The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Barcelona, 1945 – Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.” – Goodreads

Last year it seemed like everyone on Goodreads was reading this book and loving it. I bought it last June but didn’t get around to reading it until a couple of weeks ago. What took me so long?! I wish I had read it sooner! This book was so good and to me, it lived up to its hype.

If you know me, you know that I love the 1940s/WW2 era. Though the setting of the book is in that time, I was unsure I’d like it because it takes place in Spain, specifically Barcelona. Nothing against Spain or anything, I just didn’t know too much of Spanish history of that time, except for the little I remember about Francisco Franco from a report I did back in elementary school a long time ago. But it turned out to be a great setting for the overall mood of the book. I thought the setting of Barcelona enhanced the overall secretive, mysterious, and eerie vibe. The book definitely had that ’shadowy’ noir feeling.

The plot itself was very interesting, with quite a bit of twists and turns. I liked that The Shadow of the Wind in the book was the catalyst for the events in Daniel’s life, which at some point somewhat mirrored the true tale of Julian Carax’s life. So much so that once I even thought perhaps Daniel was Julian’s illegitimate son. I was wrong about that, but some of my hunches were correct. Still, there were surprises left for me to read even when I figured out some of the secrets. This is a book that you can’t say from the beginning that you’ve figured out the whole plot. Some books practically give away how the rest of the book will go right from the beginning chapters, but this piece keeps you reading for more. You really feel the need to know what happens next to Daniel or what happened in Julian’s past that was so horrible that so many people are involved in keeping the secrets related to him.

My favorite characters were Julian Carax and Fermin Romero de Torres. I enjoyed the whole book but I have to admit I was more interested with Julian’s story. It was fascinating  to follow him from an innocent child to a reckless, idealistic, hopeful teenager, and finally to an empty, angry, heartbroken man who can’t let go of the past. In contrast is Fermin, a very loquacious character, who knows a lot about a lot, and adds some comic relief when things get a little bit too serious. He too has suffered some injustices in the past, specifically under the violent hands of Inspector Fumero, who has ties to both Julian and Daniel’s stories. However, Fermin takes life as it comes and is lighthearted, in order to not succumb to the darkness and violence of his past. I think I’m going to have to also add the character of Miquel on that favorite characters list as well because I was just so touched by his loyalty and dedication to his childhood friend, Julian. It was amazing the lengths he went to help out Julian.

Overall, I thought this book had it all. It had a plot that was interesting enough to keep the reader wanting more, romance, doomed love, murder, mystery, and even some laughs. It had great characters, great settings, and a style of writing that was very easy to follow without losing its sophistication. I absolutely loved this book and it’s safe to say this is now one of my favorite books ever!

Rating: ★★★★★

Mailbox Monday 1/25/10

mailboxmonday Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

Last week I ordered and received the following:

  • Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins
  • The Serpent’s Tale - Ariana Franklin
  • The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane - Katherine Howe
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Books 1 -3) Volume Set – Rick Riordan

I will have to refrain myself from buying more books until the weekend of February 27th. That weekend I’ll be in Pennsylvania and there’s a huge discount bookstore in Wyomissing that I visited last year. Since I’ll be in that area again, I’m going to save up money to buy books :)

    Teaser Tuesday, Jan. 5

    Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB ofShould Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

    • Grab your current read
    • Open to a random page
    • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
    • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
    • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

    I had to make an effort not to run in the street, to walk with the anonymous gray calm of people who have no secrets to hide. When I inserted the key in the apartment door, I realized that the lock had been forced. I froze.

    The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, pg. 412

    Booking Through Thursday: 2009 In Review

    It’s the last day of the year, and you know what that means … nostalgia and looking back.

    What were your favorite books of the year? (Books that were new to you in 2009, if not necessarily published this year.)

    My favorite reads of the year were:

    People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks

    I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

    Suite Francaise – Irene Nemirovsky

    North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell

    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

    The Girl Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson

    Mistress of the Art of Death – Ariana Franklin

    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

    Sarah’s Key – Tatiana de Rosnay

    Reading Challenges Wrap Up

    It’s the last day of 2009 and this is just a wrap-up post of this year’s reading challenges. Out of 6 challenges, I only completed 4 of them. I think it’s pretty good, considering it was my first year joining in reading challenges.

    This also means signing up for new challenges for 2010.

    Here are the 2010 Reading Challenges I am joining:

    1. Pages Read Challenge 2010
    2. TBR Challenge 2010
    3. Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge
    4. Our Mutual Read: Victorian Reading Challenge
    5. Jane Austen Challenge
    6. Typically British Reading Challenge
    7. Bibliophilic Books Challenge
    8. 2010 Chunkster Challenge
    9. Historical Fiction Reading Challenge
    10. 1st in a Series Challenge
    11. 101 Books in 1,001 Days (start Jan. 1, 2010 – end Sept. 28, 2012)

    Victory is mine! :D

    Back in September, I read about this great promotion through Passages to the Past. Sourcebooks had a receipt promotion for their reissue of Georgette Heyer’s The Foundling. You e/mail in a copy of your Barnes & Noble receipt to be entered into the giveaway, which was a $200 Barnes & Noble Gift Card. $200? Gift card? Of course I had to join!

    Well, after coming home tonight and going through the weekend mail, I found a Barnes & Noble envelope. Having received a B&N gift card before from an online friend last year for Christmas, I thought ‘No way! She got me another gift card? But it’s too early for gifts!’ lol Well, I totally forgot about the Sourcebooks contest, but when I saw $200 printed underneath the card, I screamed and jumped like a crazy woman as it dawned on me! My father was a witness lol I WON! I can’t believe it! I mean, when I first entered, I had wishful images of myself winning it and what I would get with it and when, whether to spend it all at once or little by little, etc. But to actually win it?! Kuh-crazy!!! Just goes to show the book community is awesome!

