Another short story that I read recently was "The Yellow Wallpaper". This book is written in the form of a diary being kept by a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Instead of getting the necessary medical attention, the woman is taken by her husband to a Summer house where she is required to rest in order to get better. Her husband has forbidden her from writing as he believes that this is what made her sick, however she secretly starts keeping a diary where she writes about her situation, and most of all about the intriguing yellow wallpaper in the room where she spends her time. After a lot of thinking and analyzing the pattern of the wallpaper she starts to believe that a woman resides underneath the wallpaper that wants to get out and she must help her to do so. Before reading this book I read very good reviews of it, and although the story itself is quite captivating, I didn't enjoy reading it as much as I thought I would. I think this book is more about the concept of the story that describes how women, or even anyone suffering from depression, were treated in those days that makes this book so compelling to most people. I generally do not enjoy short stories because I feel that they do not give you enough time to get to know the characters and they always seem to end abruptly whereas I like to get into the book and become a part of the character's lives. After reading such good reviews about this book I am surprised that I didn't feel the same way about it and I am still wondering if there was something that I missed.
In this short story Ebeneezer Scrooge is a lonely miser that hoards all his money and does not even think about helping his impoverished family or others in need. On returning home one cold night he is visited by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, which has been dead for seven years. Marley warns Scrooge that unless he changes his way of living he will be spending his afterlife in great misery where he will not be able to rest. On that night Scrooge is visited by three spirits, the ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas yet to come. The spirits make Scrooge realize that there is much more to life than he is living and by helping others he can make someone else's life better. I think everyone heard about Scrooge's story but not everyone has read this book. I was one of them until I realized that the other day so I decided to read it. It is a very short book and you can finish it in just a couple of hours but I really enjoyed it. Dickens makes good use of imagery to convey the difference between the poor people that still managed to live a happy life as oppsed to Srooge who was wealthy but chose to live a cold and lonely life. This was a very enjoyable book to read and it is suitable for kids and adults alike. It aims to put a message across that one shouldn't be greedy and I think Charles Dickens did that very well.
Anna is in Dublin staying with her parents while she recovers from some serious injuries, however her mind is back home in New York. At first what happened to Anna is a mystery, with the occasional mention of her husband Aidan who doesn't seem to be around anymore. When she moves back to New York the story starts unveiling through Anna's painful thoughts. She tries to appear as everything is fine but in reality she is willing to do anything to hear from Aidan, even lose her glamorous job as a PR for a makeup line. While Anna is learning to deal with the truth she also discovers something that she never expected. At first this made her furious at Aidan however in the end it turned out to be what she needed to move on and the closest to Aidan she could get now that he is gone.
A group of eight immigrants from different parts of the world go to England in hopes of finding a better life, but instead they find themselves living in two caravans in a strawberry field, not at all what they had expected. This book deals with how immigrants in England perceive the country before they go there, the high expectations they have and their hope of making a better life for themselves. The immigrants are instead exploited and given jobs that the English people will not do such as strawberry picking and working in the poultry industry. The book is written from the point of view of these eight workers, as well as dog's point which they have named Dog. In the second part this is mostly from Andriy's and Irina's point of view, both from Ukraine but one is a miner's son from the Donbas mining region while the other is a bourgeois girl from the anti-Russian Western Ukraine. Despite being very different they end up being attracted to each other and they both think that in the long run they can change the other's way of thinking. I picked up this book while I was at the airport in London on my way back home because I had seen a couple of people reading it during my short stay there. Initially I thought it would be light reading but Marina Lewycka managed to explore serious subjects such as global capitalism in a way that it will not bore you out.
This is a collection of essays about fatherhood written by various bloggers and compiled by Heather B. Armstrong of www.dooce.com. The essays vary from those written by fathers about their kids or to their kids, to those written about the authors' fathers. I found the essays witten by the fathers quite interesting and enjoyed seeing parenthood from the dads' perspective. My favorite essays were 'Sam I Am' by Matthew Baldwin and 'Day Job' by Heather B. Armstrong. This was a little different read for me as I don't usually read these kind of books but I'm always open to new things so being I follow Dooce I thought I'd give it a try. I was expecting this book to be more funny and deep from the reviews I read about it and from reading Dooce, however I was a bit disappointed to find out that most of the essays aren't really humorous and none of them that deep. I didn't care for some of the essays either, especially ones were the writing is not that good. Maybe I had high expectations for this book and that is why I was disappointed. What I would have liked to see was more essays by Heather herself as I like her style of writing, and in general I think it would have been a better book.
This book is written from the perspective of Gemma, Lily and Jojo, three women striving to be successful. Gemma and Lily used to be friends, until Lily stole Gemma's boyfriend Anton, although it's debatable whether she really stole him since Gemma and Anton broke up prior to them getting together. Jojo is the sexy agent at Lipman Haigh involved in a complicated love affair with Mark, one of the partners at the company while she herself is striving to become partner. The three women connect when Jojo agents both Lily's and Gemma's book and as the story evolves, everything gets more complicated, from their love life to their jobs. This is typical 'Chick Lit' but Marian Keyes did a great job at making the story enjoyable where you get to both laugh and cry. It's a great book for a relaxing read with nothing too intriguing to figure out and very easy to go through. For some reason I found myself really rooting for Gemma and was a little disappointed with how her book turned out, but on the other hand was pleased that everything else worked out for her. Knowing how each of the women perceive the situation made me connect with the three of them, and although at times I didn't like Lily in the end I really wanted her to get back with Anton. I also found the three different characters to be real, with a little extravagance thrown in to make it more interesting but I can easily see how anyone can feel the way they did given the circumstances. Definitely need to read a book like this every now and then.
What was supposed to be a romantic weekend away with her husband turned out to be a horrible nightmare for Jessie. She is fed up of his sleazy sex games but she comes to regret the moment she kicked him in his crotch, causing him to have a fatal heart attack and leaving her handcuffed to the bed, all alone at their cabin where her screaming is heard by no one. During the hours she spent attached to the bed, Jessie is haunted by the voices in her head which represent different personalities and eventually help her get out of the situation she got into. Other than the voices in her head, her only other company is 'Prince', the dog which comes inside the cabin to feed on Gerald's body, and 'The Space Cowboy' which is her visitor at night, except she doesn't know if he is real or her mind is playing tricks on her. This is a psychological novel and although King includes some gruesome bloody details, the horror lies within Jessie's thoughts and her fight for survival. It keeps you wanting to know what happened next and although it's not the best I've read by Stephen King it did keep my interest. The voices of Ruth, Goodwife Burlingame and Punkin are real in a situation like this, where the brain isn't entirely functioning well and when in fear the conflicting voices represent your own thoughts and speculations. King also explores the doubts one encounters when in fear, where you can't distinguish between reality and your imagination running wild due to the state of panic you are in. The ending has an interesting twist. When you think you can breathe a sigh of relief that Jessie made it, you learn that perhaps her 'The Space Cowboy' wasn't just a figment of her imagination and there might be more to it than that.
