After all the cheerful, happily ever afters (and not so happily ever afters) in my Valentine’s Day post I thought I’d bring the tone of this blog back to a place I’m more comfortable – with some good old stabbings in the back.
There are of course a lot of massive spoilers to follow so proceed with caution. Continue reading “7 books with absolute grab-you-by-the-throat punch-you-in-the-gut betrayals”
Yep it’s that time of year. Time for shops to be filled with all things red and pink, restaurants to release special oyster and champagne based menus (and charge twice their normal prices for the privilege) and me to shelter in my bed and wait for the whole thing to be over.
I’ve never really been one for soppy declarations of love, whether spoken, written or sewn onto the front of a teddy bear, but classic literature is the one exception. As I’ve said before, romance doesn’t grate on me nearly so much when all the language is just that bit more poetic.
And the other thing that will almost always win me around to a love story – a tragic ending. Give me a book with a pair of star-crossed lovers, heartbreak and death and I’m hooked. It’s the Marianne Dashwood inside me I think. A happy ending will barely ever get in involved in quite the same way – Jane Austen aside of course, because no one can criticise Jane Austen about anything ever in my presence (expect Emma, you can criticise away on that one with my full approval).
This post is of course heavy on the spoilers so be warned!
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.
Sometimes a bit of instalove is forgivable. And that’s certainly true of anything written by Shakespeare. So what if they were thirteen years old and fell in love in the space of ten minutes? How could something that includes quotes like, ‘love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs’ and ‘parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow’ not be considered one of the greatest romances of all time?
You have short earlobes. Socially and genetically there’s no reason for me to be attracted to you. The only logical conclusion is that I must be in love with you.
Look, look, a contemporary book has made the list! This book is just nothing but sweet from start to finish. I read the whole thing with a big soppy grin on my face. If you want a heart-warming, easy reading romance that will make you believe in love in this cold cold world then this is the book for you.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.
I’ve limited myself to just including two Jane Austen romances on this list so I thought I should pick the two polar opposites. Whereas Pride and Prejudice starts off with Lizzy and Mr Darcy hating each other and not being afraid to show it, Anne and Captain Wentworth used to be engaged, are still madly in love, but both trying very hard not to show it.
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.
Anna Karenina is the perfect book to satisfy the drama loving side of me, with the passionate and ill-fated affair between Anna and Vronsky, while at the same time giving a beautifully written account of the ordinary, quiet love between Kitty and Levin. Not as heart-wrenching or memorable but while I was reading it it was their story I was enjoying more.
She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.
The relationship between Eleanor and Park starts off heartbreakingly cute and ends just heartbreaking, just as a love story should. Maybe not exactly one for the ages – I doubt this will stand the test of time, being held up alongside Romeo and Juliet as romance at it’s best – but for right now, for a tale of modern love, this is as good as it gets.
Just because it’s taken you three years to notice, Ron, doesn’t mean no one else has spotted I’m a girl!
I know, I know, the romance really isn’t the point here, but no matter what JK Rowling says, Hermione and Ron will always be the perfect couple to me. If you’re ever in doubt, just imagine how clichéd the whole series would have been it if was all about Harry and Hermione.
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Perhaps the most ill-fated love story on this whole list. In this whole 400 page book Robbie and Cecelia get to spend less than five hours in the same room as each other. And then there’s that ending. If you haven’t read this book then what are you waiting for, go and read it right now! In fact, this is the one situation where I might even condone you watching the film instead because it’s just that good.
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.
Admittedly I haven’t actually finished this book yet. But I just had to include it because already I am that invested in Natasha and Andrei. Oh My God. The most epic of epic love stories. Spanning years and continents. Lives ruined, bloodshed. And I may have just slipped in quoting Veronica Mars, oops.
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
The love story between Tess and Angel Clare is definitely not a happy one, but almost as epic as that of Natasha and Andrei. And in fact, now I think of it, eerily reminiscent of that Tolstoy plot line. It all starts so well, such a sweet simple love. And they’re happily planning their future as farmer and wife when BAM, Tess does one thing wrong and he turns out to be the biggest jerk the world has ever known. Seriously, my hatred for Angel Clare knows no bounds. When really I suppose it’s not his fault, it was just the way women were treated at the time.
I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
There could be no other winner for me. Lizzy and Darcy are the original OTP. Their love story, the initial hatred, the slowly coming to understand each other, the separation and disapproval of his relatives, will be copied for generations to come. But never ever equalled.
This is it, the big one, the ultimate list – the ten best books I’ve read this year.
I have been preparing for this post for months actually. I take list writing VERY seriously and wanted to make sure this really was the definitive list of the best books I’ve read this year.
