We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is such a remarkable book. It's been on my radar for a long time, largely because I think the title is fab and the hardback cover (right image) is gorgeous, but I patiently waited for the paperback version before giving in and buying it. And I have to say, it was worth the wait - I was blown away by this book, it took me to places I didn't expect it to, and I would honestly say it's probably one of my books of the year.

The best and only way to read this book is to just pick it up without reading anymore than what is given on the blurb. The purpose of the book is based around the big reveal on Page 77 and I challenge anyone to see that coming - it plays along the same way that books like Room and Never Let Me Go do; lulls you in a false sense of comfort before turning things on its head. I read it having to contain every little bit of my excitement (and there was alot of it), desperate to talk about what just happened but not wanting to give away the fundamentals to people who I will no doubt force this book upon.

Blissful ignorance is one of my favourite ways to start reading a book - Room by Emma Donoghue is another definite book that needs to be read in ignorance - it can either work in your favour and blow you away or it can throw you off what you expected and potentially disappoint, but isn't that the fun of not knowing?
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is too good to ruin prior to reading it, but it's far too good not to read at all.

This book is so beautiful and compassionate, it has just about something that everyone can relate to; family politics, sibling love and rivalry, but also an even further depth that noone could understand unless they were living it. It will make you re-evaluate your own philosophical and moral values. It's eye opening as well as entertaining. You won't want to stop reading this.

Once finished, if you can, read the author's note about writing the book too - it gives a great account of why she wrote it and how close to her heart this story was from her own experiences.

That is all I can say. I don't want to discuss it further and destroy the magic of this book, but it is too good not to give mention at all.
Just trust me and read it: you won't regret it!

You can read an extract here from Serpent's Tail. #WAACBO

I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes


I will start out by holding my hands up and admitting that I didn't give this book quite the attention I should have. My excuses being that it is a 700 page hardback that puts a brick to shame. It was not a commuter-friendly choice, but I was far too keen to wait the extra few months for the paperback to come out (I think I've now learnt my lesson about patience). Therefore, my perfect excuse to read it was a cottage holiday with the family for a week in Cornwall. I had high ambitions to finish it in the week, but *insert excuses here* I got about half way through before I had to return to handbag-compatable reads in London. That was about 3 months ago and shamefully I rarely found opportunity to pick it up again until last week when I decided it was time. The mistake I made was stopping at the point where the story dipped slightly and so I didn't have much compulsion to keep at it. The first 400 pages took me a week months ago, the latter 300 pages took me an evening. It turned out that good.

Do not be fooled by the length it took me to read this - all you need to do is read all of the reviews on Goodreads (of which majority are 5*s) to see that I am definitely in the minority, most people couldn't put it down and I genuinely believe if I'd been reading it on my commutes, I too would have read it solidly from cover to cover in a week or 2. 

Plot:
Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.
(Goodreads)

It is a great book. It is extremely clever, it is one thing to mention one of the most exceptional, infallible detectives/secret agents, but to actually create this character and plot line with every detail as to why he is the best is something else.
The book starts off pacey - there's been a murder, it has been considered and planned down to the last detail to make it near impossible to solve. We're intrigued. It then skips off to a whole other plot line, which is the main, dominating purpose of the book, following an extremist trying to destroy the human race for the sake of his religion. This is when it gets clever. Again the details are so precise that it's a wonder a reader couldn't recreate it themselves in real life (fingers crossed they won't) - not many books go in to the detail of terrorism, not only from the action side of things but into the person's past and present mind. This makes it exceptional to read and really intriguing. However, it goes into so much detail and back story that it becomes quite long. This was the point where my holiday ended and I put down the book for a while - I couldn't yet piece together the connection between the beginning sequences and the middle back story and so it became easy to stop reading.

I recently read S J Bolton's review on this book and she sums up exactly how I felt: "It was interesting enough, well-written enough to hold my attention, but not the epic, race against time, most thrilling thriller ever written I’d been hoping for. 
It gets there – Oh, my, but it get’s there – it just doesn’t do it fast."
She says it - it gets there, it just takes its time about it, and having read it now, why shouldn't it? About 50 pages further from where I stopped (if only I had preserved a little more), there is suddenly revelations that blow things out of the water; the pace suddenly accelerates into overdrive, pieces start to fall into place and the timer starts ticking down very fast.The ending pulls it together perfectly, it leaves no burning question unanswered and does so in a way that you won't want to stop thinking about it.

