It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.
I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment. You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.
Last weeks winner (using Random.Org) was:
TBA (I did not have time to pick yet)
Congratulations! Please choose an item out of the PRIZE BOX and email me your choice with your mailing address as well! journeythroughbooks@gmail.com
It has been a whirlwind of a week. Chance has been staying with us since last Sunday and I have been prepping all week to get ready to go to Honduras this Wednesday. In a nut shell (and that term is perfect) I have been running in several different directions this week and unfortunately reading didn’t always get on the agenda.
This week I have finally picked the three books that will go on the plane with me and the two audio books on my IPOD:
From the author of the bestselling The Good Women of China comes the uplifting story of three sisters who, like so many migrant workers in today’s China, leave their peasant community to seek their fortune in the big city.The Li sisters don’t have much education, but one thing has been drummed into them: their mother is a failure because she hasn’t managed to produce a son, and they themselves only merit a number as a name. Women, their father tells them, are like chopsticks: utilitarian and easily broken. Men, on the other hand, are the strong rafters that hold up the roof of a house. Yet when circumstances lead the sisters to seek work in distant Nanjing, the shocking new urban environment opens their eyes. While Three contributes to the success of a small fast-food restaurant, Five and Six learn new talents at a health spa and a bookshop/tearoom. And when the money they earn starts arriving back at the village, their father is forced to recognise that daughters are not so dispensable after all.
In 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Arabs ventured into the town of Ramla, in Jewish Israel. They were on a pilgrimage to see their separate childhood homes, from which their families had been driven out nearly twenty years before during the Israeli war for independence. Only one was welcomed: Bashir Al-Khayri was greeted at the door by a young woman named Dalia.
This act of kindness in the face of years of animosity and warfare is the starting point for a remarkable true story of two families, one Arab, one Jewish; an unlikely friendship that encompasses the entire modern history of Israelis and Palestinians and that holds in its framework a hope for true peace and reconciliation for the region.
In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran’s sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari’s stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah’s secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice…
A young woman appears in a small NC town. She makes one friend, a woman who lives nearby, but other than that, she keeps to herself. Soon, however, a series of events pulls her into the circle of a local merchant, a widower with two children, and against her better judgment, she finds herself drawn to him and letting down her carefully constructed guard.
For this women has a secret, a secret that has forced her to hide her identity, run as far away as she can from home, and escape a past that still haunts and terrifies her.
It is inevitable that her past will catch up with her-in the form of an abusive husband who refuses to let her go. But what remains unknown is whether she will allow herself to love and trust again, and to what extent her husband will go to ensure that she’ll have a future…but only if it includes him…
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
I hope in the next ten days to accomplish getting through all of these between the plane time and hopefully some down time between our travels.
There will be a It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? Next week – I am pre-setting the post. AND I hope you will stop by after Wednesday and check out the wonderful bloggers who have shared a Christmas story with you as well as a book recommendation.
I am excited to see what you are reading! Please add your post to the LINKY below where it says click here.
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