The Time Traveler's Wife

Last month for our book club we read The Time Traveler's Wife. I only asked about joining the book club about a week before it met (total coincidence) and picked up the book the night before. The book is 536 pages and I tried my best to power through it. I read only a little over 300 before we met for book club. Let me first say this: this is not a book to try to power through. In fact, trying to read it so quickly actually gave me a headache, a first.

Here's the description from the back of the book:

A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

Wow, just reading that as I typed made me feel a little bit ill. I actually disagree with the back of the book on several counts. I don't think the book is a romantic trap. I think what happens in the book is unfair and almost cruel. Henry gets to travel through time and Clare is always left waiting. Always.

Because of the rushed nature in which I read this, I might give it another chance at another time. Maybe. I've got an awful lot of books that I want to read though...

The Book Thief

I just finished this book for the second time. I first read it over a year ago simply because I believe John Green talked about it or because it was a Printz honor book. I listened to it the first time and I really think this helped out a lot. I took German in high school but haven't read or done pronunciation for a while so hearing how to say certain German words was really helpful.

A description of the book from the book itself:

Liesel Meminger is only nine years old when she is taken to live with the Hubermanns, a foster family, on Himmel Street in Molching, Germany in the late 1930s. She arrives with few possessions, but among them is The Grave Digger's Handbook, a book she stole from her brother's burial place. During the years that Liesel lives with the Hubermanns, Hilter becomes more powerful, life on Himmel Street becomes more fearful, and Liesel becomes a full-fledged book thief. She recues books from Nazi book-burnings and steals from the library of the mayor. Liesel is illiterate when she steals her first book, but Hans Hubermann uses her prized books to teach her to read. This is a story of courage, friendship, love, survival, death and grief. This is Liesel's life on Himmel Street, told from Death's point of view.

I highly recommend this book.