Deluged With Books Cafe

Women in Love  follows the lives and loves of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Set in a coal mining town surrounded by the pastoral English countryside, it explored divergent reflections about humanity and relationships in the spur of industrialization, which resounds most of D.H. Lawrence's works. If I have to speak how this book affected me, I'd give you an image of a distant train chugging toward the platform I stood on. The rumbling noise perks up my reverie, then becomes insistently louder until the shrill whistle and mayhem of wheels and steam blast on my face rattling my consciousness. There was nothing placid nor ideally romantic about this book. Lawrence writes with intense, charged and sensual gusto. If he meant to express love in this way then in a different abstract plane, I get him. Otherwise, his prose mostly took up the hat of romanticism. I am quite arrested by his interesting vocabulary and considering the ban issues on the author's boo...

Stories doesn't need silence. They need words. Without them, they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you. These words and the rest it entailed remained with me after I finished this rather somber book.  The Thirteenth Tale  is your usual blend of English Gothic mystery about ghosts and haunted manors and dysfunctional old family. Margaret Lea, a some time biographer working on his father's antiquarian shop, travels to Oxfordshire to meet the famous novelist Vida Winter, who once published a book,  Thirteen Tales of Change of Desperation  which strangely only contained twelve stories. Will Vida, who is known not to speak the truth about her origins and for being a recluse, ever reveal the thirteenth tale? This one is a plethora of book quotes, if you ask me. It is like one quarter book musings and three quarters mystery, an aspect that made this an interesting read, perhaps a rather definitive style of Diane Setterfield. I love how she under...

Beautiful Creatures  has been floating around the bookshelves and bestsellers list before I (as is usual) found myself jumping on the last bandwagon. It does take a while to sway me to the currently popular. When the film adaptation hit the theaters, my curiosity got piqued. Seeing the trailer and recognizing half the cast (no kidding!) was the last push that propelled me to finally check it out. This is the first of the Caster Chronicles series, spanning four books, and set in a small place in South Carolina. Lena is the new girl in town while Ethan cannot wait to escape the place. Inevitably, they gravitated to each other. As Ethan puzzles out the dreams of a girl haunting him, Lena struggles to hide her ever growing power, a curse that's been in her family for generations. The South, which seemed a favorite haven of the paranormal, continually draws me in with its sinister history and old worldliness (beginning with Anne Rice). Take an abandoned mansion, let a my...

In this story, we meet Hazel Grace Lancaster, a not so normal teenager because she's been diagnosed cancer when she was twelve.  Now she has lungs that doesn't work as it should, but trying to get by, one day at a time. Almost seemed a routine for Hazel - until Augustus Waters. Augustus Waters is a 17 year old guy who had survived Osteosarcoma. They met in a cancer support group, which Hazel regularly attends in the insistence of her mother while Augustus attends one meeting in the request of his best friend Isaac. And this is where their story starts.

By far the more stormy and bittersweet of Austen's books, Sense and Sensibility  kept me torn between the two sisters' acute pain in their leap to romantic love among other things. Bereft of Norland Park in the death of Mr. Dashwood, the second Mrs. Dashwood and her three unmarried daughters moved to a cottage in the far countryside. There they settled into spare comforts and little entertainment for company. With their fall on the social ladder, the Dashwood sisters struggle to find acceptance and in their own ways reach out, though almost futile, to claim their happiness. I could not help but be drawn to the quiet steadfastness of Elinor but at the same time I am swept by the unreserved Marianne who goes after her passions. There is much turmoil of emotions seeping in the story with its sense of realism among the characters, the plot and between the romances. It downplays the idealistic notions and felicity felt mostly in other Austen works. Not all love stories a...

Yes, another travel memoir. Here, we journey to the narrow streets of Italy, on the dusty roads of India and the lulling waves of Indonesia. It is a woman's journey peppered with cravings to eat more, typical clumsiness and distractions, like failing to concentrate on a meditation and, lo, a possibility of love. Eat Pray Love  is also a meandering to self-discovery in which the author took a life-changing break and decided to fly halfway across the world to search for healing and peace.