    Thank you, Sourcebooks, for the wonderful promotion! I’m soo happy! Christmas came early :)

    Monday Memes 9/21/09

    mailboxmonday Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

    I’ve received quite a few books from BookMooch this month. Here they are:

    • The Russian Concubine – Kate Furnivall
    • 44 Scotland Street – Alexander McCall Smith
    • Girl with a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
    • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Martina Lewycka
    • The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – Ann Brashares
    • London – Edward Rutherfurd
    • The Crimson Petal and the White – Michael Faber

    readingonmondays It’s Monday! What are you reading this week? is a weekly event to list the books completed last week, the books currently being read, and the books to be finished this week.

    Books Completed Last Week:

    Mistress of the Art of Death – Ariana Franklin

    I’m Currently Reading:

    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
    Dracula- Bram Stoker
    Luncheon of the Boating Party – Susan Vreeland

    Books I Hope to Finish This Week:

    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

    The Road – Cormac McCarthy

    The Road From Barnes & Noble:

    A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

    The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

    This book was slow going at first and I was really doubting how far this story was going to go with just the man and the boy as characters. But it got interesting when some humans driven to cannibalism showed up. After that I was more on edge as I read along, always nervous that a band of said humans were going to ambush father and son.

    At first, I didn’t like the writing, didn’t like the fact there were no chapters; it was throwing me off. Eventually I realized the continuous blocks of paragraphs were brilliant. I haven’t read any other McCarthy work so I’m not sure if this is his style or just specific for this book, but I thought the paragraph blocks helped emphasize the mood of unending desolation. McCarthy also didn’t use apostrophes for some contractions, which clearly breaks the rules. But I think this paralleled the environment of the story, an America which didn’t have anymore rules and noone to enforce them. This is clearly demonstrated by the cannibalistic humans, who from the extreme lack of proper food, breaks society’s standard of not eating other people.

    The Road definitely has a depressing and hopeless mood, but I think it is well written and touching.

    Rating: ★★★½☆

    World Without End – Ken Follett

    World Without End From Barnes & Noble:

    In 1989 Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. Critics were overwhelmed—”it will hold you, fascinate you, surround you” (Chicago Tribune)—and readers everywhere hoped for a sequel.

    World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas— about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race—the Black Death.

    This was a mammoth book just like its prequel The Pillars of the Earth. I liked World Without End just as much. The characters, with the main ones descendants of the characters from TPotE, were just as interesting and some of them even more infuriating.

    I liked that the plague was wound into the book and was connected to a storyline of a very opinionated and strong minded woman, Caris. Caris was a female character that I admired because she was strong and independent contrast against the patriarchal superiority of the monks. She was also an early nurse/doctor, who actually knew more than the Oxford-trained monk-physicians in town, just from pure common sense and actual attention to the patients. Her superiority in this over the monks was very enjoyable to read because Follett emphasizes the inequalities between men and women in this book.

    One small thing that irked me though was Follett having a monk saying the phrase “living it up”. Seriously, did they say that in the 1300s? I don’t know how many historical behavior inaccuracies are in this book, but “living it up” coming out of a monk’s mouth was something that definitely stood out to me.

    However, that little glitch didn’t really take away from the story. I was completely engrossed – furious and elated as I followed the characters throughout the book.

    Rating: ★★★★☆


    The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

    The Time Traveler's Wife From Barnes & Noble:

    Audrey Niffenegger’s innovative debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

    The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s marriage and their passionate love for each other, as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals — steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

    Ever since I saw that Eric Bana was in the movie adaptation, I was determined to read this book before the movie came out. Well, I’ve finished the book, the movie’s come out, and I have no desire to see it anymore until I can watch it from Netflix. I didn’t hate it but I’m certainly not head over heels in love with it like many out there. It was alright, but maybe I was just expecting too much out of it because of all the hype. I didn’t think it was that romantic and the happenings towards the end weren’t tear-jerkery as explained by others. I’m not allergic to romance, in fact, half of my daydreams have to do with romance and various scenarios in which I find the man of my dreams. However, even though the element of time-travel was used to emphasize the unusual romance between Henry and Clare, and thus making it a “love wins against all odds” romance, which, as a woman, is supposed to make me go ‘Aww’, I just wasn’t sold on it.

    Why not?

    Because of Clare.

    It wasn’t a spontaneous romance. She basically knows from the age of thirteen that she’s going to be married to Henry in the future. Aside from a couple of minor boyfriends, which unsurprisingly don’t work out, she propels her life to a path where she ultimately meets up again with Henry because she knows she’s supposed to be with him, a fact that more or less Henry divulges to Clare. How do you get that fact out of your mind  and attempt to even have real relationships with other men? If your future husband tells you you end up as his wife, why even bother? I really don’t like that Henry told Clare about this because I feel like it robbed her of making her own decision on who to be with. Yeah sure, she went out with a couple of guys, but that was mostly to pass the time before she meets up with Henry again. None of those relationships were meant to be learning experiences, whereas if she was oblivious to her romantic future with Henry, they would’ve been and would’ve made Henry and Clare’s romance more plausible and enjoyable to follow.

    I also can’t believe that more people didn’t know of Henry’s time-traveling condition, or that if they were curious about his numerous disappearances, they weren’t curious enough to look further into it.  The ones that did know weren’t as spooked out about it.

    What I did like about this book though was the idea of time-travelling as a genetic disorder. I wish there was a little bit more on that in the book.

    I wish I liked this book more, but it’s been a little over a month now since I’ve read this book and I still feel the same way.

    Rating: ★★★☆☆

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