Being Aralondwen

Book Title: El Juego del Ángel
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Fans of Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind and new readers alike will be delighted with this gothic semiprequel. In 1920s Barcelona, David Martin is born into poverty, but, aided by patron and friend Pedro Vidal, he rises to become a crime reporter and then a beloved pulp novelist. David's creative pace is frenetic; holed up in his dream house?a decrepit mansion with a sinister history?he produces two great novels, one for Vidal to claim as his own, and one for himself. But Vidal's book is celebrated while David's is buried, and when Vidal marries David's great love, David accepts a commission to write a story that leads him into danger. As he explores the past and his mysterious publisher, David becomes a suspect in a string of murders, and his race to uncover the truth is a delicious puzzle: is he beset by demons or a demon himself? Zafon's novel is detailed and vivid, and David's narration is charming and funny, but suspect. Villain or victim, he is the hero of and the guide to this dark labyrinth that, by masterful design, remains thrilling and bewildering.

16 / 35 books. 46% done!

Book Title: Tokio Blues
Author: Haruki Murakami
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Toru Watanabe un ejecutivo de 37 anos escucha casualmente mientras aterriza en un aeropuerto europeo una vieja cancion de los Beatles y la musica le hace retroceder a su juventud al turbulento Tokio de finales de los sesenta. Toru recuerda con una mezcla de melancolia y desasosiego a la inestable y misteriosa Naoko la novia de su mejor y unico amigo de la adolescencia Kizuki. El suicidio de este les distancia durante un ano hasta que se reencuentran en la universidad. Inician alli una relacion intima; sin embargo la fragil salud mental de Naoko se resiente y la internan en un centro de reposo. Al poco Toru se enamora de Midori una joven activa y resuelta. Indeciso sumido en dudas y temores experimenta el deslumbramiento y el desengano alla donde todo parece cobrar sentido: el sexo el amor y la muerte. La situacion para el para los tres se ha vuelto insostenible; ninguno parece capaz de alcanzar el delicado equilibrio entre las esperanzas juveniles y la necesidad de encontrar un lugar en el mundo. Con un fino sentido del humor Murakami ha escrito el conmovedor relato de una educacion sentimental pero tambien de las perdidas que implica toda maduracion. Tokio blues supuso el reconocimiento definitivo del autor en su pais donde se convirtio en un best seller.

15 / 35 books. 43% done!

Book Title: When Nietzsche Wept
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him.

When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure," Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.


Book Title: Naamah's Kiss
Author: Jacqueline Carey
Rating: 4/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Once there were great magicians born to the Maghuin Dhonn; the folk of the Brown Bear, the oldest tribe in Alba. But generations ago, the greatest of them all broke a sacred oath sworn in the name of all his people. Now, only small gifts remain to them. Through her lineage, Moirin possesses such gifts - the ability to summon the twilight and conceal herself, and the skill to coax plants to grow.

Moirin has a secret, too. From childhood onward, she senses the presence of unfamiliar gods in her life; the bright lady, and the man with a seedling cupped in his palm. Raised in the wilderness by her reclusive mother, it isn't until she comes of age that Moirin learns how illustrious, if mixed, her heritage is. The great granddaughter of Alais the Wise, child of the Maghuin Donn, and a cousin of the Cruarch of Alba, Moirin learns her father was a D'Angeline priest dedicated to serving Naamah, goddess of desire.

After Moirin undergoes the rites of adulthood, she finds divine acceptance...on the condition that she fulfill an unknown destiny that lies somewhere beyond the ocean. Or perhaps oceans. Beyond Terre d'Ange where she finds her father, in the far reaches of distant Ch'in, Moirin's skills are a true gift when facing the vengeful plans of an ambitious mage, a noble warrior princess desperate to save her father's throne, and the spirit of a celestial dragon.

14 / 35 books. 40% done!

Book Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Author: Muriel Barbery
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com):
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.


