Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

by Laini Taylor

June 22nd

I can't believe I'm even breaking from reading to write this review (except it is easier to type and eat dinner than read and eat dinner). This book -- wowza. I was enchanted from the first page. It has won tons of awards so far, so I shouldn't have been surprised (but then again, everyone loves The Great Gatsby and I had to suffer through the terrible thing, so I usually don't take people's opinions as fact).

Karou (which I'm pronouncing Ka-roo, but have no idea if it's right) is living in Prague, has just broken up with a self-centered narcissist, and has a pretty loyal friend (Zuzana). She is going to art school, has 94 sketch books that she has filled throughout her life, and everything about her past seems pretty shaded ... for about the first 70 pages.

Then as we start to find out what has actually been going on in Karou's life, the reader (i.e. you and I) are sent through a whirlwind of adventure. I have had to re-read sections to figure out if I'm missing things. Just hold on, things are bound to get better and clearer!

Lastly, there is this Angel guy. Is he good? Is he evil? Tell me he is Karou's love interest for the book because he sounds delicious.

June 23rd

Last night, around 10:00pm I posted the following on Facebook.

Well, finishing the book won out ... I just couldn't put it away knowing I was so close to finding out what was going on. 

This book has so many layers, just when you think you know what is going to happen, Ms. Taylor pulls the rug from under your feet and you realize you didn't know what was going on after all. I love that. Although the love interest was maybe a little predictable, it was held out for so long I found myself holding my breath. 

Page 305 ... the last page of chapter 42. I found myself holding my breath, unsure of what I hoped the next page would say, fearing turning the page of a book. At this point I was not sure what I even wanted to happen. I waited a full five minutes thinking about it, re-reading the previous pages, wondering what could make it okay. Leading up to this point had been amazing ...

This book is a roller coaster of emotions and you are never sure what you are hoping for. The ending, well I wouldn't have ended it any other way, I love when it isn't tied up in a neat bow. This just means that the beginning of Days of Blood and Starlight is going to be amazing. 

Pick up this book and you won't regret it.

Hard to start a new book

It is hard to start a new book when you are still thinking about the last one. 

From Zero to Well-Read ... a BookRiot piece

First, I love book lists, I like to go through and check off all of the ones I've already read. Second, I forgot all about the "note" function in Facebook and thought it was maybe time to try it out once again. Finally, it is good to review what some people (in this case Jeff at BookRiot) think are 100 great books. Seriously, look at #100 ... he hasn't great taste, but I'll try and conquer some of my holdouts this summer (except that one, I have no desire to read that). 

Books I've already read are bold. Books I'd like to read are italicized. 

So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay  by Michael Chabon
6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
12. Beowulf
13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
14. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
16. The Call of the Wild  by Jack London
17. Candide by Voltaire
18. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
24. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
25. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
26. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor 
27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
28. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
29. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (blah, don't ask why)
30. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
32. Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
33. Dune by Frank Herbert
34. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
36. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
37. Faust by Goethe
38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39. Game of Thrones by George RR Martin (according to Kindle, I'm at 72%, I should really finish it)
40. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
41. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
42. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
43. The Gospels
44. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
45. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
47. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
51. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
52. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
54. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
55. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
57. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
58. The Iliad by Homer
59. The Inferno by Dante
60. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
61. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
63. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
65. The Little Prince by Antoine  de Saint-Exepury
66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
68. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
71. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
72. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
73. The Odyssey by Homer
74. Oedipus, King by Sophocles
75. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
77. The Pentateuch
78. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
79. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
80. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
81. Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
82. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
83. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
84. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
85. The Stand by Stephen King
86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
87. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
88. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
92. Ulysses by James Joyce
93. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
94. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
95. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
96. Watchmen by Alan Moore
97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
98. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
99. 1984 by George Orwell
100. 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

That brings us to 46 read ... and 14 I am interested in. What about you? Let's discuss, what books are missing from this list of being well-read? What books shouldn't be on here (a la 50 Shades of Grey)? What are you reading this summer?