As usually happens, I had watched the film before knowing that it was based on a book which I just finished reading. It was a perfect time for I have, these days, been gravitating towards women authors at the turn of the twentieth century. Elizabeth von Arnim gets to the heart of the matter in making a study of women with their inner yearnings and the slow unfolding of their souls. It is a story of transformation akin to the blossoming of a flower. The women, quite unhappy and set in their ways, found themselves changing little by little surrounded by the magical beauty of the Italian countryside, the lush flowers carpeting the hillside and the break from the monotony of their lives which had become dreary.

It's the go to place. Often, things boil down to basking under the Tuscan sun, yearning for a new start, for an enlightened state, a reprieve from the buzzard or the banality of the day to day (considering the number of memoirs about moving to Italy). So I keep wondering there must be something under that piece of Northern Italy sky. Frances Mayes subtly illustrates her summers in her Tuscan villa in delicate prose and impressions, giving us an almost normal portraiture of the little activities happening in her town, Cortona. Some things are simple like picking herbs outside her kitchen garden for her recipes and digging up potatoes while others get a bit difficult like getting official papers and dealing with house builders among others. It feels nostalgic, as if the memoir has become distant memories sifted in the author's mind, reminiscing luminous moments from the remnants of her divorce to the time she bought the abandoned villa. From the details of her flower ga...

In these days when I have been burying myself on modern classics, this book finally got its turn. What more, I watched both film adaptations beforehand and genuinely found it lovely. A Room with a View  tells us about a young English woman traveling to Florence with her cousin guardian. She meets a few of the English tourists in their Italian pension over dinner and what starts as a typical appropriate discussion about "a room with a view" turns into an awakening of a woman's heart and mind to the beauty, to the discoveries of living life. Forster writes the classic (British) way of exploring a coming of age story, about a girl wrapped in the pleasantries and manners of her own circle that when she finds herself outside the zone of her comfort was made to grasp the threshold of a different view. If I had not known beforehand the gist of the book, I'd have tired of half the rambling conversations that make no sense to me, that offer nothing to enlighten nor t...

Book Synopsis: With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly Golightly is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Her brownstone apartment vibrates with martini-soaked parties as she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home. Immortalized in a film starring Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is full of sharp wit and in its exuberant cast of characters vividly captures the restless, slightly madcap era of early 1940s New York. So who hasn't heard of Breakfast at Tiffany's?  More likely one would either be familiar with Truman Capote's novella of which the movie was based on.  The movie starred the gorgeous Audrey Hepburn and the dashing George Peppard with more people probably remembering to watch rather than reading the book.  Mention the...

Jane Hayes is a thirty-something woman who's been unlucky in love. She's pretty and has a great career, but then she has a secret - she's obsessed with everything Jane Austen, particularly Mr. Darcy ( Colin Firth version! ). To help Jane overcome with her obsession, her wealthy aunt sends her to Austenland - a vacation destination that takes you to the regency era. Jane leaves New York for England with hopes of fulfilling her dreams of wearing period clothing, channeling her inner Elizabeth Bennet and finding her own Mr. Darcy.

British romance novelist Emily Delahunty had traveled to Rome by train when the carriage she sat on, along with others, got blown up by a bomb explosion. Presently, she lives in a quaint villa in the hills of Umbria which has now became a haven for the remnant survivors; an old Englishman, a young German lad, and an American girl. In the surface, it seems like an idyllic scene as Mrs. Delahunty spends her time in nostalgia, drinking grappa, taking walks along the Italian countryside and sitting in her private rooms with a shelf displaying her array of novels but beneath this delightful image runs a dark past and dim musings. As is the facade of a quiet pensione villa for tourists that now houses a handful of people, walking figures of grief and pain and survival.

Julianna "Juli" Baker met Bryce Loski when they were seven. His family just moved into the neighborhood and being the good neighbor that she is, went to help. One look at his beautiful blue eyes and she knew she was a goner. Bryce met Juli when they were seven. Or more like she barged into his life and never left him alone since then. First time he saw her, Bryce knew she was dangerous. Unavoidably dangerous.

The story starts off in summer 1935, a busy day for the Tallis household. Thirteen year old Briony Tallis is preparing for a play that she wrote herself to present to her brother. Briony then sees her older sister Cecilia and Robbie, son of the housekeeper, in a rather sexual situation which young Briony misinterprets. An incident happens during the family's dinner party and one of her cousins, Lola, was discovered to be raped by an unknown assailant. Briony then accuses Robbie as the criminal. Though Robbie claims to be innocent, he is taken away to be imprisoned and this incident destroys the loving family that Briony has known.