Book Title: Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 17)
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
Rating: 2/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): When a vampire serial killer sends Anita Blake a grisly souvenir from Las Vegas, she has to warn Sin City’s local authorities what they’re dealing with. Only it’s worse than she thought. Ten officers and one executioner have been slain—paranormal style. Anita heads to Vegas, where’s she’s joined by three other federal marshals, including the ruthless Edward. It’s a good thing he always has her back, because when she gets close to the bodies, Anita senses “tiger” too strongly to ignore it. The weretigers are very powerful in Las Vegas, which means the odds of her rubbing someone important the wrong way just got a lot higher.

12 / 35 books. 34% done!

Book Title: Santa Olivia
Author: Jacqueline Carey
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Loup Garron was born and raised in Santa Olivia, an isolated, disenfranchised town next to a US military base inside a DMZ buffer zone between Texas and Mexico. A fugitive "Wolf-Man" who had a love affair with a local woman, Loup's father was one of a group of men genetically-manipulated and used by the US government as a weapon. The "Wolf-Men" were engineered to have superhuman strength, speed, sensory capability, stamina, and a total lack of fear, and Loup, named for and sharing her father's wolf-like qualities, is marked as an outsider.

After her mother dies, Loup goes to live among the misfit orphans at the parish church, where they seethe from the injustices visited upon the locals by the soldiers. Eventually, the orphans find an outlet for their frustrations: They form a vigilante group to support Loup Garron who, costumed as their patron saint, Santa Olivia, uses her special abilities to avenge the town.

Aware that she could lose her freedom, and possibly her life, Loup is determined to fight to redress the wrongs her community has suffered. And like the reincarnation of their patron saint, she will bring hope to all of Santa Olivia.

10 / 35 books. 29% done!

Book Title: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out.

9 / 35 books. 26% done!

Book Title: Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage
Author: Pat Fallon, Fred Senn
Rating: 4/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): In a vivid look at some of the most creative and successful ad campaigns of the last 25 years, the founders of Fallon Worldwide chronicle the ways that "creative leverage"-the "daily practice of making creativity actionable and accountable for changing consumer behavior"-to bear in high-stakes, enterprise-critical situations. In doing so themselves, Fallon and Senn have helped clients capture markets, redefine consumer perceptions, and recover from disaster-all while generating enormous revenue. Citibank's "life is more than just money" aphorisms, United Airlines' animated vignettes, Holiday Inn's campy one liner, and Lee Jean's ironic hipster mascot, Buddy, demonstrate how fearless commitment to the creative approach finds the market sweet spot others missed. Each chapter treats a single campaign in depth, building as it progresses toward a complete working definition of creative leverage. The self-promotion of the introduction may put some readers off, but it is short-lived; the rest of the book drops the bragging and allows the campaigns to speak for themselves. Specialists in marketing and advertising will find the book appealing, and professionals of all stripes should find it useful. But general readers interested in going behind the scenes of these memorable campaigns-or of ad work in general-will find much to enjoy here.

Book Title: El viaje del elefante
Author: Jose Saramago
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): During the mid-sixteenth century, king John III presented his cousin Maximilian, the archduke of Austria, with an Asian elephant. This novel recounts the epic voyage of Salomon the elephant, and the journey it undertook to satisfy royal whims and absurd strategies. El viaje del elefante is not a historical account; it is a mix of real and imaginary facts that leads us to recognize reality and fiction as an indissoluble unity -a characteristic trait of great works of literature. It is also a reflection on the human condition, where humor and irony, marks of the ruthless clarity of the author, come together with the compassion with which Saramago views human weaknesses.