As I said, I wish I had given this book more attention initially that I know it definitely deserved and I am pleased to hear that the film rights have been bought too. It is made for the big screen - they may have to condense it down some, but it will make a block buster!
Plus it means I can force the story upon my friends who would not be interested in reading such a hefty book!

This book should come with 2 rules:
1 - do not read it in public if you're afraid of emotional outbursts.
2 - read it anyway, it is completely worth it.

A story of how love can break our hearts – and heal them.

A year ago I met the love of my life. For two people who didn’t believe in love at first sight, we came pretty close.

Lilah MacDonald – beautiful, opinionated, stubborn and all kinds of wonderful in ways that words could never quite capture. The woman who taught me to live again. 

My Lilah, who gave me so much, and yet kept from me a secret that she knew would break my heart.

My name is Callum Roberts, and this is our story.

Me Without You is a book to make you smile, bring you to tears and remind you to hold on tightly to those you love.
(Goodreads)

Mrs Hemingway is a beautiful representation of the relationship Hemingway had with his wives as well as the relationship they had with each other and how this shaped his career. It is eloquent and elegant but at the same time harrowing to read.

It is a story about how far you are willing to go to hold on to your husband and how long you are prepared to fight to be Mrs Hemingway.
Each wife in turn has a voice in the novel, Hadley, Fifi, Martha then Mary and each recounts how she captures Hemingway's attention and then watches as the next one makes her mark. Each story is entirely different from the others, they all went about their marriage in different ways, in different parts of the world and I willed each wife not to make the same mistake as the last. Although the marriages ended in the same way, it didn't feel predictable, it still felt fresh and it made the sense of foreboding unbearable - no matter how different they were to eachother, each wife faced the same fate - it was sad, it was angering, but what can be done? Hemingway's attention span for his women pretty much lasted as long as his novels before he was on to the next one.

I was gripped from page one with this book. I really felt that I traveled with the ups and downs of this book.
I loved that it was based around real love letters and telegrams and  Naomi wrote it with such confidence that you have to remind yourself that this is still only fiction.

It will stick in your head for a long time after reading and the descriptive scenes of Paris or on the beach in Cuba will make you wish you were there without a doubt!

May We Be Forgiven
A.M. Homes

May we be forgiven is one of those books that I have seen on the shelves and twitter posts and never read but thought I should to see what the fuss is about. It won the Women's Fiction prize, so it must be good. As it happens for the SYP February bookclub this book was voted in as the read.
I don't want to say that I hated it, as hate seems like such a strong word, but this book was definitely not for me, in any way.

It is one of those books that when someone asks what it is about, it is really hard to describe... 'so there's this guy who's brother gets in a car accident and kills a family, then comes home to find the guy (his brother) in bed with the brother's wife and so he kills her over the head with a lamp...' so that sums up the first, say, 20 pages and the premise to the story, it then goes on to describe a life of fostering the children, internet sex dates, lesbian relationships with teachers and stranger's abandoned parents.
Yeah. It felt abit like that when I was reading it. With every new escapade I was thinking 'what is going on here? What is going to happen next?'

I think there are a few fundamentals that really jarred me with this book:
1. I didn't get on with the writing style at all. Some people love the style of Austen or Dicken's works, some hate it. Not everyone can get on with them. It's like that, but this is the polar opposite of Austen/Dickens. I found the style very crude, it spent far too long describing the dirty condom left in the bin after sleeping with Jane (the brother's wife before she was killed) and an episode where a tampon was put in the wrong place (don't ask) and subsequently the girl pooed on the floor (really). Some at my book club thought this style to be gripping and realistic, but maybe I'm old-fashioned (and ignorant enough to want to live in a fairy tale land of books where harsh realities are glossed over), but I just found it crude and unenjoyable. In fact I found it very masculine as well, not just because it was told from a male character's point of view, but because of the crude nature of it, yet I discovered about half way through that A.M. Homes is actually a woman!

