforts, and one hopes that Jean would be proud to finally have a writing success.
  
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Sarah (7798 KP) created a post in Bookworms

Apr 3, 2018  
A couple of years ago Goodreads posted a list of their 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, as voted by users. We may have moved on a little, but personally I think this list still stands.

What do you think? How many have you read?


1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3. The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
4. 1984 - George Orwell
5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
6. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
7. The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
8. Charlotte's Web - EB White
9. The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien
10. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
11. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
12. Jane Eyre- Jane Austen
13. Animal Farm - George Orwell
14. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
15. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
16. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
18. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
19. The Help - Kathryn Stockett
20. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
21. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
22. The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
23. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
24. Night - Elie Wiesel
25. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
26. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
27. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
28. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
29. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
31. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
32. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
33. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
34. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
35. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
36. The Giver - Lois Lowry
37. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
38. Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
39. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
40. The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
41. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
42. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
43. Macbeth - William Shakespeare
44. The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
45. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
46. The Holy Bible: King James version
47. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
48. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
49. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
50. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
51. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
52. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
53. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
54. The Stand - Stephen King
55. Outlander - Diana Gabaldon
56. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
57. Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
58. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
59. Watership Down - Richard Adams
60. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
61. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
62. A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin
63. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
64. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
65. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
66. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
67. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - JK Rowling
68. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
69. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
70. Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
71. The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
72. The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
73. Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
74. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
75. Dracula - Bram Stoker
76. The Princess Bride - William Goldman
77. Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
78. The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe
79. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
80. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
81. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. The Time Travelers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
83. The Odyssey - Homer
84. The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
85. Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
86. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
87. The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
88. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
89. The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
90. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
91. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
92. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
93. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
94. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
95. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
96. Beloved - Toni Morrison
97. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
98. The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
99. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
100. The Story of My Life - Helen Keller
  
Show all 14 comments.
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Angelicalynnn (21 KP) Jul 6, 2018

I’ve read 30 not to bad but still plenty I would love to read!

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iamsara (130 KP) Jul 19, 2018

14 ?

<i>I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.</i>

Whilst researching a previous book, Simon Garfield came across the diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt amongst journals collected during the Second World War for Mass Observation. Intrigued by her observations and character, Garfield became determined to learn more about her. After eventually receiving permission from Jean’s niece, he was able to read all forty-five of her diaries, edit them, and produce this huge manuscript for publication: <i>A Notable Woman</i>.

Jean began writing her journals in the April of 1925 at the young age of fifteen. Although she did not write everyday, she continued putting down her thoughts and experiences up until her death in 1986. Jean Lucey Pratt was not a celebrity, although she did write an, unfortunately, unsuccessful book; nor did she achieve anything spectacular during her lifetime. What makes her diaries worth publishing is the fact that she was “ordinary,” a woman who wrote not to impress other people, but to honestly express her emotions and opinions.

For the majority of her life Jean lived on her own in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, where she yearned for a husband. Her dreams of finding the perfect man yet only attracting a handful of lovers is both amusing and saddening. The most interesting part of her written records, however, has got to be the experiences of war. Unlike other diarist such as Anne Frank, who feared for their lives, or those that experienced the fighting up front, Jean provides the perspective of the average British citizen. She comments on the rationing, the blackout curtains as well as the political propaganda, providing her own opinions, which often changed as the war progressed. Jean amuses the reader by revealing she often slept through an air raid, only waking up at the sound of the All Clear.

The war ends midway through the book, thus delivering accounts of the latter half of her life, from career to ill health, incorporating in family events and, of course, her enormous horde of cats. Although a rather introverted, lonely individual, Jean’s relationship and love for her brother is often heartwarming. Separated by oceans and only seeing him every so many years, it is clear that the siblings are strongly supportive of each other. Jean often refers to her brother as Pooh (as in <i>Winnie the Pooh</i>), to which he responds by calling her Piglet.