Persuasion  is perhaps my favorite novel of Jane Austen. It seems to me we are but a handful on this bandwagon. As much as I adore her other books and its heroines and heroes, it is Anne and her captain who 'pierce my soul'. Eight years has passed since Anne Elliot of Kellynch Hall last saw the naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Eight years ago since she was happily betrothed to him but was persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off the engagement for such match is declared unsuitable. Now Frederick returns, a wealthy captain in the navy, and most likely they are to cross paths again. Anne obviously still have feelings for him but will things ever return the way it was between them? Anne Elliot won me over with her grace and subtle elegance, her quiet nature and sensible voice. I find affinity in her character; her inner struggles and heartfelt musings. Austen has captured that fragile mood of anxiety and dread, the tentativeness of things, a thresho...

Four friends Lena, Bridget, Tibby and Carmen discovered that an old pair of jeans, bought on a thrift shop, happens to fit them all. And they look good on it too despite their different builds. So, they chuck it to magic and formed a friendship vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (with its list of pros and cons) and decided to pass around the pants as they spent their first summer apart. Lena (the beauty) travels to Greece, Tibby (the rebel) is stuck at the department store, Bridget (the athlete) is kicking off at the soccer camp and Carmen (the one who cares the most) is dealing with a big family surprise . Each of them wishing some magic dust in the pants will bolster them through the trying episodes they will encounter along the way, that by wearing it something good happens. It was fun reading the quirky lists and letters on the book. There's certainly more snark and angst, more scattered thoughts and spontaneous quips here. I like the nuance of the handwr...

There's nothing like a little fantasy book to escape the every day dreariness.  But for a young boy named Tristran, stepping into the magical realm is nothing but a birth right. To gain his heart's desire, Tristran Thorn crossed over from Wall to Faerie in search of a falling star and what awaited him as he reached it turned out to be a feisty pale haired girl. Together they found themselves falling into treacherous paths of magical adventures. Stardust  is a dark fairy tale, with a hint of savagery as on nature’s way and a splash of fate’s subtle cruelty. The story is narrated in a straightforward manner seeped with downright irony and bleakness, the kind which leaves a lingering taste. It is a tale that won’t leave you satisfied and contented, no, it will leave you restless, pondering and searching. 

In North and South we are introduced to Mr. Thornton and Margaret Hale, their story entwined with the turbulent social issues of their time set in the background of the industrial city of Milton. Mr. Thornton rose up on the top spot of my most beloved classic book hero of all time (yes, I'm sorry but kindly move over Mr. Darcy). I admired a lot of his characteristics and even more his subtle change over the course of time since he became acquainted with Margaret Hale. But it sure does make me laugh out loud (and I can't pin down why) in a sort of giddy incredulous way every time Mr. Thornton appears. There's this disarming irony in his contained appearance in contrast to his passionate inner musings. Margaret though is a bit of a slow warm to me. She flits from girl to woman in sporadic times. She's given over to trifling fears and doubts at certain points as if her sympathies and affectations appear half-formed. However, when she shows her calm and power, it a...

"Kill or be killed." Battle Royale is a dystopian novel set in Japan in the year 1997. Japan is part of an authoritarian state called Republic of the Greater East Asia. Shuya Nanahara and his classmates go on a class trip when suddenly, they were gassed while they were on the bus. They wake up to an isolated island, which they learn that the class were chosen to participate for this year's "program" - a research project designed to scare the citizens of Japan. The program was designed for the participants to kill each other, until only one remains.  One by one, the students are released from the briefing room and start the battle for survival. Who will emerge as survivor?

Practicality and magic tossed around with a dash of sisters that couldn't be anymore different, eccentric aunts, a dusty manor, an array of black cats, and tantalizing attractions of the opposite sex and you'll be in for a little dark fable if not entertainment. When the beautiful and precocious sisters, Gillian and Sally, are orphaned at a young age, they are taken to a small town in Massachusetts to be raised by their aunts, who happen to dwell in the darkest, eeriest house in town. As they become more aware of their aunt's mysterious and sometimes frightening powers, and their own powers begin to surface, the sisters grow determined to escape their strange upbringing by blending into "normal" society. But both find that they cannot elude their magic-filled past. And when trouble strikes, in the form of a menacing backyard ghost, the sisters must not only reunite three generations of Owens women but embrace their magic as a gift. ( * )