2. What some found as 'darkly humorous' and 'intensely gripping' I found to be pretty ridiculous (see back to list of plot points). It was argued at the book club that it was describing the realities of nature but I found nothing realistic about a mysterious girl leaving her senile parents on Harry's doorstep with all the legal forms handing over all power of attorney to him without him knowing, and then just leaving him to get on with it so she can go live her life. or when the murderous brother is dropped into a wilderness camp with other convicts and his brother seemlessly sends him a fulled data-loaded ipad of which his Israeli terrorist-looking friend starts to order guns and bombs off of it and it takes the authorities a while to bat an eyelid. When would that ever happen??
I got that it was trying to satirize society in parts and how harsh it can be, and it was quite amusing in parts but I just found it emotionally detached and plain ridiculous. I wanted more from it, more emotion over the grief of the wife and less focus instead on the dirty condom left in the bin.

I think the happy ever after almost swayed me at the end. I contemplated giving it 3 stars instead of 2 (until I was reminded how much i disliked the first 90%), it seemed to wind down at the end towards this happy ending of redemption and the functioning dysfunctional family, which was sweet, but could've happened without all the rest.

Although I may not understand why, I'm glad others liked it, it makes for a good debate at book clubs, but it is not the kind of book I would suggest anyone read if there was a choice.

I have recently read Every Day by David Levithan, a book that seems to be on everyone's lips this year, and I thought it would make for an interesting discussion.



Have you read it?
If not, it is about 'A' who has no body, no gender and no sexuality - each day A wakes up inhabiting a new body of a 16 year old and has to spend the day impersonating them, trying not to interfere with their lives. A does this every day and has no reason or understanding of how it happens or why. Then one day A wakes up in the body of Justin and everything gets turned upside down when A falls in love with Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon and starts to break the rules one by one.

I was really intrigued when I first heard about it and I really commend David Levithan on it - although it sounds quite simple to explain it must have been so complicated to pan out and make into a coherent plot with a little loopholes as possible. It's an interesting subject as a whole, the idea that this person (well not really a person, entity really) exists without any physical identification or gender.
I don't know about you, but my brain couldn't quite get itself round the fact that A was genderless, it kept trying to attribute it to one or the other. Levithan says himself that the majority of readers instantly fall into the trap of calling A a 'he', which I am guilty of myself*, maybe because Levithan is a male writer, or because the first body in the book is male. Who knows, but I think it is instinctive for our brains to try and assign these unknown qualities that in real life are second nature to one or the other.
Did you automatically imagine A as male or female? Or did you stick with knowing A as genderless?

How important do you think gender is to a story? It's an interesting message that Levithan is trying to put out there with a genderless main character. Should we spend more time focussing on more important things in life and love? Would the story have been different if A was defined to being either male or female? Of which would also then define them by being straight or gay for falling in love with Rhiannon. I think it is so easy to go through a story and so subconsciously notice the gender or the character - especially when told in first person - that you don't really think about it, but with Every Day  Levithan is making you 100% aware of the lack of gender - to the point where it becomes a discussion point between A and Rhiannon. It is quite ironic really, in order to portray the potential message that gender doesn't have to be the focal point of a character, he has to highlight the gender (well, lack of it).



*However, I also want to bring your attention to a little thing I picked up on, which probably aided in my mental assumption that A was a guy, that both UK and US covers have pictures of guys on the front (although the UK cover has a girl on it too, I was under the assumption that that was Rhiannon, rather than a double version of A). It's hard not to be presumptuous, but surely having a picture of a male on the cover of a book about A who is genderless, makes it slightly redundant?

Should characters and plots be defined by their gender and sexuality? Or should they take a leaf out of A's book and be open-ended and unattached to any physicality which could define them, and instead focus on the mind and the powers within?

If you haven't read Every Day yet, I would strongly recommend you read it, even just to see what all the fuss is about!

How do you choose what book to read next?

Now this is something that I started thinking about after an outing through a bookshop with my boyfriend. Both being lovers of books, we spent a long time walking among the bookshelves, pointing out books that were good and not so good. I found myself not only drawing on books that I had already read, or had waiting on my to-read pile, that I wanted to recommend to be read, but I kept pointing out books that were 'big' at the moment. I realised that I had built up a large amount of knowledge on the upcoming newest, hottest reads purely through twitter and blogging and this was how I choose a lot of my new reads.
This got me thinking, how do you choose your books? There are so many books out there - where to start?