Initially Jean did not intend to let anyone read her diaries but later began to imagine how other people would react to what she had written. She toyed with the idea of posthumous publication, but presumed only family and friends would read them – how wrong she was! Regardless of whether her diaries were to be viewed by outsiders or not, Jean usually referred to people by their initials. Whether she did this for a particular reason or merely to save time when writing remains debatable, however it does cause a bit of confusion when reading. Helpfully the editor, Garfield, has provided a character list that can be referred back to as needed.

Simon Garfield has done a magnificent job of compiling the diary entries together to produce an interesting, moving and occasionally amusing story about life during the 1900s. He has painstakingly sorted through handwritten entries, deciding what bits to omit and conducting further research in order to explain in footnotes the sections or references that would not make sense if left alone. Garfield has made the majority of Jean’s journals flow like a novel, only becoming erratic towards the end of her life when she would only write once every few months.

<i>A Notable Woman</i> gives a fantastic insight into the lives of ordinary people during an era of hardship and change. Readers are more likely to read an accurate description of the war and subsequent years in this book than in any emotionally detached textbook or biased account. Without a doubt this book is worth a read, although do not expect to be able to rush through it as some may do with a work of fiction. Garfield if highly praised for his efforts, and one hopes that Jean would be proud to finally have a writing success.
  
40x40

Hadley (567 KP) rated Lie to Me in Books

Nov 18, 2019  
Lie to Me
Lie to Me
Kaitlin Ward | 2019 | Mystery, Thriller, Young Adult (YA)
6
8.0 (3 Ratings)
Book Rating
Bad writing (1 more)
Mostly romance
Drowning is one of the top fears in the world, and it's also one of the top ways to cover up a murder. In Lie to Me, Ward's fourth YA novel, she uses drowning as the basis of the story. Yet, this book fell very short in the thriller/mystery genre: Ward gives away too many hints at the beginning of the book, that most readers will have the murderer figured out by chapter 7; she also focuses too much on romance, something that should have caused this story to be filed under a different category other than mystery/thriller. But luckily she didn't bring in a wide circle of characters to cause confusion, using only one view point from the main character of Lie to Me: Amelia- - - a teen girl who believes she was pushed down a ravine to be left for dead in the raging water below.

Besides her 'accident,' Amelia leads a normal life with her mother, father and brother, Hunter - - - she also has a small group of friends. After her 'fall,' a body of a teen girl from the same town is found in a nearby river, but the town gossips, and makes it seem that this girl committed suicide, leaving Amelia worried that her family would think the same thing about her. Depression is something that Amelia's family has had to deal with before, but the talk of depression is candid and not very enlightening; her brother, Hunter, who is in therapy for such doesn't even talk about it, instead he's usually seen playing soccer or Fortnite, this seems to be a broad attempt to bring mental health into the story,but without going into that subject, it failed as a story line. Yet, one of the main causes of depression today is social media, which we find Amelia stalking one of her best friends/love interest on- - -if Ward was trying to reach the YA community about depression, she went the wrong way about it.

Another mistake that Ward made was when Amelia receives an anonymous text message from someone telling her to 'Just let it go,Amelia,' this occurs after she has started investigating whether her 'accident' was an accident. Amelia tells us that she is always suspicious of everyone, but when this text message comes around, it's as if she could care less. She even tries to take the anonymous message as advice: " 'Or it's advice.' I feel backed into a corner. It's one thing to believe someone hurt me and another thing to have proof of it. I don't want this to be proof. 'I mean, Sky's always telling me I should let my life get back to normal, and she doesn't even know I'm thinking any of this. Maybe someone else feels that way,too.' " In reality, if you believed that someone attempted to murder you, and suddenly you are receiving a cryptic message about letting it go, wouldn't the logic thing to do is go to the police?? Amelia doesn't!

