Holiday Reads

A few weeks ago I went to Menorca for a holiday with Matt's family.  The most important part of going away is planning the books that you're going to take, right?

To take with me I picked two books that had been sitting on my bedside table for about 5 months, Station Eleven and The Bees and then a book that I'd recently picked up from the bookshop at work, Signal to Noise.  As a backup, I also had downloaded Frostbite by Richelle Mead if I wanted something a bit more light and fluffy.

I didn't get as much reading done as expected, as the Villa we were staying in was kitted out with a  ping-pong table and a pool table, plus we would spend the evening playing cards which was super fun (while laying your winning hand you had to sing The Terminator theme tune - something that Matt and I have always done when playing cards but have now passed over to his family).

I started reading The Bee's but after 50 pages realized that this wasn't perhaps the best book to start with.  I plan to pick it up again in the future, but my relaxed holiday brain couldn't wrap itself around the hive concept.

I then basically devoured Frostbite - which is crazy to me because normally I hate reading on my Kindle Fire.  It was okay - I wouldn't recommend it, it's pretty much everything I would normally hate in a book, but I knew that going in.

Thinking that I better actually read one of the physical books I brought with me, I started Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, and it surprised me by not being at all like I thought it was going to be.  From the blurb, I had initially pegged Station Eleven as being set completely within a dystopian world- post major event - the whole way through, but this only makes up small sections of the novel.  Instead, the story explores how one man's life can impact others around him.  I really enjoyed it and wished it was longer in some ways...which is always good.  I liked the fairytale, and I liked this depth of sadness that followed throughout the whole narrative.

Next up, was Signal to Noise, which again turned out to contain a different story to what I expected.  There were vibes of The Craft, but, to be honest, the magic isn't that big of a deal within the story, and again the real story is more about the relationships between all of the characters. I loved all of the angst of Meche and Sebastian and also their relationship - how much they both loved each other but how crappy teenage stuff got in the way of them realizing that.  I liked how Meche hated Seb for chasing after the popular girl, and actually recognized that she was doing the same thing by chasing after the popular boy.  Lovely little read, and was a great way to cap off the holiday!