I think I’ve read 53 books in 2015 which I am very pleased with. I can’t remember how many I aimed for so I’m pretending it was 50 in which case, well done me, pat on my back, I reached my target. Although I also worked out that I have bought 73 books. Whoops.
Of those 53 there’s only a couple I actively regret reading. Both of which were from the Austen Project – Sense and Sensibility by Joanne Trollope and Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid. So number one lesson learnt this year is however much I will want to buy Emma by Alexander McCall Smith when I see it for sale I must resist the urge! But other than those two books I’m happy with everything I’v read. Which has only served made choosing a top ten an even trickier task.
There were some amazing books that only just missed the cut for top reads of the year – On Chesil Beach, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Longbourn and Middlesex to name but a few. But the below ten are just out of this world incredible. Books that are serious contenders for a coveted place on my Desert Island books.
10. Looking for Alaska by John Green
9. Saturday by Ian McEwan
8. How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran
7. The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan
6. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
5. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
4. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Well it turns out I’m an idiot because I’ve only just realised The Broke and the Bookish release the themes for these Top Ten Tuesdays in advance. So I don’t actually have to manically do them when I get home from work on the Tuesday, I can prepare them days ahead of time, weeks even. So that’ll be nice for next time but this one is still a fly by the seat of my pants Top Ten Tuesday.
This is, as the title says, my ten favourite quotes from 2015, excluding poetry because even though I do read a lot of poetry I don’t keep track of my favourite quotes so well. But I might try and put together a list of that sort in the near future.
As much as I destroy books in every other way (cracking the spines, spilling food on them, dropping them in the bath) I just can’t bring myself to write in them. Which means highlighting or underlining is out. So I remember quotes the modern way: I photograph them. Half the camera roll on my phone is blurry, night time photos of book pages. But this at least meant I had a ready made source to put together this list of the ten most poignant, touching or just plain funny quotes from the books I’ve read so far this year.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran
The Secret History by Donna Tartt from The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Aesop’s Fables
The White Princess by Philippa Gregory
![IMG_6491[1]](https://lizzyreadsbooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/img_64911.jpg)
Again just one this week. Which considering my TBR list has just doubled after a very successful (or, from the view point of my bank balance, disastrous) shopping trip is really not good enough. It was a long one though.
TESS OF THE D’URBUERVILLES by THOMAS HARDY
Where I finished it: In a service station on the M1 after insisting to my parents that I’d be so much more pleasant for the rest of the car journey if they just left me in peace to finish it.
How long: About two weeks off and on.
Favourite quote: ‘Tis because we be on a blighted star and not a sound one.
Would I read it again: I think in a few years I’ll be desperate to read it again.
Every time this book is mentioned in front of my mum she does this almost involuntary wince (only almost involuntary because I’m sure she hams it up for effect) and proceeds to lament for ten minutes how frustratingly passive Tess is. I don’t know if this was supposed to put me off reading it but it didn’t work – any book that can cause that strong a reaction years after you first read it is a book I want to read.
Well I don’t know if I completely misread it (or if my mum did) but I don’t blame Tess for the way her life turned out. When I put the book down it was Angel Clare I was angry at. Which was hard for me as in the TV series I’m going to watch he’s played by Eddie Redmayne and I don’t want to be angry at Eddie Redmayne. But Angel Clare could have been so good for Tess, they could have been so happy, and instead he gave in to old fashioned values, became a hypocrite and abandoned her. He even had the cheek to complain that she didn’t write when he’d told her not to write!
The last third of the book I read in a rush, desperate to get to the end. I was convinced it wasn’t going to end happily – this isn’t Jane Austen – and I just wanted to get it over with. I was reading with my hand in front of my mouth, predicting what was going to happen, upsetting myself with my own imagination. But even after all my suppositions the ending was far from what I had predicted.
This was the first book by Hardy I’d read and now I would definitely read another. I found it surprisingly easy to get into, I’m intrigued by the way he has a fictional geographical area all his books take place in, I like his style of writing – not too embellished with description but still finding time for a poetic turn of phrase and also how much he references Shakespeare and how I get to feel really cultured when I can place the quote.
I don’t think this book will have had quite as much of an effect on me as it did my mum. Already I can think back on it quite placidly, though while I was reading it I was incredibly involved. In a way I wish I’d given myself a few days off from reading to reflect on it rather than diving straight into the next book. But that’s just not me at all.
📚 ❤️
I'm All Booked
“Real life was something happening in her peripheral vision.”
The world is an open book and it's up to us to discover the magic in its pages
lizzyreadsbooks.wordpress.com 