Ward has written three other YA novels, 'Lie to Me' being her fourth. The writing in this story is bad in some places, for example, a scene with Amelia and her best friend, Sky, meeting up at the 'screen' (technically a giant drive-in movie theater screen); Amelia thinks about how this town is a haven for her, that everyone feels safe, but the very next paragraph, she's stating she doesn't feel safe anymore. This makes sense if you haven't read it, but the way it's written could have been in a much better and concise way. This and most scenes makes the story read like a sloppy diary entry. That, and the killer being predictable so early on in the story made me very disappointed with this book. 'Lie to Me' had great potential from the synopsis, but it lacked story, mystery, suspense and diverse characters.

I can't recommend this book to people who love horror stories, like I do. I think the only ones who would enjoy this story are the die-hard YA fans. It has everything that YA is known for: romance and teen drama, but it's lacking in everything else. Other than that, I don't think I'll read another book by Ward, but as far as Point horror books go, I will still give them a shot.
  
The Art of Escaping
The Art of Escaping
6
7.3 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
<b><i>I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.</i></b>

Hold on a second while I scream in my corner about how I am finally <em>on time</em> to write a review before a book actually releases. Just barely, but you know, it's still relatively on time. &#x1f631;

Maybe it's because I've decided to give up on the four books that have been there since 2016 and reset my priorities.

Okay, back on topic.

<em>The Art of Escaping</em> by Erin Callahan is a book that Roberta first introduced to me in sometime in a year far ago and honestly? Well, let's find out.

<h2 style="text-align: center;"><strong>A Few Things About <em>The Art of Escaping</em></strong></h2>
Erin Callahan's latest novel is about escapology, and maybe the title explains what escapology is, but there's probably multiple layers of meaning with the title aside from literally. (I approve of this approach.)

But here: I almost DNFed this one. But I wanted to know the end, so curiosity got better of me.

<h3><strong>Multiple POVs was meh but okay.</strong></h3>
<em>The Art of Escaping</em> is told in two views: Mattie and Will. Three, if you count diary entries as an intermission between chapters. I'm not against multiple views and maybe I was tired, but I struggled sometimes with this one.

There were times where it felt like the story was being told right now as it is happening, and then there were times where it felt the story was being told by a future version of the characters. And then there were times the story kind of repeated itself, then went onwards. &#x1f937;&#x1f3fb;‍♀️

<h3><strong>Occasionally I liked a line or two. Or three.</strong></h3>
There are some great one-liners in here, but a lot of the writing I glossed over. To be honest, sometimes I was bored and maybe it was just me in a very bad time (I felt like doing nothing for the past few weeks if my lack of posts say anything).

But I was also reading another book, and it was more interesting? Lack of motivation did nothing there. So maybe I'm not the only one who felt meh about the writing.

<h3><strong>There is NO romance.</strong></h3>
Well, not exactly. There are snippets here and there, but it's not a part of the storyline, which is 11/10 okay with me because every book and its sequel has a romance somehow these days. (Am I complaining? Not really. I like books with no romance sometimes.) But the main point is, it's not a <i>huge</i> plot bunny.

<h3><strong>Friendship and sibling dynamics.</strong></h3>
Okay, so I can live for the friendship and sibling dynamics because they were developed quite well, or at least, in the few months timeframe. The brother/sister relationship isn't much, but the friendship is a huge part of the book for both new and old relationships. It was lovely seeing Will and Mattie grow a friendship over escapology and then bringing the other characters in.

<h3><strong>Miyu is a precious bean.</strong></h3>
Early on in <em>The Art of Escaping</em>, Callahan introduces readers to Miyu, who ends up being Mattie's mentor who is Crabby<sup>TM</sup>. Honestly though, I absolutely love Miyu - she's a crab, but deep down, she's a soft cookie filled with chocolate chips. Plus 95% of the best sentences in the book come from Miyu, so there is never a boring moment with her on the page.

<h2><strong>Honestly I was hoping <i>The Art of Escaping</i> would be good, but there were a few things missing to make it to that level. It wasn't a mess, but maybe a few sweeps needed.</strong></h2>

<a href="https://bookwyrmingthoughts.com/the-art-of-escaping-by-erin-callahan-thank-you-death-come-again/"; target="_blank">This review was originally posted on Bookwyrming Thoughts</a>