Playing catch up now, work and life have gotten in the way!

Day 08 – Most overrated book
Palo Alto by James Franco takes the prize for the recently read. I was really excited about reading a collection of intertwining short stories by him, thinking it would be in a similar style to Salinger’s stories of the Glass family, but I just ended up being disappointed. It’s like Franco wanted to show the absolute worst of teenage life through these stories of death, drunkenness, sex, humiliation and petty emotions. Definitely not a book I would recommend to anyone, even though it is well-written once you look past the subject matter. I hope he writes another book and learns from the mistakes he made in this one.

Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
This definitely would have to be Eragon by Christopher Paolini, the story of a young boy who lives in a small town, in a country ruled over by a harsh and powerful dictator, and who finds and hatches a dragon’s egg. From there, he becomes a warrior for the side of good, while bonding with his beautiful (and very amusing) dragon, Saphira. I’m not really into fantasy, so when my grandmother bought me the book (purely because he was a very young writer and it was a “you can do it too” moment from her), I was skeptical, to say the least. Surprise, surprise, I now own ALL the series and am currently ploughing through the last one (no mean feat when you consider it’s around 800 pages!).

Day 10 – Favourite classic book
Persuasion by Jane Austen takes this category hands down. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s the story of Anne Elliot, a woman in her late 20s and the daughter of a silly and vain widowed baronet. Eight years before the story begins, she allowed herself to be persuaded by her mother’s closest friend and her father that the man she loved, Captain Frederick Wentworth, was an imprudent match, thus she broke off the engagement and he left to make his fortune on the high seas. At the opening of the novel, the Elliot family are in debt and decide to rent out their house and go to Bath (Anne HATES Bath). Who should they rent to but Wentworth’s sister and her husband. Eventually Frederick himself turns up and they are thrown into each others’ paths. His feelings were hurt enough for him to flirt with girls far younger than she in front of her, and she realises that she could have been truly happy with him, if she had not been a coward. An absolutely beautiful story of love lost, one that never fails to make me feel happy after reading it. There’s even a quote from Captain Wentworth that I considered getting as a tattoo - ‘[I am] half agony, half hope’.