2005 books

[peteryoung]

Jostein Gaarder, The Orange Girl, 2003
Apart from unexpectedly turning out to be one of those 'posthumous letters from father to son' affairs, I can't really see why this story was considered interesting enough for publication, even for a children's book. Concerning the identity of a mysterious girl who turns out to be none other the protagonist's mother, it has a one-dimensional track from which it never digresses, and the point of the journey was lost on me. Nice dustjacket, though, which is what attracted me in the first place, but what lies between the covers was ultimately disappointing.

Comments

[i-ate-my-crusts.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of books :)

I thought I was doing pretty well with 8, but 12 is very impressive.

Thanks for the long reviews of the previous couple, and these additional short reviews - interesting stuff.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

can't really see why this story was considered interesting enough for publication, even for a children's book

I ask this in a spirit of enquiry, not as an attack: would you care to elaborate on the above, which seems to imply that you consider children's books intrinsically less interesting (than, books for adults, I presume).

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

The Orange Girl seems to be aimed at teen readers but it's a book in which next to nothing actually happens, other than the late father telling the son in a letter how he met his mother. I think there are far more interesting things he could have done with it. I might give it to my niece to see what she thinks.

I go through phases of reading children's fiction from time to time, but it does depend on the subject matter, of course.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

Twelve books? Far more than I've managed in a very long time -- there were some years in which I barely had time to read any books at all, which is one of the reasons we say that we've given up buying them. But I did better this month, in part because we spent many hours on aeroplanes or in long-distance coaches; four books went with me to Australia, and three of them were read. Almost -- I hadn't quite finished the third, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations, by the time we returned, and it took me a week to cover the remaining 120-odd pages. As we also say, what we really need is a year off on full pay, and then we might start catching up with the backlog....