Book Title: Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse, Book 9)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): The Louisiana town of Bon Temps—along with the rest of the world—is about to be rocked with some big supernatural news: like the vampires before them, the Were people—humans with the ability to change into animals—are about to reveal themselves to humanity. Psychic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse is apprehensive about the revelation, given the way some people in the small town revile anyone with extraordinary powers, including Sookie herself. While the initial announcement seems to go over smoothly with most people, tragedy strikes when Sookie’s brother Jason’s estranged wife, a werepanther, is found murdered and nailed up on a cross. Jason is the prime suspect, but Sookie has even bigger problems to deal with when she learns that a vicious fairy prince is determined to kill her. Darker and more ominous than earlier entries in the series, Harris’ latest raises the stakes (pun intended) for lovable heroine Sookie and comes up a winner.

Book Title: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
Author: Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith
Rating: LOL
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry?

8 / 35 books. 23% done!

Book Title: The Shadow Queen (Black Jewels, Book 7)
Author: Anne Bishop
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Dena Nehele is a land decimated by its past. Once it was ruled by corrupt Queens who were wiped out when the land was cleansed of tainted Blood. Now, only one hundred Warlord Princes stand—without a leader and without hope.

Theran Grayhaven is the last of his line, desperate to find the key that reveals a treasure great enough to restore Dena Nehele. But first he needs to find a Queen who remembers the Blood’s code of honor and lives by the Old Ways. The woman chosen to rule Dena Nehele, Lady Cassidy, is not beautiful and believes she is not strong. But she may be the only one able to convince bitter men to serve once again.


Book Title: The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman
Rating: 4/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): In The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman has created a charming allegory of childhood. Although the book opens with a scary scene--a family is stabbed to death by "a man named Jack” --the story quickly moves into more child-friendly storytelling. The sole survivor of the attack--an 18-month-old baby--escapes his crib and his house, and toddles to a nearby graveyard. Quickly recognizing that the baby is orphaned, the graveyard's ghostly residents adopt him, name him Nobody ("Bod"), and allow him to live in their tomb. Taking inspiration from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Gaiman describes how the toddler navigates among the headstones, asking a lot of questions and picking up the tricks of the living and the dead. In serial-like episodes, the story follows Bod's progress as he grows from baby to teen, learning life’s lessons amid a cadre of the long-dead, ghouls, witches, intermittent human interlopers. A pallid, nocturnal guardian named Silas ensures that Bod receives food, books, and anything else he might need from the human world. Whenever the boy strays from his usual play among the headstones, he finds new dangers, learns his limitations and strengths, and acquires the skills he needs to survive within the confines of the graveyard and in wider world beyond.

4 / 35 books. 11% done!

Book Title: Travesuras de la niña mala
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): Ricardo, at an early age, sees his life-long dream fulfilled: to live in Paris. But an encounter with a past love will change everything. The young girl, adventurer, pragmatic, wicked, calculating, and mischievous, will drag him out of his small world of ambitions. This is the story of the intimate love that occupies more than three decades of Ricardo s life, and it is also a fascinating tale traveling through Europe, South America, and Japan. Starring in the backdrop are Peru's history from 1950 to 1987 and its swinging from democracy to dictatorship; Paris in the sixties and its great philosophers Sartre and Camus; the decade of the 70s in London, the birth of a new culture, drugs, music, hippies, freedom of love; Japan s big dealer lords, and, finally, Spain halfway through the 80s. Creating an admirable tension between comedy and tragedy, Mario Vargas Llosa plays with reality and fiction to release a story in which love presents itself as indefinable, owner of a thousand faces, just like the mischievous girl. Passion and distance, chance and destiny, pain and pleasure...

Revised goal for the year:

2 / 35 books. 6% done!

Book Title: The White Tiger: A Novel
Author: Aravind Adiga
Rating: 5/5
Summary of the book (taken from amazon.com): In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader’s upcoming visit to Balram’s homeland, the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in "the Darkness"—those areas of rural India where education and electricity are equally scarce, and where villagers banter about local elections "like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra"—to a determined killer. He places the blame for his rage squarely on the avarice of the Indian élite, among whom bribes are commonplace, and who perpetuate a system in which many are sacrificed to the whims of a few. Adiga’s message isn’t subtle or novel, but Balram’s appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling.

1 / 50 books. 2% done!