I started January with two Latin American writers who know how to write about passion and love - Isabel Allende's "Daughter of Fortune" and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in Time of Cholera." The first one deals with a lovesick heart of a Chilean young woman who follows her love all the way to California during the Gold Rush. The book offers beautiful description of the period, accurate historical background, and a maze of characters, each unique and full of flaws, but through who we think about issues of true love, obsession, independence, choice, and many more social commentaries and matters. The latter book also deals with love and tries to define it by offering descriptions of its many variations. There are three main characters who represent the idealists, the realists, and the confused. To know our author's results on which character is the solution to the quandary of love, you've got to read the book. An amazing read both of them.
I also read a couple of young teen books which I had picked up for Gillian, but had never read before. "Wish you were Eyre" by Heather Vogel Frederick was the last book in the Mother-daughter Book Club series. Filled with humor, plenty of teen issues, and a love for Paris, this book made a fantastic read for me. There are plenty of questions in the end of the book that brought a lot of discussion between Gillian and me. We both loved it and couldn't stop talking about it for hours. Each book discusses a beloved classic, with lots of information for the characters of the classic as well as the author. The characters in the book relate their lives and experiences to what they are reading for that month, thus the Mother-daughter Book Club. If you are looking for a good series to read with your preteen, this is it. Gillian and I spent many hours of bonding reading and discussing it.
The other two YA books I read were "Found" by Margaret Peterson Haddix, and "Reached" by Ally Condie. Found is the first book of the science fiction The Missing series that involve teens that have been transported from the past. They belong to various royal families in the past that were lost without a trace,and Haddix brings excitement to the table by making the readers enjoy her theories of what happened to them. Gillian and I loved this book and we are looking forward to reading the rest of the series. Reached was the final book in the Matched trilogy. Condie is an amazing author when it comes to poetic language and flowing sentences. Her characters grew in this last installment of the series and the plot had twists and turns that made it interesting full of issues about freedom, self realization, creativity, the right to choose, and many more. The one thing that made this book hard to read, however, was that it was too long and filled with unnecessary details. Toward the end I felt tired and disappointed that the characters were not a bit more exciting. You could tell that Ally Condie's mind is pensive, calm, and poetic, but with not many hair-raising experiences occupying it.
Watching TV shows captured my attention this month to the extent that it overpowered my desire to read, something that has never happened before. I blame it to my being tired from the holidays. I finished watching the last episode of Downton Abbey season 3 with tears in my eyes. I had watched the whole season since November, but out came the Christmas special, the last episode, and it turned our Downton Abbey world upside down. With the exception of Matthew Crawley dying in the end of the episode, everything else in this season was absolutely brilliantly written. The characters were developed more and we could feel a human connection with each of them, even with the manipulating Thomas and cruel O'Bien. I can't wait for the next season - the 20's 30's and the rise of America.
A few other shows I enjoyed watching were Hart of Dixie - a fun show with plenty of quirky characters and over the top stereotypes, Bunheads - a great range of characters that includes high school girls, mother-daughter-in law, ballerinas, handsome boys, and enjoyable issues. However, the favorite for the month remains Once Upon a Time. I watched the first season on Netflix, and liked it so much that I tried to find the second season on line. Afterward I realize that this would be a great show to share with Gillian, so every Tuesday now, we send the boys upstairs, and Gillian and I sit to watch two to three episodes together. She looks forward to it each week and this has been the best and most relaxing kind of bonding we have experienced recently. The show is clean enough to share with her age group, and it is very fun to watch, filled with lots of very creative twists on the existing fairy tales, amazingly beautiful costumes, and lots of love stories. I was touched the other day when we had a conversation about it. When we first saw the picture of the actor who plays Snow White's prince, we were kind of dissapointed because he was blond and not very striking in the way we were used to have the prince represented. As we watched the series, we fell in love with the prince, and at one point Gillian said: I think the reason we love this prince so much it's because he is so tender and kind and pure, and those qualities come from the inside. We are loving who he truly is inside, which is even more beautiful than what he looks from the outside." Wow!
During the first half of January, I stayed a lot inside resting, reading, and playing with Charlton. While inside, I got to listen to a lot of good music from classical to bluegrass to pop. One of my favorite songs was a new single by Maroon 5 -Daylight, and Matchbox 20's Overjoyed (well, all of their new CD from last year). I'm also not ashamed to declare that I have enjoyed spending hours dancing with Gillian to the music of One Direction, especially their new CD Take Me Home, with awesome songs such as Live while you're young, and my favorite Little Things. Gillian's favorite is called What makes you beautiful, so in her honor here it is:
I watched Bunheads (yes...all of it...) right before I started Hart of Dixie. How did we not talk about that one???
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