Book Reviews by Today, I Read…

Back Cover of Sky Burial

As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritural known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Several decades later Xinran met Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who had spent years searching for her missing husband Kejun, after he disappeared in Tibet; her extraordinary life story would unravel the legend of the sky burial. For thirty years she was lost in the wild and alien landscape of Tibet, in the vast and silent plateaux and the magisterial mountain ranges, living with communities of nomads, moving with the seasons and struggling to survive.

In this haunting book, Xinran recreates Shu Wen’s remarkable journey in a grand story of love, loss, loyalty and survival. Moving, shocking and finally enriching, Sky Burial paints a unique portrait of a woman and a land, both at the mercy of fate and politics.

Three Quick Points About Sky Burial

• Point 1: There is a 99% chance that you will need a box of tissues nearby.
• Point 2: You will almost certainly be left wondering whether or not such profound and enduring love can even exist in our generation.
• Point 3: The story of Shu Wen will likely haunt you long after you’ve read the final sentence.

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From the back cover of Wake

She is floating. Not the falling dream again, she thinks. She is sick to death of the falling dream.

The scene changes immediately. Now Janie is outside. It’s dark. She’s alone, behind a shed, but she can hear muffled voices. She’s never been alone before, and she doesn’t know how people can have dreams that they are not in. She is curious. She watches nervously, hoping this isn’t somebody’s nightmare about to explode through the wall of the shed, or from behind the bushes…

Three quick points about Wake

• Point 1: It’s rather short. With abrupt, sometimes awkward, sentence structures.
• Point 2: This is either a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ book, yet somehow I managed to be squarely in the middle, loving some aspects, craving more definition, and hating others.
• Point 3: The characters remind me of Bella Swan and Eward Cullen in their inexplicable love that just somehow seems to work for the story.

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It seems, unbeknown to me, that Today I Read went offline a couple of days ago. This apparently was due to my host doing a server software upgrade without warning its customers. Frankly, I’ve loved my host up until this point, but this mess was quite a bit annoying. Especially since it wasn’t that quick and easy of a fix.

The good news is that Today I Read is back up and running, I’ve finished reading another book I plan to put up for review (no, not Moonshine, and I’ll explain why in another book notes post; it’s called Wake by Lisa McMann), and in case anyone else is having problems with their HostGator website throwing up a 500 Internal Server error, you must delete your .htaccess file and start fresh. It seems that somehow, their upgrade has managed to corrupt the .htaccess files and even restoring the backup version they have doesn’t resolve the problem.

That’s it for the quick update. Since there’s a full schedule for me today, I won’t be able to get the review up until much later today or tomorrow sometime.

So, here’s the deal: Moonshine has finally started to pick up.

Of course I didn’t get my wish of never seeing the word Auphe (or allusions to the battle that never was) again. But, I’ve learned to skim over it; they’re now fewer and further between.

Something else I learned is that you can safely skip over the first six chapters of the book without any damage to the story whatsoever.

Worried you’ll miss something important in those first six chapters? OK then, here, let me get you all caught up: Continue reading »

I noticed a trend with the banned books on the list: many were said to be sexually explicit, use offensive language, and have occult themes. People secure in their sexuality, who may use coarse language, and have a keen interest in things of an occult nature are generally labeled heathens, hence the title.

Granted, I really don’t think of myself as a heathen; I’d prefer to be labeled as someone with an open mind who strives to be well-read and who thanks the wonderful teachers who introduced her to such wonderful and inspiring reading material in the first place.

But, moving right along, here’s my contribution to the Banned Books Week meme. Funny enough, I was actually doing a bit of research about the banned books list earlier today (separately from BBW) and was tempted to write a blog entry about it. Now that I’ve been tagged, I have a legit reason. Thank you Brie.

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